Dantes Inferno (1924 film)

Plot

The tactics of a vicious slumlord and greedy businessman finally drive a distraught man to commit suicide. The businessman is tried for murder and executed, and is afterward taken by demons to Hell where he will spend the rest of eternity

Cast

Preservation status

The UCLA Film and Television Archive has an incomplete print, three reels out of a total of five reels. A print of the film reportedly also survives at the Museum of Modern Art. Some of the original prints of this film had the scenes in hell tinted in red.

Production

This film, like several previous Fox Films such as The Queen of Sheba, A Daughter of the Gods and some Theda Bara films, featured full nudity in some sequences. Actress Pauline Starke is completely nude in the Hell sequences, with the exception of a large flowing black wig that covers her nether regions. Some bit players and extras are fully nude. The different prints of the film were more than likely edited according to the attitudes of the different regions or parts of the world they played in. The film also features popular comic actor Bud Jamison in blackface as a butler; he is easily recognizable under the makeup, and his initial appearance has caused some laughter by knowledgeable film buffs at its occasional screenings.

Some hell scene footage from the film was reused in the 1935 film Dante's Inferno.

For his 1980 sci-fi thriller "Altered States" director Ken Russell intercut borrowed footage from this film with his own digital effects to create a hallucination sequence.