Spottiswood Aitken Movies

Jesse J. Goldburg's low-budget Independent Pictures offered its customers more than Bill Cody or Bob Custer B-Westerns, including dreadful melodramas such as Accused. Although reared by Cyrus Braidwood (Eric Mayne) as his own daughter, young Helen (Dorothy Drew) is actually the offspring of a murderer, Lait Rodman (Charles Gerrard), whose written confession is kept under lock by Braidwood. Rodman manages to retrieve the confession and Helen goes to his apartment looking for it. Once there, she meets young Steve Randall, and through a series of misunderstandings, they both end up as prisoners of a gang of crooks. This unfocused melodrama was directed by former slapstick comic Dell Henderson, whose directorial career never rose above low-budget action fare. Also trapped in the film were former luminaries Du Pont, once the most foolish of Erich Von Stroheim's Foolish Wives (1922), and the distinguished Biograph actor Spottiswoode Aitken. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

One might be inclined to dismiss the title of this film as a contradiction in terms -- but with Lillian Gish in the lead, how could the heroine be anything else but innocent? Based on a story by D.W. Griffith, writing pseudonymously as "Granville Warwick," the story concerns a Kentucky belle named Dorothy Raleigh (Gish), who impulsively marries big-city gambler Forbes Stewart (Sam De Grasse). As a result, Dorothy's grim, taciturn father Colonel Raleigh (Spottiswood Aitken) declares that, so far as he is concerned, his daughter is dead. Inexplicably abandoned by Stewart, the pregnant Dorothy returns home, only to be denied entrance by her unforgiving father. The girl moves to the "colored" section of town, where she gives birth to her baby. Compounding Dorothy's woes is the sudden appearance of Stewart's current mistress (Mary Alden), who claims that she has married Stewart. Disconsolately, Dorothy prepares to take her own life, when Stewart returns, explaining that he has been detained by a trumped-up prison term, and begging his wife's forgiveness. Lillian Gish seldom mentioned An Innocent Magdalene in later years, preferring instead to discuss the concurrently produced Griffith production Intolerance, in which she played a much smaller but far more memorable role. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This dramatic adventure finds the flirtatious Cherry O'Day (Betty Compson) as the daughter of the Shanghai saloon keeper Terrence (Spottiswood Aitken). She works in the dive and entertains the patrons, sending them away after they cease to amuse her. Cherry falls for Gordon Deane (Milton Sills), the American writer and adventurer who barely notices her. When her father dies, she marries banker William Blaine (Joseph Kilgore). MacGregor (Mitchell Lewis) is the unrefined sailor who vows to return from a year at sea to marry the disinterested Cherry. The marriage crumbles, and Cherry is shipwrecked on an island with a lighthouse where she meets Gordon, MacGregor, and a financially ruined young man. The young man and MacGregor engage in a fierce battle over Cherry on the deck of the lighthouse high above the jagged rocks below. She watches in horror as the rail breaks and both men fall to their deaths. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

This comic tale of buried treasure should have been a winner, but it turned out to be one on Mary Pickford's misses. The credits were solid -- the prestigious William Desmond Taylor directed, and Frances Marion wrote the scenario from a Rida Johnson Young play. The other leading players (Douglas MacLean and Spottiswood Aitken) were impressive, too. Perhaps Taylor was too serious to direct this story, which borderlined on slapstick. Neither of the other films he and Mary made together (How Could You, Jean? and Johanna Enlists) were any good, either. After this film, Pickford began a new contract at a new studio and worked once again with her then-favorite director Marshall Neilan on the far more appealing Daddy Long Legs. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

