Silent Movie Mondays Takes You on Three Fantastic Adventures

Tonight at the Paramount Theatre it's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which gives you an insight into the state of underwater photography (in Bermuda) in 1916. Who knew? Universal's silent film, directed by Stuart Paton, is loosely based on Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues and his Mysterious Island, and it contains what some have called the most remarkable overacting ever recorded, from Jane Gail.

You are also cautioned that the Captain Nemo (Allen Holubar) is old and dresses like Santa Claus. But there is "a full-size navigable mock-up of the surfaced submarine Nautilus," reports the Paramount. The Paramount's Mighty Wurlitzer Organ is helmed this time by Jim Riggs, so apparently STG never got that contretemps with Dennis James sorted out. The show starts at 7 p.m. and tickets are $12.

Next Monday, November 9, it's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the creation of a 23-year-old German teacher named Lotte Reiniger. In 1926, she used silhouette animation to tell the Arabian Nights-esque story of the prince Achmed, a sorcerer with a flying horse, Princess Peri Banu, and Aladdin. You will be familiar with the technique if you saw SIFF's trailers this spring or have watched the credits of A Series of Unfortunate Events recently. It took three years to make these 65 minutes of film, but people still call it "gorgeous" and "mesmerizing." So that's a top pick, if you're going to just one.

Closing out this installment of the series, on November 16, is The Lost World, from 1925. It's a live-action Wallace Beery feature; Willis O'Brien (King Kong) did the stop-motion animation for the prehistoric critters. Cinematography is by Arthur Edeson (The Thief of Bagdad). Beery's Professor Challenger starts running around London telling people there are dinos in the Amazon--oh, that Challenger, he's quite mad, I tell you. But then he gets up an expedition, heads to the Amazon, and oh my! The brontosaurus egg is on someone else's upper-crust lip. The bonus for seeing this one is that you'll laugh more when you watch Barton Fink.