Annie Laurie (Blu-ray)

Produced at the creative apex of the silent era, Annie Laurie (1927) was MGM’s grand-scale dramatization of the conflicts between warring clans in the 17th-century Scottish highlands. Lillian Gish (The Wind, Broken Blossoms) stars as the daughter of a diplomat who seeks to negotiate peace between the haughty and politically-connected Campbells, and the more rough-hewn MacDonalds, led by the dashing Norman Kerry (The Phantom of the Opera). When Annie discovers that the Campbells’ chieftain is plotting to derail a treaty and justify a brutal attack upon the MacDonalds (in what would become known as the Massacre of Glencoe), she must sprint to a snowy mountaintop to light a warning signal — a thrilling sequence reminiscent of Gish’s legendary ice floe scene from D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East.