I’ll confess it straightaway: I’m biased about this picture (as it surely would have been known in 1930) – wholly, shoutily in favour of it. I watched it last September at the Cambridge Film Festival on a big screen in Emmanuel College, with two pianists playing along, live, as this silent marvel told its really quite sophisticated story. I’d had no idea what to expect and came away mesmerised.

It is, of course, a masterpiece - not Castleton Knight’s primitive 1929 British talkie, but Sir Nigel Gresley’s LNER Class A3 4472 Flying Scotsman, which iconic steam locomotive is currently being refurbished for commissioned runs in the spring. It enjoyed its inaugural London-Edinburgh journey on 1 May, 1928, and so excited the public that it generated a silent comedy-thriller, to which sound was added in 1930. The talking scenes, introduced halfway through, weigh down the story but sound effects enhance the thrilling train action that was shot with Gresley's co-operation.

The mistake was probably that I hadn’t tanked up beforehand. Clues were there. Soho Theatre is over a pub. 9.45pm start. Who’s going to turn up in those circumstances completely sober? Who would be mad enough to turn up in Soho at 9.45pm stone-cold sober? And a four-star Edinburgh Fringe show had not necessarily been assessed by altogether un-punchdrunk viewers, lurching as they do (and I have done) between five shows a night.

There was a celebrated two-word come-on to 1930s movie-goers. “Garbo Laughs!” was a poster strapline calculated to seduce fans of the mournful Swedish star to Ninotchka, in which her character had an unwonted fit of the giggles. Audiences were rather more conflicted when another cinematic embargo was ended. In The Great Dictator, Chaplin talks.

The first cinema was two-thirds empty. A hundred seats had been laid out by the Lumière brothers in a Parisian salon, but only 33 of them were occupied. The small audience saw a film in which a crowd, mostly women in long dresses but also a large bounding dog, pour through a tall gate. None of them looks at the camera, as we would now. In 1895, stardom was not yet associated with film. The dog, as dogs will, gave much the most attention-seeking performance.

Before Shutter Island - long, long before - there was The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. First released in 1920, Robert Wiene's hallucinogenic film descends, like that of Martin Scorsese who cites it as a major influence, into the creepy shadowlands between sanity and madness. This spring Caligari goes on national tour (details below) spruced up with a musical accompaniment by Minima, a four-strong rock group which specialises in supplying the sound for silents. The group consists of drums (Mick Frangou), bass (Andy Taylor), cello (Greg Hall) and guitar (Alex Hogg). Here, Hogg talks about Minima's work in a Q&A followed by a mini-masterclass on scoring a key scene from the movie.