I originally wrote this piece for Sight and Sound in 2019, after seeing The Signal Tower at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. I am sharing it here because the festival is making the film available to stream for 24 hours to celebrate Silent Movie Day.

On a remote stretch of American railroad, a hard-working signal operator and his family are terrorised by a snarling villain. While his pretty young wife defends her virtue against the intruder’s threats, our hero engages in a thrilling race to the rescue to save a runaway train. It could easily be the plot of one of D.W. Griffith’s early short melodramas, but this is Clarence Brown’s The Signal Tower, a fully fledged feature film from 1924, adapted from a short story by Wadsworth Camp.