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Everybody's favorite movie decade: Which ones are the best movies released in the 20th century's second decade? Best Film (Pictured above) Broken Blossoms: Barthelmess and Gish star as ill-fated lovers in D.W. Griffith’s romantic melodrama featuring interethnic love. Check These Out (Pictured below) Cabiria: is considered one of the major landmarks in motion picture history, having inspired the scope and visual grandeur of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Also of note, Pastrone's epic of ancient Rome introduced Maciste, a bulky hero who would be featured in countless movies in the ensuing decades. Best Actor (Pictured below) In the tragic The Italian, George Beban plays an Italian immigrant recently arrived in the United States (Click below for film review). Unfortunately, his American dream quickly becomes a horrendous nightmare of poverty and despair. Best Actress (Pictured below) The movies' super-vamp Theda Bara in A Fool There Was: A little...

Traffic in Souls (1913) Direction: George Loane Tucker Screenplay: Walter MacNamara Cast: Ethel Grandin, Matt Moore, Jane Gail, William H. Turner At the time of its release, the scandalous Traffic in Souls, one of the first feature films made in the United States, became a huge moneymaker. This moralistic/sensationalistic melodrama about the white slave trade — immigrant women are forced into prostitution in New York City — remains watchable chiefly because of director George Loane Tucker‘s sure touch. Tucker became a major name in the 1910s — The Miracle Man (1919), starring Thomas Meighan, Betty Compson, and Lon Chaney was another major hit — but he had his career cut short by illness. He died in 1921 at the age of 49. Unfortunately, most of his films are now lost. (Just as unfortunately, only fragments remain from The Miracle Man.) Traffic in Souls stars Ethel Grandin and Matt Moore, both of [...]...