John B. O'Brien Movies

This drama is set at Notre Dame and follows the exploits of a great football coach (patterned after Knute Rockne) who is conflicting with a promising but arrogant freshman running back. The story centers on the coach's struggle to help Bucky O'Brien understand that his glory hog ways will not help the team. Bucky ends up getting demoted to blocking for his more talented teammate, Jim Stewart. Bucky is frustrated by his new role and refuses to play. He is promptly benched during the big Notre Dame vs. Army bout. In the end, the Army is beating the pants off the Fighting Irish, and at the last moment Bucky is put into the game. This time he plays for the team and they win. A sub-plot involves the caring coach's efforts to help an ailing player who is hospitalized. The film was dedicated to Rockne, who died a few months before its release, and features several real players from Notre Dame, including the Four Horsemen--Don Miller, Elmer Layden, Jim Crowley, and Harry Stuhldreher. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

One of the few female western stars of the 1920s, Josie Sedgwick, played a girl searching for her outlaw father's killer in this routine Universal oater. Along the way, she nurses a handsome mine manager (Edward Hearn back to health, and they fall in love. As an inside joke, the villain in this film, played smoothly by Robert Walker, was given the name of a well-known supporting player, bearded Slim Cole. Like her sister Eileen, Josie Sedgwick's career waned in the mid 1920s, and she left the screen in 1926, returning only once to play Bob Steele's gun-toting mother in Son of Oklahoma (1932). ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi

In Poison, one of his half-dozen low-budget melodramas for Poverty Row producer William Steiner, former serial ace Charles Hutchison played Bob Marston, a San Francisco socialite turned amateur detective assigned to apprehend a gang of bootleggers. Staging a raid on the gang's hideout, a secret cave, Bob not only catches the gang leader, but also rescues a lovely kidnap victim, Doris Townsend. The latter was played by Edith Thornton, Hutchison's real-life wife. Czech-born character actor Otto Lederer played the main villain, with Frank Hagney of B-Western infamy as his chief henchman. Poison, which Hutchison had written himself, was distributed to small towns exclusively by the New-Cal Film Corp. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi

John Ford directed this epic-scale silent western, which was one of his first major successes and was hugely influential on outdoor films that followed. David Brandon (James Gordon) is a surveyor in the Old West who dreams that one day the entire North American continent will be linked by railroads. However, to make this dream a reality, a clear trail must be found through the Rocky Mountains. With his boy Davy (Winston Miller), David sets out to find such a path, but he's ambushed by a tribe of Indians led by a white savage, Peter Jesson (Cyril Chadwick); while the boy manages to escape, David is killed. Years later, the adult Davy Brandon (George O'Brien) still believes in his father's dream of a transcontinental railroad, and legislation signed by President Abraham Lincoln has made it an official mandate. Davy is hired on as a railroad surveyor by Thomas Marsh (Will R. Walling), the father of his childhood sweetheart Miriam (Madge Bellamy). While Davy hopes to win Miriam's heart as he helps to find the trail that led to his father's death years ago, he's disappointed to discover that Miriam is already married -- and shocked to discover her husband is Peter Jesson, now working with the railroad as a civil engineer. As the Union Pacific crew presses on to their historic meeting at Promitory Point, Davy must find a way to earn Miriam's love and uncover Peter's murderous past. Shot on location in Arizona in Ford's beloved Monument Valley, The Iron Horse was a massive production that employed over 6,000 people; two temporary cities were built to accommodate them, with 100 cooks on hand to serve meals. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

This old-fashioned meller was the one directorial effort of future matinee idol John Gilbert. He also wrote the somewhat clunky story. Janis Clayton (Hope Hampton) swears vengeance when her sister Sally (Irma Harrison) commits suicide because she has been betrayed by her boss. She gets a job as secretary to the man, a wealthy steamship owner, to accomplish her mission. As Janis plots out her revenge, she loses everything, including her fiancé, who believes she is in love with her employer. But on the day she lets the cad know she intends to ruin him, word comes in that one of his ships has sunk and everyone on board has died, including his wife and child. A grieving relative of one of the dead shoots him. Janis's fiancé realizes she always loved him and they reunite. Like most program features of its day, this film received mixed reviews, but the bad ones were so brutal that it permanently scared Gilbert away from directing. He opted out of his contract with producer Jules Brulatour (who later married star Hope Hampton), and went back to acting. ~ Janiss Garza, Rovi

Veteran Western heroine Marguerite Clayton starred in the title role of this 15 chapter Fox serial which was rather obviously inspired by Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. A gang of Tripolitan pirates swooped down and kidnapped 13 wealthy brides, whom they held for ransom. Enter an American Navy lieutenant (John O'Brien), who in chapter 15, "Thundering Vengeance," managed to rescue Bride 13, Miss Clayton, imprisoned with her sister, Bride 12 (Mary Christensen), in the villain's submarine. Written by director Edward Sedgwick, who ought to have known better, Bride 13 was basically laughed off the screen and Fox quickly curtailed their serial aspirations. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi

The head of the Kimberly household rules it with an iron fist. Unfortunately the head of the Kimberly household isn't Grant (J.H. Gilmore), the father and wealthy Wall Street magnate -- it's his spoiled, headstrong daughter Catherine (Virginia Pearson). She is so willful that she has earned the name "Impossible Catherine," and her whole focus in life is to prove women's superiority over the masculine gender. Catherine is pretty successful in this endeavor until she runs into Yalie John Henry Jackson (William B. Davidson). He's read The Taming of the Shrew and believes he can out-Petruchio her Catherine. First he takes the feisty lass up in a plane and after a few tail spins, suggests she either marry him or jump. She marries him, of course, but then runs away. He finds her and takes her to his Canadian ranch, where he sets her firmly in the kitchen. But none of this tames her spirit until one day he is wounded while trying to protect her -- and this is the one thing that's always guaranteed to get the girl. It works on the wayward Catherine who decides that Jackson is her hero. ~ Janiss Garza, Rovi

Dr. Brundage (William Davidson) comes to town and takes away much of the business of the village doctor, Dr. Kirk (J.H. Gilmour). He also makes advances to Mary Lawson (Charlotte Walker), which she repulses. So when Dr. Brundage is found dead and Mary standing over him, holding a knife, she is accused, and then convicted of the murder. With the help of the village cobbler (N.S. Wood) she escapes and runs away to another town. There, she gets a job in a factory and meets fellow worker, John Harlow (Robert Vaughn). Harlow turns out to be a rich man who was working in the factory on a bet, and he and Mary fall in love and wed. But their happiness is interrupted when Dr. Kirk, now on the skids, comes to town. Under threat of exposure, he forces Mary to take him into her home as her "uncle." Detectives finally catch wind of Mary's whereabouts and she tells her husband the whole story. They try to escape in a boat, which wrecks in a storm. They make it home to find that Dr. Kirk has committed suicide -- but not before admitting that he was the one who killed Dr. Brundage. ~ Janiss Garza, Rovi

Beth Treadway (Edna Goodrich) lives with her father, a Major (William T. Carlton), and her Aunt Sarah (Helen Strickland) on a huge Maryland estate. She is engaged to Ripley (Jack Hopkins), a crooked young stockbroker, and is completely spoiled by her family. So when she takes a dislike to John Standish (Carl Brickett), the landscape artist from the North who is redoing the Treadway property, she easily has him fired. But she realizes that he's a good guy after all when he saves an old man from a burning house. Her fiancée, meanwhile, tries to steal money from the Treadway safe and murders the major when he is discovered. Needless to say, Ripley is locked away while Beth winds up with the honorable Standish. ~ Janiss Garza, Rovi

"Capital vs. Labor" was the theme of the Mary Pickford vehicle The Eternal Grind. One of several films inspired by the tragic Triangle Factory Fire of 1911, the film casts Pickford as a spunky sweatshop worker who butts heads with her bosses over her miserable working conditions. Rather than unionize her fellow employees, however, Mary finds a more expeditious method to improve their lot. She marries the boss' son, who strong-arms his father into treating the workers like human beings. Along the way, our heroine also rescues her two sisters -- one a tubercular case, the other a prostitute -- from their sorry lots in life. Obliged by her Famous Players contract to star in pedestrian melodramas like The Eternal Grind, it was no wonder that Mary Pickford yearned to become her own producer. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This silent melodrama was typical Mary Pickford fare, if perhaps not one of her best. She had made a version of the film in early 1915, directed by Allan Dwan, but the negative was lost in a fire. The less talented John O'Brien directed the remake, but he was uninspired and the film proved merely adequate. Pickford played Molly O., whose mother dies in childbirth and whose father, David King (Edward Martindale), rejects her. King goes off to Italy to paint his departed wife as the Madonna, while Molly languishes in a cruel orphanage. Beloved by the other pupils, Molly is despised by the matron's jealous niece, Jenny (Mildred Morris), and is quickly shipped off to live with a boardinghouse proprietress (Maggie Weston). Treated more like a slave than an adopted daughter, Molly takes to the road. King, meanwhile, has returned from Italy wealthy, successful, and longing for his lost daughter. At the orphanage, Jenny is pawned off as the missing Molly and leaves to live with her "father." One day, King rescues a young girl from an encounter with a nasty dogcatcher. She so endears herself to him that he hires her as his maid. She is, of course, the real Molly O., and her re-emergence proves fatal for the impostor. The Foundling was filmed on location at the Los Angeles Orphan Asylum, an institution that would benefit from Miss Pickford's sponsorship for decades. The actress also filmed Stella Maris and Daddy-Long-Legs at the orphanage. Perhaps the completely wrong choice to helm a Pickford drama, John O'Brien later directed Universal "Mustang" 2-reelers starring action heroine Josie Sedgwick. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi