The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929 film)
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a 1929 American film from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Directed by Charles Brabin, it adapts Thornton Wilder’s best-selling novel of the same name and stars Lili Damita, with Don Alvarado in a supporting role. It is a part-talkie, meaning it includes spoken dialogue in some scenes, as well as a synchronized musical score and sound effects, with English intertitles for the silent moments. The sound was recorded using the Western Electric sound-on-film process. The film runs 86 minutes and was released on March 30, 1929.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the second Academy Award for Best Art Direction. The story is loosely based on the life of the Peruvian entertainer Micaela Villegas, known as La Perichole, whose life inspired other works such as Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement by Prosper Mérimée and La Périchole by Jacques Offenbach. The complete soundtrack survives on Vitaphone discs, and a mute print is held by the George Eastman House film archive.
The film was remade in 1944 with Lynn Bari and again in 2004 with a cast that included F. Murray Abraham, Gabriel Byrne, Robert De Niro, Kathy Bates, and Pilar López de Ayala.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:13 (CET).