After reading P. C. Wren’s new novel Beau Geste, Irish American film director Herbert Brenon hurried to Jesse Lasky’s office at Paramount Pictures to pitch a film adaptation. Lasky gave Brenon free rein and resources to create a film that matches the novel’s epic scope. The story centers on the bond among three English brothers (played by Ronald Colman, Neil Hamilton, and Ralph Forbes) whose lives are disrupted by the disappearance of a precious family heirloom, leading them to the French Foreign Legion and the battlefields of North Africa. The film’s exteriors were shot on location in California’s Imperial Dunes, its vast white sands standing in for the Sahara. Silent film music specialist Rodney Sauer will lead a quintet in a newly compiled score created for the film, combining period music with live performance to heighten its romance, suspense, and grandeur. September 20, 2026, 2:30 pm, Gartner Auditorium, the Cleveland Museum of Art. $25/$22 CMA, CSFF members. For tickets, see https://www.clevelandart.org/events/beau-geste-1926.
About the Restoration
Beau Geste was a 1926 Paramount production, that was awarded Best Picture of 1926 by Photoplay Magazine—the year before the Academy Awards arrived. Directed by Herbert Brenon, the film starred Ronald Colman, Alice Joyce, Neil Hamilton, Noah Beery, William Powell, Ralph Forbes and Norman Trevor, and was based upon the best-selling novel by P.C. Wren. The film was originally released in roadshow format with an intermission and went through two cuts. A final print was struck from the original negative in 1939 for research toward the remake. At that time the negative had hundreds of splices and missing and damaged footage. Unfortunately, that print was struck on a printer for sound films, and the left side of the image was lost. Because of the importance of the film, there was a perception that it was protected. Multiple archives held different elements, but the reality was that not a single complete element of high quality had survived.
