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

A Gentleman of Paris (1927)

This comedy-drama from Paramount Pictures features charming Adolphe Menjou in a starring role as an aristocratic French ne’er-do-well who makes a big social mistake. Shirley O’Hara, Nicholas Soussanin and Lawrence Grant support. A worthwhile Menjou excursion.

This DVD-R edition has been mastered from a good 16mm reduction print that has some moderately modulated exposure fluctuations and plugged-up shadows making reading intertitles a challenge. The film’s action in the natural-speed, full-frame video transfer, is still reasonably easy to follow. As should be expected of 16mm, the source material displays a typical amount of dust, speckling, emulsion scuffing, beginning nitrate decomposition, and other print flaws.

The film is accompanied by a music score composed and performed on electric organ by Bruce Roberts. The audio quality is distressingly low-fidelity — listening to this disc reminds us of the awful, old Videobrary VHS videotape days in the late 1980s. Shudder.

Certainly not a great home video product, but it is currently the only available edition of the film. A passable disc until a quality home video edition is released.

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