Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Phantom of the Forest (1926)

This B-studio adventure drama, directed by Henry McCarthy, stars Thunder the dog, with Betty Francisco, Eddie Phillips, James Mason and Frank Foster Davis.

This DVD-R edition has been mastered at standard-resolution from a worn and dirty color-tinted and color-toned 35mm print, which has a noticable amount of dust, speckling, schmutz, scratches, emulsion scrapes, sprocket damage, scuffing, and other print flaws. We’re being picky, but the print could have been cleaned before the video transfer was done. Otherwise, the resulting picture is very-good with good image detail and a broad range of color-tones.

The film is accompanied by a music score compiled from royalty-free digital files performed on MIDI keyboards. For a cobbled-together soundtrack, it does a better job of accompanying the film than do vintage film music recordings.

Supplemental material is an unusual novelty short that includes brief appearances by Clyde Cook, Ned Wayburn, the girls of the Ziegfeld Follies, Strongheart the dog, Baby Peggy with her mother and sister, Frank Billings, Betty Blythe, Lowell Sherman, David Warfield, Mae Murray, Sid Grauman, Mrs. Smith (mother of Mary Pickford), Jack Pickford, Marilyn Miller, a girl identified as Mary Pickford Jr. (daughter of Lottie Pickford), and Irving Cohen. The film also includes shots of the Pickford-Fairbanks film studio.

As this is a better than average production from Grapevine Video and as this is the only home video edition of the film we know of, it is recommended.

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