Miriam Cooper Movies

Except for one low-budget production, Miriam Cooper had been away from the screen for over a year when she signed up with producer B.P. Schulberg. She made three films for Schulberg, and in her autobiography, Dark Lady of the Silents, claims that this crime drama was her favorite, even though she plays her usual stock character -- a nice girl gone wrong. When Sheila Weston (Cooper) meets Ray Underhill (Gaston Glass) at a dancehall, she has no idea he's a car thief. They fall in love and quickly marry, but as soon as the ceremony ends, Underhill is arrested, as is Sheila, who the police assume is his accomplice. Both of them wind up in jail, and although Sheila serves her full term, Underhill breaks out with another con, Martin Norries (Kenneth Harlan). After Sheila is finally released, Underhill tracks her down and gets arrested again, but before going to jail, he tells her the location of a fortune hidden away by Norries. Sheila steals as much of it as she can, then travels to South Africa, where she falls in love with the owner of a diamond mine -- who also happens to be Norries. Thinking Underhill has died, she and Norries wed and return to the States. It turns out Underhill is still alive, and around long enough to admit his wrongdoings before being killed by another ex-con; Sheila finally confesses her own theft and goes on to lead an honest life with Norries. Cooper permanently retired within a year of this film, which was unfortunate since her performances were often lauded by critics. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

This drama was one of Miriam Cooper's last films, and she's far too good for the mediocre story. Her co-star here is the stolid Norman Kerry. John Brand (Kerry) is a young man from the country who decides to head for New York to try his luck on Wall Street. He becomes a huge success and is even able to get the man he ruined, Roy Pelham (William Bailey), to help him make his way up in society. Pelham's wife, Justine (Martha Mansfield), is determined to get revenge and she seduces him. Brand's wife, Marion (Cooper), finds the adulterous pair together and realizes that her marriage is in danger. To save her home, she decides to ruin her own husband's business by betraying his plans to his rivals. Brand finally wakes up to his errors and he returns to the country with Marion by his side. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Miriam Cooper's acting career was drawing to a close when she starred in this melodrama for the Poverty Row studio C.B.C., which would later become known as Columbia. In spite of not being able to see, "Old Blind" Goring (Mitchell Lewis) runs a fishing schooner with the help of his daughter, Rena (Cooper). Gordon Gray (Forrest Stanley) finds himself shipwrecked, and Rena goes to his rescue. When he goes searching for Rena, Goring walks off the schooner and drowns. His death leaves his daughter grief-stricken, and she believes Gray is to blame. In order to keep the schooner running, as she had promised her father, she forces Gray to marry her and help her with it. The couple carries on unhappily until he takes her home to meet his wealthy parents. Vera Hampton, Gray's former fiancée (Maude Wayne), is there, as is Paul Dupre (Richard Tucker), who says he is an artist, but who prefers the fast life to spending time in front of a canvas. He comes on to Rena, who responds just to upset Gray. After much arguing, Gray offers Rena her freedom, but she realizes she has come to love him. She goes to the schooner to be alone, and is followed by Dupre, who attacks her. Gray, who also has followed Rena, engages Dupre in a fierce battle. When he finally emerges victorious, Rena reveals that she loves him. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

When Miriam Cooper read William J. Locke's Idols, she begged her husband, director Raoul Walsh, to make a film of it with her in the lead. Playboy Hugh Coleman (Conway Tearle) is disconsolate when he discovers that Irene Lansing (Anna Q. Nilsson) is engaged to his best friend, Gerald Merriam (illustrator Henry Clive, who occasionally liked to act). To ease his depression, Coleman secretly marries Minna Hart (Cooper), the daughter of a Jewish banker (Robert Fischer). When Coleman runs through his money, the banker gives him a loan. Minna urges him to talk to her father about their relationship, but it turns out that Hart does not want his daughter marrying a Christian. Coleman does not put up an argument, and Minna is furious. When he comes up to her room, she tells him they are through, and makes him swear to never reveal the marriage to anyone. The next day Hart is found dead. Since Coleman refuses to reveal his whereabouts at the time of the murder -- because he was with Minna -- he looks like the guilty party. Minna refuses to reveal anything either. Finally Irene comes forth and claims that Coleman was with her. Eventually Minna and Coleman resolve their differences. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Director Raoul Walsh made a very busy version of the melodrama by Paul Armstrong and Wilson Mizner. But even if he tries to stuff too much into six reels, the acting by star Miriam Cooper (who was also Walsh's wife) stood out. Cooper is Doris Moore, a country girl who is conned by two crooks, Harry Leland (the miscast Vincent Serrano) and Pop Clark (W.J. Ferguson). They convince the naive girl to come with them to New York City and play the badger game on William Lake (Stuart Sage). But the intervention of Kate Fallon (Helen Ware), who runs the gang's New York home, saves the innocent and traps the guilty. Instead of tricking Lake, Doris marries him. A lot of money was spent on this picture -- a cabaret scene, for example, includes an elaborate tight rope performance by famed circus performer Bird Millman. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