This seafaring melodrama was based on the Harkins and Barber stage play by the same name. His ship capsized in a storm, Captain John Ferguson, his wife, Mary (Anna Q. Nilsson), and their little boy are picked up by a pirate ship manned by the brutal Butch Anderson (Jack Richardson). Anderson thrashes Ferguson, blinding him, and then sets him and his son adrift, keeping Mary on board. Mary commits suicide rather than submit to Anderson. Ferguson's son, Colin (John Harron), grows up and joins the coast fire patrol. He is in love with Molly Thatcher (Madge Bellamy), but Molly's scheming sister, Emma (Helen Jerome Eddy), wants him for herself. Emma seduces Colin just as a fire at sea is breaking out, and because he misses the call, he is disgraced. One of the men rescued is Anderson, and he goes after Molly. Captain Ferguson (played as an old man by Spottiswood Aitken) is able to mete out punishment to his old adversary, and when Emma is shot, Colin and Molly are able to reunite. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

A sturdy, reliable cast distinguishes the so-so outdoor drama God's Great Wilderness. The main character is a nasty backwoods general-store owner, who browbeats his wife and son into cowering submission and regularly cheats his customers. In contrast, a rival store owner has the milk of human kindness flowing through his veins. Tragedy strikes both storekeepers, leaving both men alone and destitute. But while the nastier of the two is left with nothing to show for his life, the kindly owner is showered with sympathy and charity. The best performance was rendered by John Ford "regular" Russell Simpson as the nominal villain. God's Great Wilderness was a rare screenwriting effort from former D. W. Griffith stock-company player Spottiswood Aiken. ~ 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

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 screen's first Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln (née Otto Linkenhelter), both directed and starred in this obscure poverty row Western about a spoiled Easterner who, after being hit over the head, finds himself stranded in a rough border town. Despite wearing evening clothes, our hero finds his manhood by rescuing a damsel in distress (Millicent Fisher) from a gang of Mexican kidnappers. Not a natural screen actor (to put it mildly), the barrel-chested Lincoln left films in 1926, returning to play a few bit parts 20 years later. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

aka The Count of Monte Cristo Much of John Gilbert's early work as a leading man was done at the Fox Studios. He made nineteen pictures for the company, but only two are still in existence -- this adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel, and 1923's Cameo Kirby. As Edmond Danton, and later as the Count of Monte Cristo, Gilbert at times seems too mannered -- a habit that he would have to watch throughout his career. Danton is dragged away from his wedding feast with Countess Mercedes (Estelle Taylor) and falsely imprisoned in the Chateau d'If. He swears to wreak vengeance on those who wronged him, if he ever escapes. Eventually he is able to dig his way out, and with another prisoner, he goes to the island of Monte Cristo, where he finds an immense treasure. He returns home as the Count of Monte Cristo and, as he promised, proceeds to destroy all his enemies. Featured in a supporting role is Renee Adorée, who would star with Gilbert in several of his pictures, most notably The Big Parade. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

As a cheap programmer, this romantic mystery had little to recommend it. Star Herbert Rawlinson overacts as John D. Curtis, who mistakenly picks up an overcoat belonging to someone else. In its pocket he finds a marriage license and tracks down the girl, Hermoine Fane (Lillian Rich), whose name is on it. She explains that she had asked the overcoat's owner, Jean de Curtois (Jean De Briac), to wed her so that she could escape a marriage to Count de Mauriat, which was arranged by her father (Sidney De Grey). She needs to marry someone so that she can inherit a fortune, so Curtis quickly weds her. De Curtois was the victim of an assault, and Curtis tracks down the culprits. They just happen to be associated with the count, who turns out to be a phony. Hermoine's father acknowledges his mistake, and since his daughter and Curtis have fallen in love, he gives them his blessing. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Miles and miles of stock "tenement fire" footage are expended in this inexpensive actioner. Alice Lake stars as a wealthy socialite who turns reformer, aiming her attacks at the city's slum landlords. The more egregious of these crooks turns out to be Lake's own father (Lionel Belmore), who steadfastly refuses to fireproof the tenements within his jurisdiction. Against this backdrop, a romantic subplot is played out involving the heroine and courageous fireman Roy Stewart. Sure enough, Stewart is called upon to rescue both Lake and her larcenous father when they're trapped in an outsized blaze (again courtesy of stock shots from earlier films). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide