a 56-foot stockade. The island provided a serviceable stand-in for locations as varied as the Sahara desert and a British cricket pitch. War scenes were shot on the plains of Grasmere, Staten Island. The Perils of Pauline and its even more popular sequel The Exploits of Elaine were filmed largely on the island. So was the 1906 blockbuster Life of a Cowboy, by Edwin S. Porter Company and filming moved to the West Coast around 1912. Top-grossing silent films in the United States The following are American films from the silent film era that had earned the highest gross income as of 1932. The amounts given are gross rentals (the distributor's share of the box-office) as opposed to exhibition gross. During the sound era Transition Although attempts to create sync-sound motion pictures go back to the Edison lab in 1896, only from the early 1920s were the basic technologies such as vacuum tube amplifiers and high-quality loudspeakers available. The next few years saw a race to design, implement, and market several rival sound-on-disc and sound-on-film sound formats, such as Photokinema (1921), Phonofilm (1923), Vitaphone (1926), Fox Movietone (1927) and RCA Photophone (1928). Warner Bros. was the first studio to accept sound as an element in film production and utilize the Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc technology, to do so. The studio then released The Jazz Singer in 1927, which marked the first commercially successful sound film, but silent films were still the majority of features released in both 1927 and 1928, along with so-called goat-glanded films: silents with a subsection of sound film inserted. Thus the modern sound film era may be regarded as coming to dominance beginning in 1929. For a listing of notable silent era films, see List of years in film for the years between the beginning of film and 1928. The following list includes only films produced in the sound era with the specific artistic intention of being silent. City Girl, F. W. Murnau, 1930 Earth, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930 The Silent Enemy, H.P. Carver, 1930 Borderline, Kenneth Macpherson, 1930 City Lights, Charlie Chaplin, 1931 Tabu, F. W. Murnau, 1931 I Was Born, But..., Yasujirō Ozu, 1932 Passing Fancy, Yasujirō Ozu, 1933 The Goddess, Wu Yonggang, 1934 A Story of Floating Weeds, Yasujirō Ozu, 1934 The Downfall of Osen, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1935 Legong, Henri de la Falaise, 1935 An Inn in Tokyo, Yasujirō Ozu, 1935 Happiness, Aleksandr Medvedkin, 1935