Warner Archive has released a Blu-ray upgrade of Rex Ingram’s 1921 silent masterpiece, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the 1916 novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

The four horsemen (War, Conquest, Famine and Death) wreak havoc on the family of Julio Madariaga, a Spanish born adventurer who amassed a fortune in the New World in Argentina.

Madariaga had two daughters. One married a German, the other a Frenchman. Madariaga did not like his German son-in-law or the three boys he had with his daughter. He favored the libertine son of his French son-in-law and his other daughter, to whom he promised to leave his fortune.

Unfortunately for young Julio (Rudolph Valentino in his star-making performance), old Julio never got around to making his will and his fortune was split evenly between his two daughters when he died. The German son-in-law (Alan Hale) sold his wife’s share of the fortune and uprooted the family to Germany. The French son-in-law (Josef Swickard) then uprooted his family and moved them to Paris where young Julio thrived as a painter and dancer, falling in love with the young wife (Alice Terry) of one of Julio’s father’s contemporaries.

The lives of everyone are upset by the outbreak of World War I in which the two sides of the families end up fighting one another.

The film compares favorably to 1925’s The Big Parade and 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front as one of the great anti-war movies of the era as well as one of the great love stories of the silent era. Director Ingram and his leading lady, Terry, married during the filming of their next film together, 1922’s The Prisoner of Zenda, and moved to the French Riviera after he directed 1925’s Ben-Hur.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was remade unsuccessfully by Vincente Minnelli in 1962. That version updated the story to World War II with Glenn Ford, a ridiculous substitute for Valentino imposed on Minnelli by MGM. Minnelli had wanted Alain Delon.

Minnelli’s leading lady was Ingrid Thulin whose phonetic English had to be dubbed by Angela Lansbury the same year she played Laurence Harvey’s mother in The Manchurian Candidate. Faring better were Charles Boyer as Ford’s French father, Paul Lukas as his German uncle, and Paul Henreid as Thulin’s cuckhold husband. Lee J. Cobb as Ford’s Argentinian grandfather was all but laughed off the screen.

Warner Archive has also released Blu-ray upgrades of 1932’s Red Dust, 1946’s The Verdict, 1952’s The Narrow Margin, and 1953’s By the Light of the Silvery Moon.

Victor Fleming’s Red Dust was one of the pre-Code era’s biggest hits.

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow went together like thunder and lightning, and no more so than in this one in which he plays the overseer of a rubber plantation in Malaya and she plays a prostitute on the run from authorities in Saigon. Mary Astor is the third side of the triangle as the proper wife of engineer Gene Raymond. Gable and Astor are great, and Harlow is even better.

Red Dust was remade by John Ford as Mogambo in 1953 with Gable reprising his role opposite Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly. Both actresses received Oscar nominations for their performances. A Blu-ray upgrade of that version will be released later this month.

Don Siegel’s The Verdict was the director’s first film, a locked door murder mystery that gave us the last screen pairing of Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, their ninth which began with 1941’s The Maltese Falcon.

Greenstreet plays a disgraced Scotland Yard superintendent forced into retirement for arresting a man proven innocent of committing a murder just after the man has been hanged. After one of the other suspects is murdered in his apartment with a locked door, Greenstreet is called upon to discover who killed him as well as the victim of the original murder. Lorre plays the man who lived in the apartment above him.

Also in the cast are Joan Lorring as a chanteuse, George Coulouris as Greenstreet’s successor at Scotland Yard, Rosalind Ivan as a nervous landlady, Morton Lowry as the murdered suspect, and Paul Cavanagh as a politician with a secret.

You aren’t likely to guess the shocking ending to this one.

Richard Fleischer’s The Narrow Margin is one of the great train thrillers, comparable to Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.

Charles McGraw stars as one of two L.A. cops assigned to escort a trial witness (Marie Windsor) from New York to L.A. His partner is shot and killed before they even leave the woman’s apartment building. He and everyone he meets on the train are either killers or compromised targets for the killers.

Jacqueline White and Gordon Gebert co-star as a woman and her son that McGraw meets on the train. This is another one with a shocker of an ending. It was remade less successfully in 1990 with Gene Hackman and Anne Archer.

David Butler’s By the Light of the Silvery Moon is a sequel to Roy Del Ruth’s 1951 hit, On Moonlight Bay, released by Warner Archive five years ago.

Both films are based on Booth Tarkington’s Penrod stories. The difference is that in those stories, which were filmed as silents in 1923 and later as talkies in 1937 and 1938, centered on a boy named Penrod. In these films, the boy is named Wesley, and he is a supporting character in stories that revolve around his big sister and her boyfriend.

Doris Day is the sister, and Gordon MacRae is her boyfriend in these totally charming musical comedies. On Moonlight Bay ended with MacRae going off to fight in World War I. In By the Light of the Silvery Moon, he’s back.

Billy Gray is back as Wesley as are Leon Ames and Rosemary DeCamp as his and Doris’ parents and Mary Wickes as their maid.

Happy viewing.