Lonesome (1928)

Rating: 4.5★

Watched: 2026-05-12

This film is really stylish and great all around. I like that it includes what looks to be a real shot of the elevated train in Manhattan. There are so many timeless elements to the story and characters, I can imagine people will still relate to it in 2128.

It’s funny to reflect on the first title card about modern life being “busy” while watching it from within the superpaced AI age 100 years later. The film depicts Hello Girls physically operating switchboards to enable long-distance communication, overlayed with clocks that contrast the slowness of human labor against the speed of information transfer. 100 years later, we perform infinitely more abstract routing under the hood of everyday protocols, including the stream through which I watched this.

I’m split on the dialogue scenes added in by the studio. The actors do have chemistry that is nice to see intimately in a live conversation, but the style clashes and the cut is notably awkward the first time. The second cut has a narrative opportunity to help explain the abrupt change and feels a bit better. The last one seems like the biggest waste to me, I would’ve preferred the dialogue thematically kept to the leads.