The fantastic film that inspired Disney & was lost for decades: PETER PAN 1924

Believe it or not, this version of PETER PAN has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes and among fans of book and all its offspring, this version is considered the best version. Even better than Disney!

If there are kids around, this is the silent film you show them to get them hooked on silent films. If you know an adult who has never seen a silent, this will enchant them, too.

Betty Bronson beat out Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford for the role of Peter Pan. Both actresses were older than Bronson; better established, more accomplished. Pickford, in particular, was famed for playing children. But neither could have done better, in this role, than Bronson did. No less an authority than J.M. Barrie himself selected her for it.

Bronson is not simply the centerpiece of Peter Pan—she embodies it. She's a free-spirit, dancing her way through scenes: conscious of an audience watching her but not concerned about it. A belle among bells and whistles and shiny objects. She connects with us as a performer as well as a character, constantly reminding us that we’re not just watching a made-up story, but a movie depicting one.

At seventeen, after she had pleaded with every friend she had at Paramount Pictures, she finally got an interview with J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. Barrie personally chose her to play the lead in a film of his work Peter Pan which would be released in 1924. She had a major role in the 1925 silent film adaptation of Ben-Hur. In 1926, she starred in another Barrie story A Kiss for Cinderella.

Between 1920 and 1935, Virginia Brown Faire appeared in some 75 films. Her first film credit was the 1920 film Runnin' Straight, a Hoot Gibson short western at Universal. Faire was the leading lady of John Gilbert in Monte Cristo (1922). She was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1923 and appeared with Wallace and Noah Beery in Stormswept that same year, but she is most remembered for her role as Tinker Bell in the 1924 film Peter Pan:

No one actually knew how censors or critics or the church would react to what was essentially a lesbian kiss. Peter Pan was played by a woman so when the time came to kiss a girl, no one knew how people would react.

There was actually no response. Absolutely no one complained. Betty Bronson had created a character so strong- people forgot she was a girl! The films kiss scene wasn’t cut anywhere!

This is pure movie magic:

Behind the paywall: The Three Musketeers

The athletic Douglas Fairbanks was known for performing his own stunts. His left-handed handspring balanced on a short dagger during one of the fight scenes is the most well-known from the picture and is generally considered the most difficult of his career.^[3] Fairbanks biographer Jeffrey Vance enthuses, "The Three Musketeers was the first of the grand Fairbanks costume films, filled with exemplary production values and ornamentation. Indeed, one ornament extended beyond the film: Fairbanks wore d'Artagnan's moustache—cultivated for The Three Musketeers—to the end of his life. With The Three Musketeers, he at last found his metier and crystallized his celebrity and his cinema.