Our monthly silent series is a mix of established classics, new restorations, and titles ripe for rediscovery. Sunday's feature at @musicboxtheatre.bsky.social , Alias Jimmy Valentine, is one of the latter, but you shouldn't sleep on it. One of the key works of Maurice Tourneur…

…the French director who made his mark during a formative period of American silent cinema. While other filmmakers were working out the narrative grammar that we still recognize today, Tourneur was aiming for something more ethereal and delicate--a glorious, unhurried private world.

Tourneur's films were complete aesthetic experiences using all of the tools of an increasingly popular art, inclusive of their color tints and their intertitles. Many are lost, and several that do survive today provide, at best, only a frail approximation of the full impact they had when new.