Lonesome (EOTWS)

End Of The Week Shorts #9 extract: Lonesome (1928)

Lonesome is a simple romance that is devastatingly powerful. It follows two lonely city dwellers who stumble across each other at a fair and fall in love. 

Reminiscent of both Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans and The Crowd, Lonesome captures the undeniable beauty, ingenuity and poignancy of late narrative silent films. This is, however, tainted by a handful of talkie scenes that cause the tone of the romance to drastically change - and not for the good. These scene are only very small moments though and so don't have a major impact on the wider narrative. In turn, Lonesome is then a great study into the difference between pure cinema and a theatrical cinema of the early talkie period - one that showcases a lost form of cinema at its best. 

All in all, this is probably a new personal favourite that I can't refrain from recommending.