Silents apparently still not on DVD

TCM's daytime theme in 31 Days of Oscar tomorrow (Feb. 13) is silents, so they'd all be from the first Academy Awards, I think. Silents had actually gotten quite good as an art form, and I know silent fans lament what was lost when the advent of sound meant that the actors had to focus on where the microphone was.

Anyhow, several of the silents in tomorrow morning's lineup are not available on DVD, so you're going to have to watch or DVR them tomorrow morning:

First, at 6:00 AM, there's The Racket, which was remade in the early 1950s. Louis Wolheim plays the gangster who loves his kid brother, and when the kid brother gets in legal trouble, it gives an upright cop (Thomas Meighan) the chance to take down Wolheim.

Second is Two Arabian Knights at 7:30 AM. Wolheim returns as an American POW in World War I who escapes with his buddy William Boyd, and meets an Arabian princess (Mary Astor) along the way. I'm not surprised this one isn't on DVD, since it was considered lost for a long time, and the surviving print was found in Howard Hughes' archives. Since it's not in the public domain, I wouldn't be surprised if the poor condition combined with rights questions kept it off DVD.

Finally, at 9:15 AM there's a Greta Garbo/John Gilbert movie I haven't seen, A Woman of Affairs. This one surprises me by its lack of availability on DVD, since it's an MGM movie. But it turns out that the book it's based on was published in 1924, so it's possible that rights issues over that -- the book would, I think become public domain next January -- might have something to do with it.