Gino Corrado Movies

Proving once and for all that Western filmmaking was treacherous work even for the greatest of stars, Colleen Moore broke her neck in a fall from a moving handcar during the making of this rousing sagebrush melodrama. The pert Moore, an idol of her generation, quickly regained her mobility but was reportedly forced to sleep in a leather neck support for nearly ten years. She had insisted on a departure from her usual flapper roles and screenwriter June Mathis had crafted this quaint melodrama of a mining camp girl who reforms a young derelict addicted to drink (Lloyd Hughes). Escaping her violent stepfather Mike Dyer (Frank Brownlee), Maggie Fortune (Moore) takes up residence in the rough mining town of Bullfrog. She falls in love with handsome Rance Conway (Hughes) and he with her, but Rance can't keep away from the bottle. While Conway is away grubstaking, Dyer turns up in Bullfrog, only to be killed by an unknown assailant. When both Rance and Maggie confess to the killing, a confused sheriff files the death away as a suicide. Revealed to be a wealthy young scion, a sober Rance proposes marriage, and Maggie accepts. A blandly handsome leading man from Arizona, dark-haired Lloyd Hughes was at his best when playing opposite strong female stars such as Mary Pickford (The of the Storm Country, 1922), Moore (five films including this one), and Mary Astor (eight times). His sound films were mostly in the "B" category. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Speed Creswell (Frank Merrill) and his father (Joe Girard) have a difference of opinion over the son's responsibility in this action adventure. The elder Creswell is an oil magnate who worries his son has no business sense. David Brierly (Gino Corrado) is the crooked foreman who tries to sabotage an important oil reserve and drive Crewsell out of business. Newspaper reporter Vera Wray (Virginia Warwick) uncovers the plot and notifies Speed. The good son races to prevent his father from signing over the property to scheming land grabbers in this film co-starring Ed O'Brien and Slim Cole. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

After her brilliant career in Europe, Pola Negri, came to America to make films for Paramount. Her first few pictures for the studio were disappointing, so they imported Russian director Dmitri Buchowetzki to work with her again (the two had made films together overseas). Buchowetzki wrote the story for this drama, which was adapted to the screen by the talented Paul Bern. Cleo (Negri) lives in Marseilles and works as a waitress in a waterfront dive. A stranger entices her into coming to Paris to take dancing lessons, but instead she is taken to a baron (Edgar Norton), who betrays her. In spite of this inauspicious start, Cleo becomes a successful and renowned actress, but her feelings about men have never recovered. She loathes them and uses them only for the money they offer her, which she then hands over to a penniless girl. Georges Kleber (Robert W. Fraser) falls desperately in love with her and steals from the bank where he works because she demands money from him. When she hears that Kleber has been jailed, however, she goes to his employer, Henri Duval (Robert Edeson), in an attempt to get him released. Duval helps Kleber, and when he sees that Cleo really loves him, he releases her from her end of the bargain. Buchowetzki's career, unfortunately, never took off in America, and he died in the early days of the talkie era. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Gloria Swanson is My American Wife in this farfetched but entertaining romantic drama. Married to Argentinian horse rancher Josef Swickard, Gloria is romanced by handsome aristocrat Antonio Moreno. This one has the whole shootin' match: duels, blood feuds, midnight trysts, and a pulse-pounding horse race. Sam Wood, the director famed for shooting every scene twenty times and declaring to his actors "Now let's sell 'em a load of clams!", manages to turn out a few clams of real class and style. My American Wife was based on a novel by Hector Turnbull. ~ 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