George Siegmann Movies

Story has it that Douglas Fairbanks was approached for the role of the Yankee, Martin Cavendish. It certainly would have made interesting casting, but Harry Myers (who, a decade later, would appear as Charles Chaplin's rich, boozy friend in City Lights) does a fine job in the part. This spectacular production was a big release for the Fox studios in 1921. Wealthy Martin Cavendish is in love with Sandy, his mother's secretary (Pauline Starke). His mother (Adele Farrington), however, wants him to marry Lady Grey Gordon (Rosemary Theby). One night, a burglar breaks into the mansion and attacks Cavendish with a spear belonging to a suit of armor. Cavendish is knocked unconscious and he wakes up in a dream where he is being poked by a knight, Sir Sagramore (George Siegmann). Sagramore takes Cavendish to King Arthur's court, where he saves himself from being tortured to death by claiming a solar eclipse was his doing. Cavendish is made a knight with the title Sir Boss, and he brings the modern-day luxuries of 1921 to medieval times, including tin lizzies, plumbing, and telephones. He rescues Lady Alisande la Cartelone (Starke) from the wicked Queen Morgan Le Fay (Theby). When he goes to battle Sir Sagramore at a tournament, he shows up dressed as a cowboy and lassos him off his horse. Then he has the king (Charles Clary) dress as a peasant to make him understand that "all this nobility stuff is bunk." When Cavendish finally awakens from his dream, he goes to Sandy and they elope. Mark Twain's famous tale has been filmed numerous times; other notable Yankees have been Will Rogers and Bing Crosby. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

In this silent drama based on the play by Eugene O'Neill, Blanche Sweet plays Anna Christie, a young woman whose father Chris (George F. Marion) is a sailor and knows enough of the life of seafaring men to be certain that he doesn't want his daughter to become involved with one. Hoping to guide her to a better life, Chris sends Anna to live with relatives in Minnesota. However, she's treated cruelly there and runs away to Chicago, where she earns a living as a streetwalker. In time, she returns to the harbor town of her birth and winds up falling in love with a sailor, Matt (William Russell). Anna finds it difficult to hide her shameful past from her father and the man she loves, and eventually she is forced to confess to them both. Anna Christie was remade in 1930 in a version that gained instant fame as Greta Garbo's first talking picture. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Another entry in Paramount's long-running "Zane Grey" series, Born to the West represented the first directorial effort of John Waters. The story concerns the lifelong rivalry between two men over the love of one woman. Most of the action takes place in Nevada during the Gold Rush, where trail boss "Colorado" Dale Rudd (Jack Holt) again confronts his longtime rival Bate Fillmore (Bruce Gordon), who has drifted to the opposite side of the law. Fillmore's father Jesse (George Siegmann) runs all illegal activities in the territory, meaning that Rudd is going to have a hard time rescuing his sweetheart Nell Worstall (Margaret Morris) from this dangerous environment. Born to the West was remade in 1937, with John Wayne and Johnny Mack Brown as Rudd and Fillmore -- whose good guy/bad guy roles were reversed for the occasion. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Based on a serialized novel by Courtney Riley Cooper, Christmas Eve at Pilot Butte, this sentimental silent Western was one of 26 collaborations between director John Ford (still known as "Jack Ford") and veteran stage actor Harry Carey. Drifter Bart Carson (Carey) becomes so infatuated with the beautiful but treacherous Lady Lou (Barbara La Marr) that he is easily persuaded to assume responsibility for a crime actually committed by the lady's brother, Walker (Edward Coxen). In prison, Bart learns that Walker is not Lady Lou's brother at all, but her lover. Escaping from prison on Christmas Eve, a furious Carson heads straight to Walker's home -- only to find the man's wife (Lillian Rich) and teenage son (Georgie Stone, later George E. Stone) alone and abandoned. Taking pity on the woman, Bart gives himself up to the sheriff so she may claim the reward. Happily, Lady Lou has confessed her perfidy, and Bart is once again a free man. Shortly after making Desperate Trails, Ford and Carey had a falling out, and the director transferred to the Hoot Gibson unit. Ford, however, never forgot the veteran star, and Three Godfathers (1948), which co-starred Harry Carey, Jr., was dedicated to his memory. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

