Howard Gaye

Prince of Lovers purports to be the filmed biography of hedonistic poet Lord Byron, here played by Howard Gaye. Little more than a pageant of Byron's many amours, the film looks more like a wax museum, with dozens of stuffy actors posing in elegant costumes. Surprisingly, the actresses playing the women in Lord Byron's life are not all that attractive, making one wonder what all the fuss was about. The most interesting characterization is delivered by Marjorie Day as Lady Caroline Lamb, the politician's wife who scandalized all of London via her unabashed illicit romance with His Lordship. This fascinating woman was later spotlighted in a 1973 biopic, which like Prince of Lovers was an exercise in boredom. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This silent era classic was based on the swashbuckling adventure novel by Rafael Sabatini, the author whose works later inspired such renowned genre favorites as Captain Blood (1935) and The Sea Hawk (1940). Andre Moreau (Roman Novarro) is a law student during the time of the brewing French Revolution who politically supports his dissatisfied fellow citizens. During a confrontation with the Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr (Lewis Stone), a feared nobleman sympathetic to the royalist cause, the blue blood murders Andre's agitator friend. Unable to engage in swordplay against the legendary prowess of the Marquis, Andre vows revenge and joins a local circus troupe, hiding behind the guise of Scaramouche, a clown, while training in the art of fencing with a master. Andre also falls in love with a woman smitten by the dashing Marquis, but she returns to the troupe when she learns of the nobleman's infidelity. As political unrest boils over into rebellion, Moreau and the Marquis cross steel. Scaramouche (1923) was remade often, most notably in 1952, which features the cinema's longest sword battle and costarred Stone in a different role. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

After arguing with his father (Alec B. Francis), Bruce Morrison (Casson Ferguson) leaves home and goes to a small town. There he meets and marries Rose Kendall (Ruth Renick). Right after their wedding, he receives a notice that his father is sick. The couple returns to the Morrison home, but Bruce is compelled to hide Rose because she is well below his station and his father would disapprove of her. Old man Morrison informs his son that he has the perfect bride for him -- Jane Penfield (Virginia Caldwell). Jane's brother, Murray (Maxfield Stanley), discovers Rose, and convinces her that her husband is no good. Rose leaves and goes back home, and Bruce divorces her because she has deserted him. Rose has a baby and Jane, whom Bruce has married, soon finds herself pregnant, too. When Jane's baby dies, the family doctor (Charles Wingate) replaces it with Rose's child (apparently no one notices the difference in the babies' age or appearance). Rose misses her baby and goes to see it. Jane, meanwhile, has proven to be a social butterfly with no maternal instincts. Bruce learns that the baby belongs to Rose, and eventually they are reconciled. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Although no existing prints of this film seems to have survived, the history of The Spirit of '76 resurfaced in 2000 due to the controversial Mel Gibson vehicle The Patriot. A wildly fantastic Revolutionary War melodrama undoubtedly inspired by Archibald McNeil Willard's famous 1876 painting of the same name, The Spirit of '76 depicts the attempts of George III's mistress Catherine Montour (Adda Gleason) to become "Queen of America." Despite warnings, producer Robert Goldstein, the owner of a costume company, reportedly went ahead and filmed all kinds of British atrocities, including redcoats bayoneting babies and raping village maidens -- inflammatory acts indeed in a year when Great Britain was enmeshed in a devastating war against Imperial Germany. As a result, Goldstein found himself prosecuted under President Woodrow Wilson's Wartime Espionage Act and sentenced to ten years in prison. The sentence was later commuted to three years but Goldstein was financially wiped out and spent the remainder of his life unsuccessfully demanding restitution. The debacle over The Spirit of '76 can be studied in Anthony Slide's fine 1993 book Robert Goldstein and the Spirit of '76. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, 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

The plot of Flirting With Fate probably wasn't new in 1916, and it certainly wouldn't disappear with this film. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. plays a struggling artist whose heart is broken when his sweetheart Jewel Carmen is promised in marriage to someone else. The woebegone Fairbanks decides he has nothing left to live for, but he isn't up to committing suicide; thus, he hires a professional killer to do the deed. When Fairbanks inherits a million dollars, Carmen's parents suddenly decide that he's worthy of their daughter's hand. The trick now is to call off the hired assassin--who is nowhere to be found! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The most successful and artistically advanced film of its time, The Birth of a Nation has also sparked protests, riots, and divisiveness since its first release. The film tells the story of the Civil War and its aftermath, as seen through the eyes of two families. The Stonemans hail from the North, the Camerons from the South. When war breaks out, the Stonemans cast their lot with the Union, while the Camerons are loyal to Dixie. After the war, Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall), distressed that his beloved south is now under the rule of blacks and carpetbaggers, organizes several like-minded Southerners into a secret vigilante group called the Ku Klux Klan. When Cameron's beloved younger sister Flora (Mae Marsh) leaps to her death rather than surrender to the lustful advances of renegade slave Gus (Walter Long), the Klan wages war on the new Northern-inspired government and ultimately restores "order" to the South. In the original prints, Griffith suggested that the black population be shipped to Liberia, citing Abraham Lincoln as the inspiration for this ethnic cleansing. Showings of Birth of a Nation were picketed and boycotted from the start, and as recently as 1995, Turner Classic Movies cancelled a showing of a restored print in the wake of the racial tensions around the O.J. Simpson trial verdict. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide