Re:Vision: The Garden of Eden
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About
Live musical accompaniment by the Club Foot Quintet.
Lewis Milestone’s extensive career was already at his peak when he directed The Garden of Eden in 1928. One year earlier he directed what would win the first Academy award for best comedy director Two Arabian Knights and in 1930 received a the Best Picture award for his all-time masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front. In between he created the delightful The Garden of Eden, featuring the sparkling Corrinne Griffith as Toni, the niece of Viennese pretzel bakers who runs away to Budapest to seek fame as an opera singer.
The Garden of Eden is best described as either a pre-pre-code or a proto-screwball comedy. Technically it is a silent film, but skimpy costumes, gender play, and sexual innuendo undeniably identify it as a film confidently striding headlong into the early 1930s. Further evidence is provided by the Film Daily reviewer who complained at the time, “It is utterly absurd and cheap pandering to dirty-minded people who gloat over an undressed woman” and by Montreal censors that demanded the last reel be eliminated entirely. Fortunately, the archived prints at George Eastman Museum and the Library of Congress, which form the basis of this restoration, eluded the censors’ wrath and you will have the pleasure of seeing the scandalous footage that Canadian audiences were denied. — Robert Byrne
Restored in 2025 by the San Francisco Film Preserve in collaboration with George Eastman Museum and the Library of Congress.
The Garden of Eden will screen with the following short:
WEAK BUT WILLING (William Watson, United States, 1929) 18m, 35mm
This delightful short film, written by and starring lauded vaudevillian Will King, features a notable uncredited performer—an as-yet-unknown Jean Harlow! Barely a year into her Hollywood career, Harlow puts in a truly scene-stealing turn as the “Blonde Night Club Patron” who compares pronunciations with a bewitched King. This centerpiece nightclub scene also features roller-skating dancers, sharp dialogue-based jokes (even at this early point in the development of sound-on-film technology), prohibition high-jinx, and a gruff and hungry bulldog!
Will King only appeared on screen in two films, making Weak But Willing a crucial window into a rapidly disappearing art form. The script is generously peppered with Yiddish, with an increasingly irritated King lapsing into his native tongue. Dot Farley endlessly chastises King throughout the film in the role of his wife. Farley had over three hundred and seventy screen credits over the course of her forty-year career, and her presence in Weak But Willing is a powerful one. — Kathy Rose O’Regan
Restored in 2026 by the San Francisco Film Preserve in collaboration with the Library of Congress.
Preserved through National Film Preservation Foundation funding.
Runtime
1h 39m
Year
1928
Director
Lewis Milestone
Format
35mm
Country
USA
Language
Silent with English intertitles
First Showing
September 27, 2026
Categories
RE:VISION — FESTIVAL OF RESTORATION AND REDISCOVERY
,
Featured
Lewis Milestone’s extensive career was already at his peak when he directed The Garden of Eden in 1928. One year earlier he directed what would win the first Academy award for best comedy director Two Arabian Knights and in 1930 received a the Best Picture award for his all-time masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front. In between he created the delightful The Garden of Eden, featuring the sparkling Corrinne Griffith as Toni, the niece of Viennese pretzel bakers who runs away to Budapest to seek fame as an opera singer.
The Garden of Eden is best described as either a pre-pre-code or a proto-screwball comedy. Technically it is a silent film, but skimpy costumes, gender play, and sexual innuendo undeniably identify it as a film confidently striding headlong into the early 1930s. Further evidence is provided by the Film Daily reviewer who complained at the time, “It is utterly absurd and cheap pandering to dirty-minded people who gloat over an undressed woman” and by Montreal censors that demanded the last reel be eliminated entirely. Fortunately, the archived prints at George Eastman Museum and the Library of Congress, which form the basis of this restoration, eluded the censors’ wrath and you will have the pleasure of seeing the scandalous footage that Canadian audiences were denied. — Robert Byrne
Restored in 2025 by the San Francisco Film Preserve in collaboration with George Eastman Museum and the Library of Congress.
The Garden of Eden will screen with the following short:
WEAK BUT WILLING (William Watson, United States, 1929) 18m, 35mm
This delightful short film, written by and starring lauded vaudevillian Will King, features a notable uncredited performer—an as-yet-unknown Jean Harlow! Barely a year into her Hollywood career, Harlow puts in a truly scene-stealing turn as the “Blonde Night Club Patron” who compares pronunciations with a bewitched King. This centerpiece nightclub scene also features roller-skating dancers, sharp dialogue-based jokes (even at this early point in the development of sound-on-film technology), prohibition high-jinx, and a gruff and hungry bulldog!
Will King only appeared on screen in two films, making Weak But Willing a crucial window into a rapidly disappearing art form. The script is generously peppered with Yiddish, with an increasingly irritated King lapsing into his native tongue. Dot Farley endlessly chastises King throughout the film in the role of his wife. Farley had over three hundred and seventy screen credits over the course of her forty-year career, and her presence in Weak But Willing is a powerful one. — Kathy Rose O’Regan
Restored in 2026 by the San Francisco Film Preserve in collaboration with the Library of Congress.
Preserved through National Film Preservation Foundation funding.
Runtime
1h 39m
Year
1928
Director
Lewis Milestone
Format
35mm
Country
USA
Language
Silent with English intertitles
First Showing
September 27, 2026
Categories
RE:VISION — FESTIVAL OF RESTORATION AND REDISCOVERY
,
Featured