According to her autobiography, Dark Lady of the Silents, film star Miriam Cooper brought the idea of filming Longfellow's poem to her then-husband, director Raoul Walsh. She also claims that she originally had little desire to play the title character -- but of course, she wound up in the lead anyhow. The picture itself begins with a quarrel between two lovers. To bring them to their senses, the girl's father reads them the poem Evangeline... On their wedding day, a pair of Acadian lovers (Cooper and Albert Roscoe) are separated when English soldiers interrupt the proceedings. The couple don't reunite until old age. Perhaps Cooper wasn't being coy when she said she wasn't interested in the role of Evangeline -- even though the film was quite successful, the long-suffering character doesn't have much dramatic bite. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Slowing down a bit from the previous year, in which he directed six films, Raoul Walsh turned out only five pictures in 1918, the second of which was The Woman and the Law. Based on the then-notorious "Jack DeSaulies Case," the film is divided into two halves. In the first portion, the audience was shown how the good-girl heroine (played by Walsh's then-wife Miriam Cooper) is forced into a marriage of convenience. In the second portion, the heroine, now unhappily married, is driven to murder her husband (Ramsey Wallace) when he inaugurates an affair with a big-city temptress. The question: Will the "unwritten law," which states that a man has a right to kill anyone who tries to steal his wife, apply equally to a wronged woman? Cast as the seductress who comes between the husband and wife was Ziegfeld Follies beauty Peggy Hopkins Joyce. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This socially conscious, well-wrought silent drama made an earnest plea for prison reform over two decades before it became a national cause. The film's message still remains powerful today. In order to truly understand the subject, director Raoul Walsh and his buddy Jack Pickford actually stayed (by choice) in a real penitentiary. The story follows the grim experiences of an innocent man convicted of murder. He did kill the victim, but it was strictly self-defense. The prison itself is run by three corrupt administrators. This film includes performances by actors Johnny Reese, James Marcus, and George Walsh, among others. ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

Sometime during the shooting of the landmark The Birth of a Nation, filmmaker D.W. Griffith probably wondered how he could top himself. In 1916, he showed how, with the awesome Intolerance. The film began humbly enough as a medium-budget feature entitled The Mother and the Law, wherein the lives of a poor but happily married couple are disrupted by the misguided interference of a "social reform" group. A series of unfortunate circumstances culminates in the husband's being sentenced to the gallows, a fate averted by a nick-of-time rescue engineered by his wife. In the wake of the protests attending the racist content of The Birth of a Nation, Griffith wanted to demonstrate the dangers of intolerance. The Mother and the Law filled the bill to some extent, but it just wasn't "big" enough to suit his purposes. Thus, using The Mother and the Law as merely the base of the film, Griffith added three more plotlines and expanded his cinematic thesis to epic proportions. The four separate stories of Intolerance are symbolically linked by Lillian Gish as the Woman Who Rocks the Cradle ("uniter of the here and hereafter"). The "Modern Story" is essentially The Mother and the Law; the "French Story" details the persecution of the Huguenots by Catherine de Medici (Josephine Crowell); the "Biblical Story" relates the last days of Jesus Christ (Howard Gaye); and the "Babylonian Story" concerns the defeat of King Belshazzar (Alfred Paget) by the hordes of Cyrus the Persian (George Siegmann).

Rather than being related chronologically, the four stories are told in parallel fashion, slowly at first, and then with increasing rapidity. The action in the film's final two reels leaps back and forth in time between Babylon, Calvary, 15th century France, and contemporary California. Described by one historian as "the only film fugue," Intolerance baffled many filmgoers of 1916 -- and, indeed, it is still an exhausting, overwhelming experience, even for audiences accustomed to the split-second cutting and multilayered montage sequences popularized by Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, Joel Schumacher, and MTV. On a pure entertainment level, the Babylonian sequences are the most effective, played out against one of the largest, most elaborate exterior sets ever built for a single film. The most memorable character in this sequence is "The Mountain Girl," played by star on the rise Constance Talmadge; when the Babylonian scenes were re-released as a separate feature in 1919, Talmadge's tragic death scene was altered to accommodate a happily-ever-after denouement. Other superb performances are delivered by Mae Marsh and Robert Harron in the Modern Story, and by Eugene Pallette and Margery Wilson in the French Story. Remarkably sophisticated in some scenes, appallingly naïve in others, Intolerance is a mixed bag dramatically, but one cannot deny that it is also a work of cinematic genius. The film did poorly upon its first release, not so much because its continuity was difficult to follow as because it preached a gospel of tolerance and pacifism to a nation preparing to enter World War I. Currently available prints of Intolerance run anywhere from 178 to 208 minutes; while it may be rough sledding at times, it remains essential viewing for any serious student of film technique. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This race-themed melodrama is the first two-reeler directed by Tod Browning. Indians kill homesteader Bob West (Otto Lincoln) and capture his little daughter Ida. They sell her to a slave trader named Morgan, who uses her in place of a dead mulatto slave child and sells her to a kindly couple. When Fred Gilbert (W.E. Lawrence), the couple's nephew, visits them a dozen years later, he falls in love with Ida (Teddy Sampson) -- much to the consternation of his aunt and uncle, who believe the girl to be of mixed race. Morgan's mulatto slave Sally (Mary Alden) gives the family a letter written by Bob West shortly before his death, and a fingerprint on the document reveals that Ida is indeed West's daughter and is Caucasian. Morgan is killed by a posse and Fred and Ida marry. Note actor Otto Lincoln, who changed his name to Elmo Lincoln by the following year, when he played The Mighty Man of Valor in the Babylonian sequence of D.W. Griffith's masterpiece Intolerance; in 1918, Lincoln found fame as the screen's first Tarzan. 15/2rl ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide

Symbolic special effects highlight this early one-reel morality tale directed by Tod Browning. Writer John Penhallow (Eugene Pallette) abandons his idealism and pens a lurid and exploitative gangster story. When he sleeps, he dreams of the nasty people in his fiction materializing out of the book as tiny figures that grow to human size. In his dream, the book is published and read by a desperate young woman who then goes astray, being used and degraded by a cruel man and disowned by her family. Penhallow wakes up and sees that his daughter (Miriam Cooper) is about to read his seamy manuscript. He takes it from her and throws it in the fireplace, where his evil characters writhe in the flames. He rewrites the book and makes sure to give it a moral and uplifting conclusion. 15/1rl ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide