Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2025 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Bells (1926)

This intriguing historical drama stars Lionel Barrymore, Gustav von Seyffertitz and the Caligarian Boris Karloff.

This DVD edition features a natural-speed, pleasingly sepia-toned and slightly windowboxed video transfer (that will appear to be full-frame on most television monitors) from an excellent 35mm print that features a broad greyscale range, and a very light sprinkling of dust and speckling. On high-definition equipment with video upscaling, the older video transfer still renders well, with smooth tonal transitions and reasonably sharp image detail. Some horizontal details, like the shingled roof of a building, will shows twitching signs of its standard-definition NTSC video transfer.

This film is entertainly accompanied by a music score performed on synthesizers by Eric Beheim. The synthesizer sound settings for strings and horns can be annoying artificial-sounding to some listeners.

We highly recommend this edition of The Bells for the high quality of its print source material. The disc includes René Clair’s short film Paris endormi [The Crazy Ray] (1922).

This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

This DVD edition has been mastered from an analog videotape copy, as evidenced by the dark smearing to the right of the white lettering in the film’s intertitles, of a slightly-windowboxed video transfer of an excellent 35mm print. Given that the windowboxing is identical and the running times are the same, this disc has likely been mastered from a copy of the Image edition cited above. While the video quality is quite good, the disc’s bit rate could have been higher to increase the resolution of the coarsely-rendered picture.

Despite what the packaging has to say, the film was not based on any material written by Edgar Allan Poe. It is, instead, based on a French play by Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrain. Do your research, Alpha!

The presentation is accompanied by a good but repetitious pipe organ music score composed and performed by Paul David Bergel.

Overall, this disc is far better than the majority of Alpha Video product and isn’t a bad alternative to the Image edition.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is available from ALPHA VIDEO through . . .

The film is accompanied by a music score performed by Jeff Rapsis.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is available from REEL CLASSIC DVD through . . .