Bessie Love Movies

Wilfred Lucas plays a distinguished banker, falsely accused of murder. Though acquitted in court, Lucas' reputation is destroyed, and he force from his job. Like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, Lucas decides that he's worth more dead than alive; thus, he plans to kill himself so his family can collect his life insurance. Also like George Bailey, he is saved from this fate at the very last minute. With only one reel left, everyone puts in overtime to rush through a happy ending. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Several westerns of the '20s centered around a foppish Easterner toughening up in a Western atmosphere, a role made popular by Douglas Fairbanks in the previous decade. George Larkin -- no Fairbanks by any stretch of the imagination -- portrays the Easterner in this inexpensive version of the tale. Shipped off to the West by his uncle, Larkin encounters the villain (Frank Whitson) who years ago had beaten the uncle. With an inducement in the amount of $50,00, Larkin, who has toughened up in the wild and woolly West, gives the bully a solid beating and wins the admiration of the tough ranch hands. Suffering one of her many career setbacks, top-billed Bessie Love has little to do as the obligatory romantic interest. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Based on a novel by Louis L'Amour, this comedic western tells of a thieving man who tries to get his hands on two million dollars of government cash while trying to avoid his friend--who happens to be a lawman. ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide

This sequel to the 1960 Village of The Damned falls short of the original well-made Sci-Fi shocker. The pretentious attempt to give the film a moral message severely weakens the plot and serves to confuse the fans of the previous film. Beautiful, strange children with genius IQ's, destructive dispositions, and ray-gun eyes, who were invaders bent on overtaking the earth in the former tale, are now a sample of mankind's future sent to the earth for the purpose of being destroyed in order to teach the present-day warlike man a lesson of some sort. Plagued with a tedious and unimaginative plot. ~ Lucinda Ramsey, All Movie Guide

This Western romance was adapted from Bret Harte's novel, The Judgment of Bolinas Plains, which had been made into a stage play prior to its translation to film. It's the story of Sue Prescott (Bessie Love), who is accompanying her parents to the gold fields. When her mother dies, her father (George A. Williams) marries her off to rancher Ira Beasley (John Gilbert). It is a marriage of complete indifference; neither Ira nor Sue have any passion towards the other. Sue, however, meets acrobat Jim Wynd (J. Frank Glendon) when the circus comes through town, and he gets her blood pumping. Jim shoots a man in a brawl, and while hiding in Ira's barn, he convinces Sue to run away with him. On the night they are to take off, the sheriff (George Kunkle) happens on the couple in the barn and is shot by Jim. Jim is put on trial, convicted and sent away to hang. Thus ends Sue's one true romance. It is ironic to note that John Gilbert, the struggling young actor who played unromantic dullard Ira Beasley became a superstar heartthrob in the latter half of the twenties! ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Despite his accomplishments as an actor, Donald Crisp's talents as a director were slight at best. What makes Crisp's Dress Parade work are the engaging star performances of William Boyd and Bessie Love. Filmed on location at West Point, the story concerns a brash young cadet (Boyd) who is humanized via his love of the commanding officer's daughter (Love). Naturally, our hero has to be thoroughly disgraced at one point in the proceedings, the better to set the stage for a spectacular redemption. Cliched though it may be, Dress Parade had the advantage of a surface authenticity; besides, Bessie Love is so gosh-darned cute. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Although this drama tugged a little too insistently at the heartstrings, Billie Dove -- still a fresh star -- stands out as the crippled young orphan girl. She is left in an asylum by her mother (Irene Hunt), who can't afford to keep her. As the years pass, the girl forms a friendship with another orphan, a boy (Gareth Hughes), which grows into love as they become teens. By then, the mother is living a life of luxury (just how this happens is never explained), and she returns to the asylum. But she doesn't recognize her own daughter, so she adopts the boy instead. Later, the girl is taken in by an old street musician (Otto Lederer), who teaches her how to play the violin. One day she is hired to play a wedding, which turns out to be the wedding of her former sweetheart from the asylum. The girl eventually becomes a concert violinist and the boy, whose wife (Myrtle Lind) has died, finds her once again. Not only are the couple reunited, but the girl finds out the identity of her mother and is reunited with her, too. This picture was efficiently directed by W.S. Van Dyke -- he was still pretty new to the craft, but he would one day earn the nickname "One-Take Woody" for his speed in shooting films. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Sinclair Lewis wrote the story to this heartwarming drama. Don Dorgan (George Nichols) has been patrolling his beat in a rough section of town for the past 30 years and has managed to keep the peace through friendship and understanding. One young neighborhood tough, Terry Rafferty (Ralph Graves), has fallen in love with Effie Kugler (Bessie Love), the daughter of a deli owner, Rudolph (George B. Williams). But Rudolph Kugler does not approve of the young man in spite of his efforts to straighten up. In his depression over the father's snubbing, Rafferty gets into a drunken brawl with the district's political boss and is sent to prison for two years. Meanwhile, Manning, a new police commissioner (Melbourne MacDowell), is hired, and he decides it's time to retire Dorgan. Since the new cop favors using his club instead of compassion, Dorgan decides to put on his uniform once again and patrol his beat -- at least when the new cop isn't looking. Rafferty gets out of prison but is almost immediately assaulted by a gang leader. Dorgan takes him under his wing and sends for Effie. The couple are reunited in spite of her father's protests. Manning finds out about Dorgan's "ghost patrol," but instead of upbraiding him, he promotes him to captain. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

