Joseph Henaberry Movies

This farcical melodrama starring Jack Holt was a pleasant program feature. Holt is Robert Pitt, a wealthy young idler who has just returned home to the States from London. While at a restaurant, he notices pretty Molly Creedon (Sigrid Holmquist). He sees that she has a photograph inscribed "with love" and as a joke, he makes a bet with his pals that he will obtain an autographed picture from the girl within 24 hours. But getting the photo is harder than it seemed at first, and he finally asks a burglar to help him out by stealing it. What Pitt doesn't realize is that Molly's father is "Big Phil" Creedon, the police commissioner, and there is a plot to steal some jewels from a British family. Pitt becomes a suspect in the attempted robbery, which he winds up preventing. After saving the jewels, he gets both the photograph and Molly. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

This second of seven film versions of the old theatrical chestnut Brewster's Millions starred Roscoe Arbuckle, better known to his fans as Fatty. The rotund comedian plays a young lawyer who inherits a vast fortune. But in order to claim his legacy, he must spend a million dollars within a set time period. Adapted by Walter Woods from the play by Winchell Smith and Byron Ongley (which in turn was based on a novel by George Barr McCutcheon), Brewster's Millions had "box office hit" written all over it, and might have been as much were it not for the sex scandal that destroyed Arbuckle's career. The most recent incarnation of Brewster's Millions was lensed in 1985, with Richard Pryor in the lead. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Before Paramount produced this well-received version of Edward White's novel Conjurer's House, it had been made into a play by George Broadhurst and filmed in 1914 by Cecil B. DeMille (it was DeMille's second directing credit). Galen Albret (Noah Beery) is the factor, or manager, of an important trading post of the Hudson Bay Company. He's also a jealous and vindictive man, and because he believes that Graham Stewart (Edward Martindel) has slept with his wife, he sends him into the Northwoods to die. Stewart's son, who grows up with the name Ned Trent (Jack Holt), swears revenge. In his search for the killer, he winds up at Albret's post. Not realizing that he has already found his man, Trent falls in love with Albret's daughter, Virginia (Madge Bellamy). Trent is caught and sent out to the woods to die like his father, but Virginia rescues him. The circumstances surrounding the death of Trent's father are cleared up, and Albret admits his wrongdoing. Trent and Virginia are united. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Before becoming famous for her amusing comedies, Dorothy Gish did a number of dramas for the Triangle studios. This was one of them. Sairy Ann (Gish), the daughter of moonshiner Pap Clayton (Charles Gorman), is being romanced by Jed Martin (A.D. Sears). But Sairy Ann prefers the town doctor, Richard Cavanagh (Sam deGrasse), who is also the son of the town judge (F.A. Turner). Jed is determined to kill his rival for Sairy's affections, but instead he kills the sheriff and is put on trial. Jed's family shows up en masse at the courthouse and when the proceedings start to go against their kin, they start shootin' and a dozen people are killed, including Pap Clayton. Jed escapes, but is recaptured by Dr. Cavanagh, and when things quiet down, the doctor and Sairy Ann are married. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Silent screen idol Rudolph Valentino made his next-to-last screen appearance in this romantic comedy/drama. Count Rodrigo Torriani (Valentino) is a notorious ladies' man who has become the subject of a long list of breach-of-promise suits filed by disappointed former girlfriends, which has left him destitute. Needing to learn a new trade, Rodrigo comes to the U.S., where his knowledge of Italian artifacts is put to good use by Jack Dorning (Casson Ferguson), an antique dealer. While Rodrigo's new trade would presumably put him back on the straight and narrow, such is not the case, as he finds himself the object of two different women's affections -- Mary (Gertrude Olmstead), Jack's secretary, and Elise (Nita Naldi), a wealthy socialite. Cobra reunited Valentino with Nita Naldi, who had starred with him in Blood and Sand and A Sainted Devil; within a year of Cobra's release, Valentino would die unexpectedly, and within three years, Naldi would retire from the screen. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A mother stows away on a ship in order to be close to her long-lost son in this seafaring melodrama from small-time company Gotham Productions. Mrs. Wallace Reid (aka Dorothy Davenport) played the suffering mother whose child was taken away 20 years earlier because her husband, Captain Bronson (Noah Beery), mistakenly believed her to be unfaithful. Joining Reid on board the "hellship" was pretty Mary Younger (Helen Foster. The girl, of course, falls in love with Reid's son (Reed Howes), and even the elder Bronsons are reunited. Repenting his earlier cruelty, Captain Bronson sacrifices himself during a storm so that Tim and Mary may live. Ingenue Helen Foster had earlier starred in Mrs. Wallace Reid's alcohol awareness melodrama The Road to Ruin (1928). ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

