The Silent Film Still Archive

Today marks the birthday of actor George Sidney (1876-1945), who played a number of Jewish supporting characters in movies of the 1930s. I think I've blogged about two movies in which he shows up: Rafter Romance, in which he plays the landlord to Ginger Rogers and Norman Foster, and Manhattan Melodrama where he plays (very briefly) a man who takes in the young boys who grow up to be Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. He also played Mr. Cohen in a series of movies at Universal about "The Cohens and the Kellys", about a Jewish and an Irish couple, but I have yet to see any of these if they even have surviving prints.

Anyhow, I was looking for a nice photo of Sidney to illustrate a birthday post for him. It's not so easy to find any, largely because Sidney was mostly a character actor, or in the case of the Cohens, leading in movies that are quite obscure today. (The fact that Universal's early stuff rarely sees the light of day contributes to this too, I presume.) But some searching led me to this photo from the Silent Film Still Archive, from the 1928 movie The Latest From Paris. It has no comments or votes at IMDb, and the sketchy info at TCM makes me wonder whether it's a lost film.

That having been said, for those of you who are a bit more into silents than I am, I can certainly suggest giving a visit to the Silent Film Still Archive.