The DeSylva-Brown-Henderson Broadway musical Good News was first brought to the screen by MGM in 1930. The scene is Tait College, where everyone is in a blue funk over the dilemma of gridiron star Tom (Stanley Smith). Since the only thing he's ever passed is a football, Tom is in danger of flunking out before the Big Game. Plain-looking Connie (Mary Lawlor) is enlisted to tutor Tom through his final exams, and in the process the two students fall in love -- much to the dismay of campus vamp Patricia (Lola Lane). Managing to finagle a marriage proposal out of Tom, it looks as though Patricia will emerge triumphant, but all is set aright during the lavish Technicolor finale. Good News is an instructive example of how Hollywood perceived the movie musical during this period: While much of the film is shot in the static, nailed-down-camera technique so common to early talkies, several isolated sequences -- most of them featuring comedy-relief characters Bessie Love and Gus Shy -- are cleverly and inventively photographed (as Love shoots dice with the football team, the camera records her reactions from the dice's point of view!) Many of the original play's songs are retained in the film, including the title number, "The Best Things in Life are Free" and the lively "Varsity Drag," performed con brio by soubrette Dorothy McNulty (later known as Penny Singleton) and including such esoterica as animated wall paintings and a superimposed thermometer which boils over as the dancing gets "hotter. Future writer-director Delmer Daves has a good supporting role as surly campus jock "Beef." Existing prints of Good News are minus the final Technicolor reel, but Turner Films has provided a videotaped synopsis, complete with production stills, for television showings. Good News was remade -- and vastly improved upon -- by MGM producer Arthur Freed in 1947. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A Harp in Hock proved to be a felicitous reteaming of veteran Austrian stage star Rudolph Schildkraut and juvenile favorite Junior Coghlan, who'd previously co-starred in The Country Doctor. Upon arriving in New York, Irish lad Coghlan discovers that his mother has just died. Coghlan is unofficially adopted by May Robson, his mom's tenement neighbor, but when the feisty orphan takes a poke at Robson's bullying son, he is turned over to the cops. Likeable Jewish pawnbroker Schildkraut assumes custody of Coghlan during the boy's probation, but after a second confrontation with Robson's son, the kid is shipped off to an orphanage. Escaping, Coghlan makes a beeline to Schildkraut's hockshop, where in a tearful conclusion the old man decides to permanently adopt the boy. In recalling A Harp in Hock in his autobiography, Frank "Junior" Coghlan noted that director Renaud Hoffman insisted that the young actor speak in an Irish brogue while on the set -- even though the film was silent! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Dorothy Davenport billed herself by her private name, Mrs. Wallace Reid, for this melodrama about drug addiction. She was making a powerful point by doing so because her husband, film star Wallace Reid, had died at the beginning of 1923 as a result of his morphine habit. An exploitative bit of propaganda, Human Wreckage was nevertheless well made -- Davenport was supported by a solid cast that included James Kirkwood, Bessie Love, and Robert McKim, and the screenplay was written by C. Gardner Sullivan. Jimmy Browne, a junkie (George Hackathorne), is arrested after robbing a pawnshop, and his friend Mary Finnegan (Love) approaches Ethel MacFarland (Davenport) about the dilemma. Ethel's husband Alan (Kirkwood) is a lawyer of note, and he gets Browne released to a sanitarium to be cured. MacFarland is overworked, and his doctor (McKim) prescribes narcotics. Soon he is hooked, adverselt affecting his life and his work -- he even makes sure that Steve Stone (Harry Northrup), the head of the drug ring, gets acquitted of charges. Eventually he begs his wife to take him away so that he can kick his habit., but he is only able to quit for good when he believes that Ethel herself is succumbing to the lure of drugs. Now cured, he heads a campaign to wipe out drugs. Stone tries to escape, but Browne, who is driving him away, runs the car into a train, killing them both. This picture was made in the wake of several notorious Hollywood scandals -- Reid's drug addiction being only one -- and was a weak attempt to convince Middle America that the film capital was willing to clean up its act. ~ 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