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Dante's Inferno More at IMDbPro »

6 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Mainly a curiosity, 27 May 2002

Author: psteier from New York

One of a number of 'high brow' pictures made at the time, a simplistic morality tale is used to frame parts of hell as described by Dante and illustrated by Gustav Dore.

Mainly of interest for the production design of hell, which seems like a giant factory. The semi-nude bodies of the sinners caused censorship problems at the time.

I saw the New York Museum of Modern Art print, which seems to be missing at least twenty percent, supposedly mostly scenes of hell.

2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Very Good, 11 March 2008
Author: Michael_Elliott from Louisville, KY

Dante's Inferno (1924)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

A meanspirted, heartless father begins reading Dante's Inferno and is soon visited by a demon who shows him what hell is like. Will the father be scared into changing his ways? The father aspect of this is clearly lifted from A Christmas Carol but it works fairly neatly but the real aspect are all the scenes in Hell, which I guess the filmmakers used to make sure people knew they didn't want to go there. It's very easy to see why this thing was so controversial back in the day and it still could have the power to creep people out. Hell is broken down into various rooms and the torture depends on the reason you were sent there. Most memorable are the murderers who are thrown on top of one another with razors so that they will be cut each time they move. The demon that haunts those who commit suicide is another memorable aspect. The print I watched was in horrid shape and didn't have a soundtrack so with the proper elements I'd probably give this a full four stars. I think this was the fifth version of the book.

Lackluster Story Aided by Visuals, 30 May 2009

Author: Maliejandra Kay (Maleejandra@yahoo.com) from United States

A selfish businessman has been consumed with the sins that will throw him to hell. He allows his tenants in his ramshackle tenement houses suffer in unsafe living conditions with no remorse. When a demon shows him what hell is like and offers him a chance to save his soul, the businessman is faced with a choice, but old habits die hard.

Although Dante's Inferno has some great visuals, the story lacks, and therefore makes this curiosity quite disappointing. This was one of the most exciting names on the list for Cinevent 41, and I was underwhelmed by it. The red tinting and the writhing bodies are powerful at first sight, but the narration dwells too much on the details of each level of hell. Maybe this is uninteresting to modern audiences who have been saturated with so many different varieties of what hell might be like that we're numb to the older renditions. Whatever the reason, it is not effective.

It is worthwhile to note that the black characters are played by white men in black-face. This choice is more startling today than it must have been when the film was originally released, but it serves as a reminder of the change in the times.

This film intertwines the imagery from Dante's famous story and a modern morality tale that plays off of the depictions of hell. Cecil B. DeMille perfected this combination in The Ten Commandments a year earlier. In comparison, Dante's Inferno falls flat.

1 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Scrooge's Inferno, 11 June 2001
Author: Henry Willis from Los Angeles

It may not be possible to bring the Inferno to the screen: too much depends on Dante's poetry, not to mention familiarity with all of the classical and contemporary references that mean so much to the poet's journey. But the people who made this film didn't even try; instead, they gave us a version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with a little diluted Sinclair Lewis thrown in, relocated in 1920's America. Yes we do get some scenes from the Inferno, but all the drama of the original has been drained from them: the lustful appear to be merely lounging around in a reddish scene, instead of being caught up in a whirlwind, while the suicides are now thorny bushes with heads, which simply look ridiculous.

But the question remains: could we do better with modern special effects? The danger is that the effects could be too good--Bertran de Born swinging his head like a lantern, Mohammed and the other schismatics split nearly in half, suicides turned into brambles, thieves turned into lizards--leaving the impression that the Inferno is just a series of freak shows, and giving too little importance to the transformation of Dante as he journeys through Hell. Good luck to anyone who tries.

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