Preceded by short: The Skipping Cheeses (Les Fromages automobiles)(Georges Méliès, France, 1907): When this newly restored film by Méliès, the early master of live-action animation, was shown at the 1998 Pordenone Silent Film Festival, festival curator Paolo Cherchi Usai wittily dubbed it "The Attack of the Killer Bries: a gang of camembert cheeses attacks a police station, chokes the cops with their unbearable smell, and rescues a peasant woman who brought them to Paris." (4 mins, Silent, English intertitles, B&W, 35mm, Courtesy George Eastman House)The Shakedown is a true rediscovery, considered to be one of only two surviving silent films by William Wyler. It shows us that, in 1929, this great American director already knew exactly what he, and the cinema, were about: the camerawork, as described by Paolo Cherchi Usai, is "breathtaking," the story, "a poignant romance between a waitress and an oil drill worker, ending up as an unlikely tale of male bondage." James Murray (from King Vidor's The Crowd) plays a young man who wows a small town with his boxing prowess, only to be revealed as the advance man for a professional boxing fix. "Check out a director's cameo in the boxing match sequence, with Wyler himself holding a numbered cardboard upside down," notes Cherchi Usai, whose detective work was responsible for presenting this rare find at Pordenone and then at Telluride.