This month’s Sunday Silent brings us to the jazz age and a prohibition-set tale of a wild young woman, whose party-filled life of good times and speakeasies meets its match! Live piano accompaniment by Lillian Henley.
We meet our heroine, Luena ‘Egypt’ Hagen – played by the very gorgeous Billie Dove, last seen at the Palace in THE BLACK PIRATE (1926) – as she recklessly drinks, smokes and shimmies her way into trouble with her similarly carefree friends and would-be suitor, all of whose church-going families are mortified by their continuous goings on. It takes getting caught up in a police raid for Egypt to start to consider her actions, but it’ll take plenty more drama before she might love another way of life better than the one she has now…
Directed by Lois Weber, the first American woman to direct a feature film and the most celebrated of the women film directors working for Universal Pictures in the silent era; by 1917 she’d directed, written or starred in over 100 one-reel (10-12min) films and was a major player at Universal into the late ’20s. Her films often often depicted women’s struggles for independence within the ever-shifting moral landscape of 1920s modernity and she wrote SENSATION SEEKERS herself, based on a short story that she knew would work perfectly for her on screen, now looking fantastic on the big screen after a full digital restoration in 2017.
