The 17 Most Underrated Crime Films of the 1920s

One hundred years ago, film was in its first golden era, and crime-films reigned supreme.

Odin Halvorson
12 min readJun 12, 2023

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The 1920s were, undoubtedly, an incredible decade for crime films. In part because the 20s saw the transition between the silent era and the rise of talkies, there’s a delightful mix, here, of films from both styles of cinema. Some of the great masterpieces of the genre (many long forgotten by the average movie audience of today) exist suspended in time, one-hundred years ago.

Many of the actors and directors who would go on to become household names in the 1930s and 1940s got their start right here, and many of those who were the darlings of the silent-era screen saw this as their final hurrah before the talkies wiped their stardom off the map.

My spiel about films in the streaming era

Once upon a time, Netflix’s DVD library hosted well over 100,000 titles and sent out roughly 12 million DVDs per week. Now, with the advent of easy-to-use streaming…

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Odin Halvorson
Odin Halvorson

Written by Odin Halvorson

A futurist/socialist/fantasist writer, editor, and scholar. MFA/MLIS. Free access to my articles at OdinHalvorson.substack.com | More over at OdinHalvorson.com.

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