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

The Desert of the Lost (1927)

This western drama from B-film producer Action Pictures, Incorporated, stars Wally Wales as fugitive Jim Drake trailed into Mexico by a western detective (Edward Cecil). But you know Wales is really a good guy — he’s wearing a big white hat. A good high-actioner. Peggy Montgomery and William J. Dyer are also featured.

This DVD-R edition has been mastered from a very-good 35mm color-tinted nitrate print, which is marred with some speckling, dust, scratches, exposure fluctuations, filmstock scuffing, splices, active nitrate decomposition, and other print flaws. The full-frame, slightly-faster-than-natural-speed video transfer is of nearly commercial home video quality, but a little dark in its shadows, however the digital master compression is a little higher than is ideal, rendering to the eagle-eyed viewer some compression artifacts. Pretty darned good on standard television equipment, the picture is just better than OK on high-definition equipment.

The film is presented with a low-fidelity soundtrack of compiled preexisting music library recordings — utilitarian at best.

Despite our criticisms, this budget home video edition is of higher visual quality than usual Grapevine Video product and is recommended until a better (if ever) edition comes along.

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