The Edgar Jepson novel, Ann Annington, was first made into a play, Ann, and then developed as a pleasant light comedy vehicle for star Mary Miles Minter. Ann (Minter) is an ambitious reporter who is assigned to interview author Harold Hargrave (Gaston Glass). The shy writer, however, absolutely refuses to be interviewed, so Ann rents a room next to his apartment and then disguises herself as a maid so she can cull information for the story. She discovers that Hargrave's mother (Helen Dunbar) is pushing him into a marriage with a prim and proper (and wholly unappealing) young lady. Since Ann is falling in love with Hargrave herself, she decides to break up the engagement by leaving a few flimsy feminine things lying around Hargrave's room. The finance finds them and calls off the wedding. Meanwhile, Ann has been sweetly flirting with Hargrave, and he's falling for her, too. When he discovers her real identity, and that she was assigned to do a story on him, it only briefly puts the brakes on the growing relationship. Ann decides to kill the story, and wins her man. At the time this picture was released, Minter was only months away from having her career cruelly destroyed by the murder of director William Desmond Taylor. While Minter almost certainly had nothing to do with his death, the scandal surrounding her love for the much older man ruined her in motion pictures. ~ Janiss Garza, 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 lonesomest of the titular lonesome ladies is Polly Fosdick (Anna Q. Nilsson), the wife of wealthy John Fosdick (Lewis Stone). Convinced that her husband is playing the field with sexy widow Mrs. St. Clair (Jane Winton), Polly follows the advice of her block-headed girlfriends and accepts a dinner invitation from rakish playboy Motley Hunter (Edward Martindel). Just as the audience is primed for a showdown between Fosdick and Hunter, the latter timidly excuses himself and leaves the room. The wind taken out of his sails, Fosdick has no choice but to forgive his wife and escort her home. The unexpectedly low-key climax is par for the course for this genteel romantic comedy, in which the characters behave like human beings rather than refugees from a French farce. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Although this comedy had an awful lot of inconsistencies, it still was an nicely entertaining programmer -- plus it had the presence of handsome Jack Holt, as Horace Winsby, the lead character. Winsby is a millionaire beet sugar king who owns nearly all of California's San Geronimo Valley -- and he has mortgages on what's left over. But he's also a condescending snob who has no mercy for his debtors and that wins him no friends. He even patronizes Patricia Owens, the girl he loves (Eva Novak), and she turns down his marriage proposal. When it becomes all-too apparent that Winsby has one too many enemies in San Geronimo, he goes to New York to wait for things to cool down. He runs up a big bill at a posh hotel, and when he loses his wallet, he is unable to pay. So the hotel attaches his luggage and throws him out onto the street. Winsby has no choice but to head for a nearby park where he befriends a bum who shows him how to get by. Patricia comes to New York with her father (Joseph P. Lockney), and they find out about Winsby's dilemma. They finally trace him to a hash house where he is working as a dishwasher, a much humbler and happier man. After he straightens things out with the hotel, Winsby extends the mortgages of his debtors and brings his bum friend back home with him. Patricia approves of the new Winsby and agrees to marry him. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

This routine romantic comedy was slight of plot and light on name actors. Joseph Schildkraut plays Nicholas Alexnov, an impoverished Russian prince who winds up living with his family in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side. There is an American heiress whom he is trying to marry when he meets Annabelle Ford (Marguerite de la Motte), the girl of his dreams. Annabelle, however, is angling for a rich husband, and Nicholas' sister, Princess Sophia (Julia Faye), tries to match her up with Peter Paget (David Butler), a wealthy oil man. Nicholas uses "cave man tactics" (1920s lingo for playing rough) to show Annabelle that he means business. She weds the prince, but it turns out that they are not faced with life in a garret after all -- Paget discovers that he loves Sophia. He marries the princess and has enough money to share with the whole family. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

When an Arizona ranchman (Willard Louis) is elected senator, he heads for Washington with his daughter, Judith Baldwin (Mary Miles Minter). But they leave behind ranch hand Tod Musgrove (Monte Blue), who is in love with Judith. In Washington, two men propose to Judith -- Congressman Hamill (Guy Oliver) and Robert Courtney (William Boyd). Since she doesn't know which one to pick, she puts them to a test at her aunt's woodland cabin. Of course, they both blow it and when Tod shows up, he gets the girl. This picture was based on the stage play by George Scarborough. 19-year-old Mary Miles Minter didn't know it, but in just a little over six months after this picture's release, her career would come to a sudden end -- her former director (and girlhood crush), William Desmond Taylor would be found murdered. While she was never considered seriously as a suspect, her rashly romantic behavior over the deceased director ruined her sweet, innocent reputation. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Glenn Hunter was still riding high from his success with Merton of the Movies, and in just a few weeks his co-star, Constance Bennett, would achieve stardom herself with the release of Sally, Irene and Mary when they made this ordinary romantic comedy. True to type, Hunter plays Joel Martin, a gawky New Englander who goes to college and almost immediately becomes the focus of the upperclassmen's pranks. But Abbie Nettleton (Bennett) takes pity on him, and when he wants to return home, she calls him a quitter and inspires him to stay. He gets a place on the baseball team, but it's a given that he is really only the mascot. Everyone can predict the rest of the story: There's the big game, and no one is available except Joel to pinch-hit. He steps up to the plate, slams a home run, and wins the game for his alma mater -- and, of course, he wins Abbie, too. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide