The “absolutely beautiful” silent film Quentin Tarantino called a “fucking masterwork”
It’s easy to assume that Quentin Tarantino doesn’t love silent film as much as he does many other aspects of cinema for two reasons that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the man and his work.
The first is that his screenplays are his defining characteristic as a filmmaker, with all of his scripts overflowing with lengthy diatribes, verbose monologues, and pop culture references. The other is that, in a literal sense, Tarantino is not a silent filmmaker, because he finds it very difficult to shut the fuck up.
Could he make a silent movie if he wanted to? It’d be an interesting experiment, but you get the sneaking suspicion that Tarantino is too reliant on dialogue to make it work. After all, as iconic as many of his movies are, most of them are remembered for the words spoken by the characters, and not the images.
He’s rattled off hundreds upon hundreds of pictures as things he’d loved watching or been inspired and influenced by, but how many of them hail from before the talkies? Not many, which is why it’s so out of character for the two-time Academy Award winner to call a silent flick one of the best he’s seen in recent years.
Not that he dismisses it completely, though, since he’s cited Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and GW Pabst’s Pandora’s Box as two of his all-time favourites, but when he can list dozens of exploitation films and handfuls of low-budget slashers at the drop of a hat, silent cinema pales in comparison to the rest of the genres, subgenres, and offshoots that he, ironically, won’t stop talking about.
Maybe there was some kind of inbuilt prejudice he had to overcome, which makes sense for someone who does a lot more talking than they do directing these days. Having spent his free time revisiting titles from the 1920s that he hadn’t seen before, one of them stood out as the best thing he’d seen in 2025.
“Look, the best movie I’ve seen this year is the silent Beau Geste,” he said. “It is just, it’s a fucking masterwork. It is absolutely beautiful.” In fact, Tarantino loved the 1926 drama so much that he did something he’d been putting off for the longest time and convinced himself to read PC Wren’s source novel to see how it compared.
An adventure story, Herbert Brenon’s classic follows Robert Colman’s title character and his two brothers as they sign up with the French Foreign Legion to escape a scandal at home, before their lives become even more complicated when they suffer under the harsh conditions of a hard-nosed commander in the Sahara desert.
Presumably, Tarantino doesn’t watch a lot of modern movies because he’s adamant that nobody has made anything good since 2019, coincidentally the year his most recent feature was released, but casting his eyes into the past has unearthed not only a gem, but a masterwork he’d never seen before.
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