William E. Lawrence Movies

Before becoming everyone's favorite supporting comedian, Edward Everett Horton was top-billed in several silent features. In Front Page Story, Horton plays cub reporter Rodney Marvin (he gets away with it, too, despite the fact that he was 36 at the time). By getting the goods on a corrupt political machine, Marvin not only saves his job, but his newspaper as well. E. E. Horton was always a welcome presence in silent films, but his true forte was deftly delivered dialogue, an aspect of his talent that meant little in the days before talking pictures. Front Page Story was photographed by Vernon Walker, who later ran the special effects department at RKO Radio. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Rian James was the last of three directors assigned to The Best of Enemies; this sort of unnecessary expenditure was one of the reasons that the Fox Studios was always on the brink of bankruptcy. The plot is basic Hatfield/McCoy stuff, with Buddy Rogers and Marian Nixon playing the grown children of feuding German-Americans Frank Morgan and Joseph Cawthorn. Romance blossoms between Rogers and Nixon, while Morgan and Cawthorn continue muttering Teutonic imprecations at one another. The Best of Enemies bears a striking resemblance to the tried-and-true stage play Friendly Enemies. Perhaps Fox could not come to financial terms with Friendly Enemies authors Samuel Shipman and Aaron Hoffman, so the studio churned out its own variation. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The director formerly known as Sean O'Feeney is billed as John Ford for the first time here, and he helps make this one of John Gilbert's best pre-MGM features. Cameo Kirby (John Gilbert), once a man of high social standing, has become a professional gambler and works the Mississippi riverboats of the 1800's. An old man (William E. Lawrence) is being cheated in a crooked card game, and Kirby gets involved in the play, with the intention of giving the man his money back. Unaware of Kirby's plans, the old man commits suicide. It turns out that Kirby's sweetheart (Gertrude Olmstead) is the man's daughter. But in spite of the tragedy, she comes to understand Kirby's altruistic motives. Based on a story by Booth Tarkington, the melodrama is offset by solid performances and an exciting paddle-wheeler river race (a bit of action that one would expect from John Ford). An 18-year-old Jean Arthur made her movie debut in this film as a bit player. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

In Dead Reckoning, Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart) recites the film's plotline to a priest in the confessional. Murdock and Johnny Drake (William Prince) are Congressional Medal of Honor recipients, en route to Washington by train. Drake hops off and disappears, leading Murdock on a hectic manhunt. Upon meeting Drake's former girlfriend Coral Chandler (Lizabeth Scott), Murdock is thrown into a maelstrom of intrigue involving a crooked gambler (Morris Carnovsky) and a complex blackmailing scheme. The upshot of this is that Murdock finds himself the prime suspect in a murder. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Buck Jones both produced and starred in this offbeat Western also featuring silent screen icon Louise Brooks. Hoping to turn it into a profitable dude ranch, drifter Buck Devlin (Buck Jones) purchases the Ranch of Empty Saddles, the former site of a bloody war between cattle ranchers and sheep men. Buck cleans up the place with the help of peddler Swap Boone (Harvey Clark) and his daughter Boots (Brooks), and the ranch is soon teeming with Eastern tourists. As an added treat for the guests, the ranch hands stage a mock recreation of the old feud, which turns deadly serious when someone responds with real bullets. Future B-Western sidekick Frank Yaconelli, appearing unbilled, and a band of cowboys perform "Welcome to the Empty Saddle Ranch" and "Orchid of the Prairie". ~ Hans J. Wollstein, 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

Even though her marriage to Charles Chaplin was history, Mildred Harris retained star status for a little while longer. In this drama, she plays a spoiled young girl, something the public may have seen as typecasting (even if it wasn't necessarily true in real life). Irene (Harris) is the daughter of wealthy Richard Fletcher (Emmet C. King). Fletcher doesn't let on that he's having financial trouble, and continues to spend scads of money to make her happy. She has two suitors -- one is John Marshall, a struggling young architect (William Lawrence) and the other is Charles Munson (Walter McGrail), a rich clothing designer (this gave the filmmakers a chance to show off the latest extravagant fashions -- a box office plus in the 1920s). Both young men propose. Before Irene can choose one, she gets in a fierce argument with her father and falls down a flight of stairs. While unconscious, she dreams that Munson offers to bail her father out of his financial bind, providing that he gets Irene to marry him. She has already secretly married Marshall, so Munson takes back his offer, and Fletcher shoots himself. When she comes to, Irene decides to stop being so selfish, and chooses Marshall as her husband. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

A "B" picture with "A" ambitions, Hell Bound stars Leo Carrillo as ruthless but basically decent racketeer Nick Cotrelli. Worried that singer Platinum Reed (Lola Lane) may know too much about his crooked operation, Cotrelli marries the girl so that she can't testify against him in court. Believing that Cotrelli isn't interested in her, Platinum falls in love with Robert Sanford (Lloyd Hughes), the young doctor who nursed her through a serious illness. At first inclined to bump off both his wife and her lover, Cotrelli thinks the better of it and in the end sacrifices his own life to insure Platinum's future happiness. Singer Russ Columbo is credited with writing the film's signature tune "Is It Love?" but did not appear in the film, as has sometimes been reported. ~ 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

In this "East Side Kids" escapade (the eighth in the series), the gang, led by Muggs McGinniss (Leo Gorcey), help a man load a barrel on a truck. Little do they know that the man is a crook; accused of trying to steal the truck, they are immediately and without due process sent to reform school. Meanwhile, a gang members' brother is framed for murder and sentenced to death (justice is dispensed with remarkable swiftness on the East Side). The imprisoned gang watch a newsreel which features the man whom they'd helped load the truck. The man was filmed picking up a lottery prize for the his boss, a supposedly dead gangster who committed the murder for which the boy mentioned a few sentences back was framed. With the flimsiest of evidence, Muggs and his boys figure that the barrel loaded on the truck contained the murderous gangster. They escape from reform school (almost as easily as they'd gotten in), track down the gangster's henchman, extract a confession and save the condemned boy at the last minute. Insanely illogical, Mr. Wise Guy is lifted ever so slightly from mediocrity by the supporting performance of Billy Gilbert as the gangster's stooge. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

When he's shipped off to prison on a tax-evasion charge, millionaire Van Dyke (Walter Connolly) breathes a sigh of relief: at least he'll be free of his dizzy, spendthrift wife (Billie Burke) and spoiled-rotten daughter Carol (Joan Bennett). Once behind bars, Van Dyke strikes up a friendship with amiable reformed bootlegger Ricardi (George Raft). Since Ricardi is to be sprung first, Van Dyke suggests that the ex-crook take on the task of "taming" the incorrigible Carol. Unwilling to be stifled by a former jailbird (even a good-looking one), Carol decides to get even by persuading one of Ricardi's former cohorts, a shady character named Tex (Lloyd Nolan) to stage a fake kidnapping. Trouble is, Tex kidnaps the girl for real, obliging Ricardi to race to her rescue -- but only after deliberately breaking every traffic law known to man, so that he'll be pursued by a veritable battalion of motorcycle cops (this hilarious finale was later re-used in the 1941 Buster Keaton two-reeler So You Won't Squawk). A heady blend of screwball comedy and crime melodrama, She Couldn't Take It is one of the fastest and funniest films of 1935. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Sudden Bill Dorn gets under way when a prospector strikes gold. Within what seems to be minutes, the entire population of a nearby town packs its mining equipment and race off to the lucky strike. One of the few speculators keeping his wits about him is the eponymous hero, played by Buck Jones. That's because he already has his hands full contending with heroine Lorna Kent (Noel Francis), fetching senorita Diana (Evelyn Brent), and black-hearted villain Mike Bundy (Harold Hodge). By the time Universal's Sudden Bill Dorn was released in early January of 1938, Buck Jones had already left the studio and pitched camp at Columbia. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Filmed in a fast five days, The Battle of the Sexes was D. W. Griffith's first production after breaking loose from his Biograph contract. Adapted from Daniel Carson Goodman's play The Single Standard, the film stars Lillian Gish as a proper young lady who is shocked by her father's infidelities. Going to the other woman's apartment for a showdown, Gish is confronted by the woman's partner in crime, a slick confidence man. The father realizes the trouble he's caused by his extramarital affairs when Gish falls in love with the crook. A more lighthearted version of Battle of the Sexes, also directed by Griffith, was filmed in 1928. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide