When the Clouds Roll By

Daniel Boone Brown is a man carousing around New York without a care in the world, until he unwittingly becomes the subject of a sadistic psychiatrist’s experiments. As the doctor pushes him step by step into his own fears, the film turns from a comedy into a fantastical show. The passage everyone remembers from this Douglas Fairbanks vehicle is the nightmare: the room turns, Fairbanks walks up the walls and across the ceiling, and the inside of his stomach and his mind are staged. The tricks use every technical means the period had, and the ceiling walk is done here more than thirty years before Royal Wedding. The flood at the end is a large set piece built with miniatures. It was the first film Victor Fleming directed, the man who would go on to make The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind.