Two kinds of cinematic antiquarianism are on view in new releases from the admirable Milestone Collection, a catalog that has revived several obscure films from the silent era. In the first, the rather grandly titled “Olive Thomas Collection,” an amusing Frances Marion comedy, “The Flapper” (1920), directed with more flash than usual by Alan Crosland, is paired with a lame documentary. But together they reclaim from anonymity a captivating brunette whose once-fabled beauty, despite ringlets and cupid lips, maintains a curiously modern candor. In the second, “Hindle Wakes” (1927), the object of adoration is a forgotten near-masterpiece, an often astonishing adaptation of a once-famous play, directed by a prolific hack, Maurice Elvey, whose entire corpus – said to be the largest by any director in British film history – will likely be sifted in search of additional treasure. Finding Olive is fun; finding “Hindle Wakes” is an event.

Thomas won’t rouse embers to the degree of the lately resurrected Anna May Wong, not least because the latter’s rehabilitated vehicle, “Piccadilly” (1929, also distributed by Milestone) is an exceptional movie, perhaps the high point in the career of its transplanted German director, E.A. Dupont. Nor is Thomas as sexy as Wong. Famous in her day as a Ziegfeld girl and early Selznick star, she disappeared after the furor over her death, at 25, in a Paris hotel – the victim of an accident, a suicide, or murder: The jury is still out. Few of her films survive, and many remember her only as the first Hollywood scandal, a kick-off chapter in Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon,” which, as usual, gets all the details wrong.

“The Flapper” is a deft diversion about an innocent 16-year-old girl, Ginger, who is dispatched from her insular resort home, where thrills are confined to church and soda fountain, to Mrs. Paddle’s boarding school in Lake Placid, N.Y. Free of her father, a senator who has his own priest in attendance, and a martinet housekeeper, she pretends to be older to attract a mysterious gentleman, who proves to be just that and not a pederast. (Obviously, you could not make this film today.) Trading in her “Peter Thompson” school uniform for flapper clothing, makeup, and headband, she pretends to a torrid past but ultimately turns her misadventures into triumph, retaining her virginity: The looks of horror when the community fears otherwise are about as ripe as the satire gets.

Thomas’s brightest moment is her brief shimmy with a ukelele, and the film’s peak is its location-shooting in Manhattan. Marion’s wit is expended in alternately clever and arch title cards, and what promises to be a subtext about class evaporates when “the moth among the butterflies” – Hortense, the boarding school’s charity case – turns out to be a vamp and a thief: Class will out, no doubt. A cliche-ridden piano score supports the film, barely, but the excellent print reflects the high level of the original production.

Thomas suggests a transitional force between Mary Pickford’s eternal child and Clara Bow’s ravenous sprite, and you can imagine her growing into Norma Shearer or Kay Frances roles – if, that is, she had a voice, which is an issue unexplored in the documentary by Andi Hicks. The purple script, narrated by Rosanna Arquette as if she were waking from a coma, leaves no platitude behind: She was “a beauty who loved life and lived it to the fullest,” who had a “bi-coastal lifestyle” and a “high-flying lifestyle,” and “set the tone for a new generation.” (The level of research is characterized by the actor who reads a passage from cameraman Billy Bitzer’s memoir in a thick German accent – Bitzer hailed from Roxbury, Mass.)

Married at 16, and then again at 20, to irresponsible Jack Pickford (his sister Mary apparently disapproved), Thomas slept with Ziegfeld and either one or two Selznicks. The same year she completed “The Flapper,” she ingested bichloride of mercury, used externally for syphilis symptoms, and lingered four torturous days – a FrontPage story soon displaced by the travails of Fatty Arbuckle, William Desmond Taylor, Thomas Ince, and others in that fun-loving tribe.

The notion that Olive augured the modern woman is as frayed as Ginger’s attempt to embody the romantic excess of cheesy fiction. Fanny Hawthorne, of “Hindle Wakes,” is the real thing, the English version of Ibsen’s Nora, unwilling to trade a satisfying fling for a lifetime’s marital obligation. She participates in her own deflowering, and it emboldens her. Stanley Houghton’s play is no longer much performed, but it caused a storm in 1912, moving him to the head of the Manchester School of realistic drama; he died of meningitis a year later, at 32.

The near-simultaneous DVD releases of “Piccadilly” and “Hindle Wakes” add two titles to the exceedingly small list of distinguished British silents, a field little celebrated beyond the apprentice works of Alfred Hitchcock. Both films illustrate the liberation enjoyed by the camera in the final years of that era. With the introduction of sound, the camera would once again lose its mobility, as filmmakers waited nearly four years for technology to catch up to the creative juices that gushed in the mid-1920s.

Elvey had filmed an adaptation of the play in 1918, but in returning to the subject he came up with the ingenious idea of showing the events that provoke the play’s drawing-room debate. As a result, “Hindle Wakes” is one of the least stagey theatrical adaptations ever made. It’s as if a director filmed “A Streetcar Named Desire” with an hour of footage dramatizing Blanche’s mishaps before she turns up shattered on her sister’s doorstep. The title refers to the vacation week (wakes) enjoyed by the mill workers in Hindle, a community in Lancashire, spent at the still thriving working-class amusement park at Blackpool.

The 14-minute Blackpool sequence is one of surpassing inventiveness, as the camera mounts a tower, rides a roller coaster, scans the neon vistas, and looks down with documentary authority at swirling couples (including same-sex ones) on a dance floor. Of the two musical tracks offered, choose the one by the duo that calls itself In the Nursery. It excels especially in the dancehall scene, replicating the sounds of a jazz band with an added edge of brittle dissonance, then departing entirely from the dance-band orchestra, as a beaming light shines on the floor and confetti rains on the dancers, underscoring the episode with dreamlike foreboding.

Elvey’s eye is no less judicious in footage of the mill, which suggests the kind of industrial film Joris Ivens was just beginning to master. The entire first hour is a masterly montage of varied shots, including close-ups that serve no purpose but to fill in the social milieu, and parallel symbols: Whistles, corporate, and railroad, that govern everyone’s time; details that distinguish rich and poor, conventional and idiosyncratic – the sentimental “master” of the mill, prefers to drink his coffee from the saucer, like a cat. A constant motif consists of ground-level shots – wheels and legs and feet and shoes, from the massed legs of the women changing their shoes at end of day, to Fanny’s entrance at the end, feet first, descending the stairway of her now stifling home.

The shocker that scandalized critics in 1912 and won the support of Emma Goldman (whose essay can be accessed through a DVD-ROM feature) concerns Fanny’s refusal to marry the son of the master, following their escapade. She asks the dim and vacillating Allan, “I’m a woman, and I was your little fancy – you’re a man and you were my little fancy. Don’t you understand?” He doesn’t, but is happy to make a beeline back to his fiancee, the mayor’s daughter, while Fanny, anticipating her mother’s determination to humiliate and exile her, packs her bags and goes off, Nora like, to live on her own, still working in the mill, unfazed by the scandal. This last part is fantasy – she probably would have had to board a train for distant parts.

The film loses inspiration, but not tempo (this is a two-hour silent film without a dreary frame) when it is obliged to come inside for the theatrical working out of the plot. Elvey deepens the conflict by focusing on the awkward relationship between Fanny’s father and the master, former school chums; the latter likes to have him around to remind him of his failure but also wants to rekindle the virtues of their boyhood friendship – and consequently is determined that his son marry Fanny.

Fanny, photographed with evident affection and played by Estelle Brody with a smirk of patient superiority, represents a measure of independence no one else can comprehend. Two other standouts in the generally excellent cast are Humberston Wright as her father and Peggy Carlisle as her best friend, Mary. With her bobbed hair and Harry Langdon clown face, Carlisle makes so powerful an impression that her disappearance midway is more unsettling for the viewer than other characters. Her off-screen and insufficiently explained death leaves an emotional hole that can be filled only by screening the film from the top: If the last third of “Hindle Wakes” is prophetic social consciousness, the first part is filmmaking magic: epical, intelligent, stirring. Elvey died in 1967, at 79, remembered, if at all, as a journeyman who turned out low-budget quickies that defined the mediocrity of the British film industry. In 1927, at least, he was in its vanguard.

Mr. Giddins’s column appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.