Mae Marsh Movies

With her Hollywood career in the doldrums, actress Mae Marsh briefly set up shop in England, where she appeared in several intriguing productions. In Flames of Passion, Mae plays a married woman who falls in love with her chauffeur. When her lover accidentally kills her child, Mae refuses to betray the man to the police. Only under intensive cross-examination by lawyer C. Aubrey Smith does Marsh break down and tell the truth. Flames of Passion was one of many felicitous collaborations between producer Herbert Wilcox and director Graham Cutts. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Given the title, the star -- the delightful Mae Marsh -- and the fact that one of her co-stars is a dog, there's not much else that needs to be said about this too-cute picture. But for what it's worth, here's the story: Cecelia Carne (Marsh) moves into a small cabin in the woods with her beloved bulldog and keeps to herself as much as possible. But one day she meets Saxon Graves (Charles Meredith), a neighbor's brother, and he finds out she is an artist. Judge Carteret (Herbert Prior), her landlord, asks her to decorate his home and through this job, she hears that he is working on a case involving the mysterious Giron (Tully Marshall). Giron, it turns out, is her father, a devious character from whom she has been hiding. He shows up but eventually he shoots himself and Cecelia is able to relax and have a romance with Graves. This picture was adapted from the novel, The Girl Who Lived in the Woods, by Marjorie Benton Cooke. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

When factory worker Susan Sweeney (Mae Marsh) receives word that she has inherited half interest in a country hotel, she immediately heads out to see it. Unfortunately it's a run-down place located next door to a sleazy saloon, run by the other half-owner, William Kibby (Jack Dillon). But Susan is determined to turn the place around, and she does, closing down the saloon along the way. Austin Strong (Jere Austin), the attorney who handled the estate, has a sister, Miriam (Hazel Alden), who runs off with Dick Wellman (Arthur Houseman). A rainstorm forces them to spend the night at Susan's hotel and when she finds the page with their registration has been torn from the book, she believes it has been taken by Sam Tupper (John Sainpolis), who is trying to discredit Strong. Susan goes to Tupper's home with Wellman, and in the struggle between the two men, Tupper shoots himself. In order to save Miriam's reputation, Susan takes him back to the hotel, which compromises her instead. But Strong figures out the ruse, and decides that Susan is "all woman." The cameraman on this picture was Oliver T. Marsh, the brother of its star, Mae Marsh. ~ 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

In this silent tragedy a bright, creative young woman from the slums gets into considerable mischief and lands in jail. While languishing there, the girl begins to write down her thoughts and observations. She then sends them to the warden who recognizing her talent, helps get her hired onto the local newspaper. When he succeeds, he and a reporter rush down to her cell to tell her the great news. Unfortunately, they are too late for she has committed suicide. ~ Sandra Brennan, 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

One year before her "great leap" off a mountaintop in Birth of a Nation, Mae Marsh was cast as the leading lady of The Great Leap. Marsh and Bobby Harron play a pair of young lovers, whose families are engaged in a long-standing feud. Despite the admonishments of their parents, the two continue to meet clandestinely. Through their example, the warring families eventually realize the futility of their bloody behavior. Also featuring Ralph Lewis, Raoul Walsh and Donald Crisp, The Great Leap was designed to keep D. W. Griffith's stock company busy while Griffith was occupied with other projects. ~ 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

Conservative Biograph Studios, having galloped to prominence on the coattails of their star director D.W. Griffith, refused to allow Griffith to make any film longer than two reels. Ignoring this edict, Griffith permitted his Biblical epic Judith of Bethulia to stretch to four reels; Biograph's reprimands were so blistering that the director quit the studio, setting up his own independent operation. While of great historical value, Judith of Bethulia is, truth to tell, not one of Griffith's best efforts. Among other things, the film is hampered by uninteresting exterior locations and a storyline that switched dramatic gears far too often. The basic story of young widow Judith (Blanche Sweet) offering herself to Assyrian leader Holofernes (Henry B. Walthall) in order to kill the man and thus avenge the subjugation and slaughter of her countrymen was strong enough on its own to carry the day. It was hardly necessary for Griffith to concoct a last-minute-rescue subplot involving Bethulian warrior Robert Harron and damsel in distress Mae Marsh. Historians have suggested that Griffith, impressed by the recently released Italian spectacular Quo Vadis, may have conceived Judith as an American "answer" to that film--an ill-advised decision, since the plotlines of the two properties bear precious little resemblance to each other. Still, it is fascinating to watch Griffith experiment with many of the story elements and techniques that he'd later hone to perfection in such films as Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916) and Orphans of the Storm (1916); it's also an enjoyable film-buff exercise to spot such Griffith regulars as Lillian and Dorothy Gish and Harry Carey in minor roles. Biograph--whose fortunes diminished after Griffith's departure--reissued Judith of Bethulia in 1917 in an expanded version titled Her Condoned Sin, using outtakes that Griffith had wisely jettisoned back in 1914. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide