Tide of Empire

Tide of Empire (1929)

California's gold discovery in 1848 draws a "tide of empire" to the area, which becomes ripe for bandits.

Date of release
1929-03-23
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (9)
Runtime
1h 13m
Genres
Western
Director
Allan Dwan

Casting

Interesting facts

Tide of Empire is a 1929 American synchronized sound Western film directed by Allan Dwan and starring Renée Adorée and Tom Keene. While the film has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects using both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film process.

Production

The film was originally slated to star Joan Crawford in the female lead, but the final filming had Renée Adorée instead of Crawford. It was one of the last MGM films without dialogue and performed badly at the box office. Buster Keaton, who was visiting the set, got cast in a cameo as a drunk getting thrown out of a saloon.

It was actually a prank and a matter of self-casting, since director Allan Dwan was as surprised as everyone else to suddenly see Keaton “come flying out the saloon doors. It wasn’t part of the scene at all—-I didn’t expect it.” Dwan decided to keep this unscripted scene in the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended