Miriam Cooper Movies

One of the most overused titles in the history of films, Betrayed was affixed to this early effort from director Raoul Walsh. Miriam Cooper, who at the time was married to the director, stars as Mexican peasant girl Carmelita Carruti. Not the brightest of senoritas, Carmelita falls in love with ruthless bandit leader Leopoldo Juares (Hobart Bosworth). She changes her mind about Juares as a result of a dream, in which her sweetheart is exposed as a double-dyed villain by handsome U.S. Cavalry officer William Jerome (Wheeler Oakman). Upon awakening, however, Carmelita throws over both Juares and Jerome in favor of her hometown boyfriend Pepo Esparenza (Monte Blue) -- who secures his financial future by collecting the 10,000 peso reward on Juares' head. For reasons unknown, Betrayed was reviewed in the trade magazine Variety under the title Betrayal. ~ Hal Erickson, 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

Home Sweet Home has been referred to by its leading lady Lillian Gish as "the first all-star film." Indeed, virtually every member of director D.W.Griffith's celebrated stock company appears in this three-part, five-reel biographical drama. Based on the life of John Howard Payne, composer of the "world-famous" title song, the film stars Henry B. Walthall as Payne, herein depicted as a brilliant but unstable artist who never found the happiness embodied in his songs. As incidents in Payne's life are enacted on the screen -- his early failures, his success as a playwright in England and as a composer in France, and his lonely, embittered final years in Africa -- these scenes are counterpointed with three "sub-stories," in which the song Home Sweet Home is shown to have a profound effect on several different people. In Episode One, a western miner (Robert Harron) nearly leaves his waitress sweetheart Mae Marsh), but they are reunited to the strains of the Payne song. In Episode Two, the song causes a faithless wife (Blanche Sweet) to renounce her lover (Owen Moore) and return to her husband (Courtenay Foote). And in the final episode, two quarrelling brothers (Donald Crisp and James Kirkwood) kill each other, leaving their grieving mother to find solace in the familiar strains of Home Sweet Home. Though Lillian Gish also spoke respectfully of her artistic collaborations with D.W. Griffith, even she found the film's final scene -- in which, dressed as Heavenly angel, she rescues John Howard Payne from the bowels of Hell -- a bit difficult to watch with a straight face. This silly denouement aside, Home Sweet Home, a joint effort of the Reliance and Mutual film companies, was quite wonderful entertainment, and one of the most successful of Griffith's pre-Birth of a Nation endeavors. ~ Hal Erickson, 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 sentimental melodrama (adapted from the novel by Peter B. Kyne) was the last silent film that director Raoul A. Walsh made under the auspices of his own production company. His then-wife, Miriam Cooper, stars as "Nan of the sawdust pile," who is victimized by a man who wed her illegally. She goes back to her Northwest hometown with a bastard child only to suffer malicious gossip and ostracism. The only one who stands by her is Donald MacKaye, her childhood sweetheart (Ralph Graves). But Donald's father, a mill owner (Lionel Belmore) thoroughly disapproves of their romance. Although he forbids his son to have anything to do with Nan, when Donald becomes seriously ill Nan is at his bedside until he recovers. Still Mr. MacKay refuses to warm up to Nan, but Donald marries her anyhow. Finally, when the couple gives him a grandson, MacKay gives them his fond approval. Miriam Cooper notes in her book, Dark Lady of the Silents, that during the filming of this picture, she burned her eyes severely by staring into a bank of arc lights -- a very dangerous thing to do in the early days of motion picture lighting. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide