Josephine Crowell Movies

The massacre of the Huguenots, previously dramatized in broad strokes by Griffith's Intolerance, served as the basis for director Frank Lloyd's Ashes of Vengeance. Norma Talmadge stars as a Huguenot lass who stands defiant against the persecution of the French royal court. She is protected by Conway Tearle, a French noble who refuses to go along with the de Medici's murderous machinations. Josephine Crowell, who played Catherine de Medici in Intolerance, here repeats the role. Director Lloyd and H. B. Somerville adapted the screenplay of Ashes of Vengeance from Somerville's novel of the same name. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Bunty Pulls the Strings was adapted from the immensely popular stage farce by Graham Moffat. Leatrice Joy stars as a Scottish lassie who has her hands full solving various domestic problems. Her brother Raymond Hatton faces a prison term, and she herself is in danger of losing boyfriend Cullen Landis. All ends happily with a double wedding ceremony, with Leatrice's father (Russell Simpson) not only giving the bride away but taking a bride himself. Surprisingly, comic actor James Finlayson, who co-starred in both the British and American stage versions of Bunty Pulls the Strings, does not participate in the film version. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Edward Everett Horton made a series of eight comic shorts in the late 1920s in which he played a Charley Chase type of everyman. It's a little known fact that these were produced by Harold Lloyd's production company. This one is especially charming. Horton plays the sweetheart of Sharon Lynne, whose father (Otis Harlan) doesn't approve -- even though he's never met "Eddie," he's convinced the young man is a lounge lizard. Sharon is determined to change her dad's mind, and asks Eddie to come meet him. But before that happens, Horton runs afoul of an ill-tempered man and, while shopping with his sweetheart, he becomes a constant source of annoyance for a haughty old battle ax (Josephine Crowell). When he finally shows up for his meeting, Dad is out in the garden and his bodyguard turns out to be the ill-tempered man, who angrily chases him away. Horton believes this is his girlfriend's father, and they plan to elope. He sneaks onto the property and, mistaking Dad for the gardener, asks for his help. Because Horton has offered some gardening tips, and because he's so obviously in love with Sharon, Dad decides that he's an all right guy and willingly helps him. The bodyguard thinks the girl is being kidnapped and follows in hot pursuit. Eventually everyone's identity is straightened out, and Eddie gets to wed his girl. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Author Gertrude Atherton wrote this story especially for the screen; it is supposedly based on a true story that happened in San Francisco's society circles. Langdon Masters, a newspaper editor and writer (Lewis S. Stone), falls in love with Madeline (Mabel Julienne Scott), the neglected wife of the aristocratic Dr. Howard Talbot (Charles Clary). Although Masters and Madeline decide that they should not see each other, when Talbot discovers the affection between them, he demands that Masters leave San Francisco and his newspaper career. Masters agrees and wanders to New York's notorious "Five Points" district, where drink and degradation follow. Madeline, fed up with her husband's cruel nature and cold demeanor, finally obtains a separation. She heads for New York and proceeds to track down Masters. She finds him in one of the city's worst dives and proceeds to pull him out of the gutter. With her love, Masters is able to once again lead a useful life. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Long before he began playing bit-part judges and college professors, Edward J. LeSaint was a busy film director at Fox Studios. LeSaint's Flames of the Flesh stars the versatile Gladys Brockwell as a fallen woman. To exact revenge on the elderly man who did her wrong, Brockwell seduces the man's callow young son. Complicating matters is the boy's older brother, who makes love to Brockwell himself in order to rescue his sibling. Brockwell grows genuinely fond of the brother, but sadly concludes that she's no good for him-or for anyone else. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

For Wives Only was based on the stage play The Critical Year. The story takes place in Vienna, where handsome Dr. Rittenhaus (Victor Varconi) spends most of his time avoiding the amorous advances of his adoring female patients (shades of Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle). Hoping to use Rittenhaus' influence to secure a well-paying job, Professor Von Waldstein (Claude Gillingwater) talks the young medico into entertaining Countess Von Nessa (Dorothy Cumming), a wealthy hospital patroness. Certain that her husband is cheating on her with the Countess, Rittenhaus' wife Laura (Marie Prevost) concocts an elaborate scheme to arouse his jealousy. Part of her plan requires her to pledge eternal devotion to three of her husband's colleagues -- and from this point on, it's "Oh, Doctor!" all the way. ~ Hal Erickson, 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

Clara Bow plays an inveterate flirt who impulsively marries much-older mountain man Ernest Torrence. When city lawyer Percy Marmont shows up on a camping trip, Bow can't help but lead the poor fellow on. He resists her advances, but finally succumbs, leading to disaster. Very typical of the silent films that catapulted jazz-baby Clara Bow to stardom in the late 1920s, Mantrap benefits immeasurably from Bow's boundless vivacity and from the breathtaking location photography by James Wong Howe. One nagging question: what does twentysomething Bow see in either of her superannuated leading men--particularly the cadaverous Percy Marmont? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Cecil B. DeMille was busy developing Leatrice Joy into a glamorous star a la Gloria Swanson when she was loaned out to director Marshall Neilan for this romantic comedy. She played the title character of Neilan's film -- a homely, unwanted girl whose father (George Barnum) has invented a "wireless power machine." Minnie realizes that the only way she'll find a lover is to invent one, so she sends herself flowers and gifts from an imaginary sweetheart. A newspaper reporter (Matt Moore) starts investigating Minnie's story, and when her nasty stepsister (Helen Lynch) discovers her ruse she threatens to expose her. Since Minnie has to dig up a lover from somewhere, she decides to claim an unidentified body at the morgue. It turns out to be a dead Chinaman. The reporter is about to complete his story, but in the end he sympathizes with her and falls for her himself. With the help of a plastic surgeon, both Minnie and the reporter are fixed up for a glossy Hollywood-style ending. Neilan was forced to add this artificial tag by DeMille, who threatened to stop the film from being shown unless Leatrice Joy was turned back into the chic star of his own pictures. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Jack Holt stands out in this adaptation of the William LeBaron stage hit. A pair of con artists have published a book under the fictitious name of Robert Douglas. Now the IRS, the publisher, and various other organizations are after them and they must somehow come up with a "Robert Douglas." They find him in John Webster (Holt), a supposed literary agent, who has arrived in town with his assistant (and former safecracker) Eddie Maloney (Harry Depp). He takes the identity of Douglas, but when he discovers the motives of the men who hired him, he turns the tables on them. In addition, he gets involved with the campaign for governor, and helps the incumbent, Kendall (Charles Clary), to be re-elected. With Maloney's aid, he uncovers a fraudulent scheme that the manager of a lumber company was using against Kendall -- which was Webster's real purpose all along. In the midst of all this activity, he also manages to win the hand of Kendall's pretty daughter, Grace (Wanda Hawley). ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide