The Road to Yesterday
(1926)
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The late silent-era production from director Cecil B. DeMille features Joseph Schildkraut, William Boyd, Jetta Goudal and Vera Reynolds in a historical drama within a modern-day framework. Sound familiar DeMille fans?
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 2007 Sunrise Silents edition
The Road to Yesterday (1926), color-tinted black & white, 127 minutes, not rated, with Mystery of the Double Cross [episode 15: “The Double Cross”] (1917), color-tinted black & white, 25 minutes, not rated, and The Enchanted Drawing (1900), color-tinted black & white, 1 minute, not rated.
Sunrise Silents, TRTY-N (NTSC) and TRTY-P (PAL), no UPC number.
Windowboxed 4:3 NTSC or PAL, one single-sided, single-layered DVD-R disc, Region 0, ? Mbps average video bit rate, 1536? kbps audio bit rate, PCM stereo sound, English language intertitles, no foreign language subtitles, 6 chapter stops, keep case, $22.95.
DVD release date: 21 December 2007.
Country of origin: USA
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 2007 Passport Video edition
The Road to Yesterday (1926), black & white, 105 minutes, not rated, with The Squaw Man (1914), black & white, 74 minutes, not rated, The Virginian (1914), black & white, 50 minutes, not rated, Carmen (1915), black & white, 57 minutes, not rated, The Cheat (1915), black & white, 59 minutes, not rated, Joan the Woman (1916), black & white, 133 minutes, not rated, The Little American (1917), black & white, 62 minutes, not rated, A Romance of the Redwoods (1917), black & white, 90 minutes, not rated, Don’t Change Your Husband (1918), black & white, 79 minutes, not rated, Old Wives for New (1918), black & white, 72 minutes, not rated, The Whispering Chorus (1918), black & white, 81 minutes, not rated, Male and Female (1919), black & white, 115 minutes, not rated, Why Change Your Wife? (1920), black & white, 91 minutes, not rated, The Affairs of Anatol (1921), black & white, 117 minutes, not rated, Miss Lulu Bett (1921), black & white, 71 minutes, not rated, Manslaughter (1922), black & white, 100 minutes, not rated, and The Volga Boatman (1926), black & white, 120 minutes, not rated.
Passport Video, DVD-5090, UPC 0-25493-50900-0.
Windowboxed 4:3 NTSC, five single-sided, dual-layered DVD discs, Region 0, ? Mbps average video bit rate, ? kbps audio bit rate, Dolby Digital 1.0 mon0 sound, English language intertitles, no foreign language subtitles, chapter stops, multidisc keep case, $19.98.
DVD release date: 12 June 2007.
Country of origin: USA
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Sunrise Silents discs are never to commercial quality standards, all being mastered from reduction prints, but this edition does at least look better than the budget edition produced by Passport Video noted below. The 16mm reduction print utilized for the video transfer contains a higher amount of image detail while having as much frame jumpiness, and persistent dust and speckling as you would expect.
It should be no surprise that a cheap multidisc edition producer spends as little money as possible to produce a product that is appealing to the budget-minded, and that is evident in the edition at hand, but to the detriment of visual quality. The subpar 16mm source print is grayed out and retains little of the image detail from the original 35mm prints. As is to be expected, the print has splices, scratches, dust and speckling.
