The Hardest Luck Film Analysis

The house, white against the darker background, nestled somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, is very rarely ever seen. This isn’t to say that that it was behind a large fence, the way a lot of people living there have, or that it was abandon and overgrown with weeds and shrubs. No, what I mean is that the house was sometimes there and sometimes not, gone in the fog just as quickly as it came. I can’t give you an address so you can attempt to see this phenomena yourself, because I’m not entirely sure it has one, nor would I even know what it was if it did. On occasion, it is there, silhouetted in the moonlight against what in the daytime would be green hills behind it; but in the night, when I have only viewed this ghostly façade, it is black against black as they roll off toward the horizon. This

“The Hardest Luck,” which is not exactly placed next to any Chaplin films on any Film Institute lists, was a silly romantic comedy filmed all around LA and the Hollywood Hills. I didn’t even like the movie that much and neither did a lot of critics (it hasn’t even been released on DVD). I was only watching it because of a list I was compiling of lesser known silent film actors and actresses for a book I was hoping to write on the subject. Film after film was watched through sometimes blurry eyes. What seemed like several thousand dot-com trips to IMDB were made. Furthermore, dozens of trips to the library were also made in search of precious images, not only for use in my book, but because, sadly, many films from the era have been lost. Warehouse fires, careless storage by people with little eye for the future, and rot on the celluloid has deprived many people like me of classics by so many people from Buster Keaton to Lon