The Roger Corbeau silent film collection

The great movie still photographer Roger Corbeau worked on more than 150 film sets in a career lasting from the early 30s to the 1980s. But along with his impressive work as a un photographe de plateau, we owe him a great debt for gathering an impressive collection of still prints from the silent era of Hollywood.

The Collection de tirages sur le cinéma muet réunis par Roger Corbeau is contained in the great archive of the French Ministry of Culture's Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie. It includes nearly 7,000 photos! Here are some of my favourites.

Violet Mersereau in the role of Judith Ralston, in Theodore Marston's The Girl by the Roadside. This photo, by the New York firm of Moody, is from 1917.

A lovely profile shot of Virginia Valli by the Los Angeles firm of Witzel, from 1922.

A cute shot of Fatty Arbuckle by an unknown photographer, from the 1920s.

William S. Hart and Mary Thurman in Lambert Hillyer's Sand!, from 1920.

This print would have been especially interesting for Roger Corbeau. It shows the (anonymous) still photographer on the set of Edward Sloman's The Eagle's Feather, 1922.

An impressive shot from the set of Hobart Bosworth's The Sea Wolf, 1913. Hobart Bosworth himself played Wolf Larsen; his co-stars were Viola Barry & Herbert Rawlinson. What a remarkable photograph from the early days of the motion picture industry!

Lyda Salmonova as Maddalena Pazzi, in Richard Eichberg's film Monna Vanna, from 1922. The film was based on Maurice Maeterlinck's play, which was itself based on a story by Niccolò Machiavelli.

Mahlon Hamilton as Ralph Lincourt & Leatrice Joy as Barbara in  Ladies Must Live, 1921. Unfortunately, this film, like so many others from the period, is lost.

I'm noticing how often the men in these pictures look so old-fashioned, while many of the women could have walked over from a film set of today.

Recognize this beautiful young woman, self-isolating & listening to music on the beach? It's Mary Astor, in a shot from the 1920s. Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her.

Mary Astor was only a teenager when she had that screen test. She made her first film in 1921, when she was 14. One of the greatest of Hollywood actresses!

Astor as Adriana della Varnese in Don Juan, 1926. John Barrymore kissed Mary Astor & Estelle Taylor 127 times in this film.

I'm a big fan of Bébé Daniels, one of the greatest of silent stars. Here she listens to a football game with Gregory La Cava, director of Feel My Pulse, 1928.

Another print from French photographer Roger Corbeau's silent Hollywood film stills collection.

This one is a bit different. Bébé Daniels plays the trumpet for John Philip Sousa, a visitor to the set of Miss Brewster's Millions, 1926. The great composer seems unimpressed.