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

The Road to Yesterday (1925)

The late silent-era production from director Cecil B. DeMille features Joseph Schildkraut, William Boyd, Jetta Goudal and Vera Reynolds in a moralizing historical drama within a modern-day framework. Sound familiar DeMille fans?

Mr. DeMille waxes philosophical on the topic of reincarnation in this tale of a newlywed couple who are haunted by something ethereal from the moment they are married, and a young minster and the society girl he meets at the Grand Canyon who feel they know each other from somewhere else. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!

The film is likely accompanied by a soundtrack compiled from preexisting low-fidelity music recordings.

Sight unseen, this is our recommended home video edition of the film by the questionable virtue of its being in-print and available.

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

Sunrise Silents discs are never to commercial quality standards, all being mastered from 16mm and 8mm reduction prints, but this DVD-R edition does at least look better than the budget edition produced by Passport Video noted below. The fair to good quality 16mm reduction print utilized for the video transfer contains a reasonable amount of image detail while having as much frame jumpiness, and the persistent dust, speckling, schmutz, and other print flaws that you would expect. The picture’s colortones are flat, with soft image details, and some sections of the print feature reasonable contrast and some have very light exposures that make the shot content hard to discern.

The film is accompanied by a MIDI-based synthesizer music score cobbled together from recognizable standards presented in ways that might make you feel like you’re at a circus performance.

Supplemental material includes the final episode of the Mystery of the Double Cross (1917) serial; a theatrical trailer for Kiki (1926); a rough print of the Vitagraph trick film The Enchanted Drawing (1900); and an image gallery of glass slides (35 images).

A passable edition until a better one comes along.

This review was updated in 2026.

SUNRISE SILENTS has discontinued business and this edition is . . .

It should be no surprise that a cheap multidisc edition producer spends as little money as possible to produce a product that is appealing to the budget-minded, and that is evident in the DVD edition at hand, but to the detriment of visual quality. The 8mm reduction print is greyed out in this slightly windowboxed video transfer and, as can be expected, retains little of the image detail from the original 35mm prints. The tiny print has a number of splices, scratches, dust and speckling.

The film is accompanied by a soundtrack compiled from preexisting music recordings.

Supplemental material includes sound-era newsreel footage with Cecil B. DeMille (14 minutes); and interviews with A.C. Lyles, John Hart, Charlton Heston and Anne Bauchens about DeMille (7 minutes).

Not recommended, as it is easily the worst-looking film in this collection, but just barely watchable if you are after the other films available in this uneven-quality collection.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .