Trying to improve the image of the movies by adapting literary classic works and frequently employing celebrated stage actors and actresses, Adolph Zukor's Famous Players-Lasky (1916-1933) would produce in the year 1925 a film of Ferenc Molnar's sophisticated stage comedy The Swan, featuring Adolphe Menjou. In fact, quite a few sophisticated films were produced in the middle period of the decade. Ernst Lubitsch transposed Oscar Wilde's famous 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan to the silver screen in 1925.
James Cruze, best known for his Western The Covered Wagon directed Beggars on Horseback (1925), based on a contemporary play, the most satirical of George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly collaborations. A whimsical and satirical farce from France, Un Chapeau de Pailie d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat,1928) would not appear to suffer in the transmigration from stage to silent screen. But most of these translations from the more verbal media (novel and play) suffered oversimplification as adapters tried to appeal to the mass audiences. The use of inter-titles would present a few problems. Lubitsch, on a mission to avoid a flood of titles for his Wilde adaptation, even to the length of omitting the famous playwright's forte - the epigrams. Not until screen would find its voice did such literary works as Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew achieve the full dimension of which the medium is capable; the 1929 version, directed by Sam Taylor (who was one of Harold Lloyd's directors), starred Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.