Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2026 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Mechanical Man (1921)

This Italian science fiction feature, directed by André Deed, features André Deed, Mathilde Lambert, Gabriel Moreau, Ferdinando Vivas-May, Valentina Frascaroli and Giulia Costa.

This DVD-R edition of this extremely rare Italian science fiction film originates from a severely-truncated Brazilian Portuguese-language release print, which possibly may be the only surviving version of the film. Despite the introductory video titles that might imply that we would be viewing the surviving footage in a restored high-quality video transfer, the actual surviving footage is copied from a low-quality VHS videotape, with new video-based English-language intertitles created by Alpha Video. Even though the disc has a relatively high video bit rate, the picture is smeaary and coarse, with visible horizontal resolution lines. If your viewing system is capable of line-doubling, it will only moderately improve the low picture quality. In between the video noise of the VHS tape, dust, speckling, and other print flaws peek out to confirm their presence.

The film is accompanied by a MIDI-keyboard and digital piano music score composed and performed by Rachel Gutches. As with other of her silent film scores for Alpha, this music may just have you praying your disc player suddenly breaks down.

If you are at all nostalgic over the VHS videotapes of the 1990s, this disc will remind you just how far silent film presentations on home video have come. To remind you of how bad a DVD edition can be, just take a gander here. For now, this is our recommended home video edition of the film.

This review was updated in 2026.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is available from ALPHA VIDEO through . . .

Other SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASY FILMS of the silent era available on home video.