Body and Soul

It is impossible to review or rate this film, because it is not available anywhere. Perhaps someday it will show up at a classic film festival. It does exist and has been preserved. It was actually shown on TCM exactly once, in October 1994. It is sixty minutes long. This one may be tied up in rights problem, as Turner Classic Movies showed several films exactly once - Beyond The Forest, Trial of Mary Dugan, Ceiling Zero - during their first year on the air only to later be informed that there were rights issues and never show them again.

All I can glean from some other web pages and a New York Times review from 1927 is that the film is set in the Swiss Alps and stars Lionel Barrymore as a rather mad doctor with a pretty wife who at one point is urged to and does drag his wife through the snow and brand her like she is cattle. This apparently even shocked the Times reporter who spent most of his review talking about this one incident. That and some of the poorly done scenes where Helga - the wife - is seen standing out in the snow but seems to be perfectly warm.

Lionel Barrymore often took the role of villains in the silent era versus the grandfatherly types he played once sound came in. The director, Reginald Barker, had a pretty prolific career in silent film, but retired a few years into the talking film era. He was married four times - not unusual for early Hollywood where the public simply wouldn't tolerate people living together - his last marriage having a particular tragic end. Barker had only been married nine days when he had a fatal heart attack in 1945.