This crime thriller, "suggested by" the story by Hugh McNain Kahler, benefited from the fine directorial hand of Marshall Neilan. Tommy Frazer (Richard Dix) is one of a gang of crooks lead by "Tony the Wop" (Raymond Griffith). Frazer gets caught and is sent up the river for three years on a forgery rap. When he gets out of prison, he finds his girl, Ann Whittaker (Claire Windsor), waiting for him -- and she's got a scheme. She is working in a bank and wants to pull an inside heist. She and Frazer spend a year plotting out the robbery, which is successful. But Frazer has guilt pangs over what he has done and resolves to return the loot. On his way back with the box of money, he encounters his old gang, who steals it from him. Frazer and Ann go to the bank president, Denton Drew (Claude Gillingwater), and confess. But Drew reveals that he knew about their scheme, and the box held only plain paper. He forgives the wayward lovers, who decide to go straight. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Even though this Western used the convenient "dream" premise, it still managed to please audiences. Cowboy Tod Musgrave (Charles Jones, who hadn't yet added "Buck" to his stage name) and his pal Del Hawkins (Maurice Flynn) steal a ride on a train after being kicked out of a saloon. The conductor (George Siegmann) throws them off when he discovers they have no tickets, and the two men swear revenge. While waiting on a station bench for the train to return, Musgrave and Hawkins both fall asleep. The train arrives and Musgrave and Hawkins board it. As Musgrave is giving the conductor a sound thrashing, Hawkins robs the train. When Musgrave protests, Hawkins knocks him unconscious and plants some of the money on him. As a result, Musgrave is arrested as the thief and sentenced to prison. He proves to be a model inmate, helping to quell a riot, which earns him the admiration of Dorothy Owen, who is friends with the warden's daughter (Ruth Clifford). Through reading a newspaper, Musgrave finds out that Hawkins has bought a ranch and is engaged to Dorothy. He escapes from prison to warn Dorothy of Hawkins' true nature. She goes with him to a mountain cabin and Hawkins follows. The three of them are then buried in an avalanche. Hawkins confesses, and when the sheriff (Charles K. French) digs them out, Musgrave makes him go to prison in his place. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Based on a Hungarian play by Lajos Biro, Hotel Imperial stars Pola Negri as a chambermaid in a small Gallacian hotel. When World War I erupts, the town in which Pola lives is alternately occupied by both the Russians and the Austrians. As the film's various intrigues play themselves out, we learn that Pola is actually an aristocrat, posing as a maid to find her sister's murderer, which she does with the help of handsome Austrian officer James Hall. Hotel Imperial represented the last directorial effort of Mauritz Stiller, who returned to Sweden after being rejected by the love of his life, Greta Garbo. This, coupled with the death of Pola Negri's ex-lover Rudolph Valentino during production of Hotel Imperial, earned the film a reputation as a "jinx." The curse evidently carried over to the 1939 talkie version, which had an even more benighted production history. ~ 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

People do all kinds of nutty things in this silent melodrama from producer/director Maurice Tourneur. Take Ramon Martinez (Earle Williams) for example: When Ramon's wife Alice (Jane Novak) is accused of adultery, the jealous husband simply hands over their young son Bobbie (Ben Alexander) to a band of gypsies -- to spite the presumably faithless wife, who was actually only trying to protect Ramon's sister Carmen (Carmelita Geraghty), a victim of blackmailer Harvey Clegg (Carl Miller). Ramon and Alice separate, and Carmen perishes in a shipwreck. Bobbie, now known as "Spuds," takes matters into his own hands, however, and successfully proves his mother's innocence, paving the way for forgiveness. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Starring veteran leading man House Peters, this Raoul Walsh-directed silent melodrama was filmed on location in Tahiti. Peters played Captain Blackbird, who, on the island of Pago Pago meets lovely Lorna (Pauline Starke), a white girl promised by an evil trader, Faulke (eorge Siegmann), to Chief Waki (Carl Harbaugh). Although the frightened girl and her handsome lover Lloyd Warren (Antonio Moreno), beg the captain for his help, Blackbird refuses. That is, until a chance meeting with Faulke discloses that Lorna is actually his daughter. This muddled melodrama marked the screen debut of future MGM star William Haines. The always wisecracking Haines, who appeared unbilled in Lost and Found), had little good to say about the film's leading man, often referring to the British-born star as "Outhouse" Peters. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

With this comedy-melodrama, Richard Dix was bumped up from leading man to star status. This also marked the first film for director R.H. Burnside, who was better known for staging spectacles at New York's Hippodrome. Peter Minuit (Dix) comes from an old and very rich New York family, but he is bored with his idle life. He finds excitement when safecracker Spike Malone (Gregory Kelly) breaks into his Fifth Avenue home. Minuit convinces Spike that he is really another crook by the name of Gentleman George. Spike takes him home to his pretty sister, Mary (Jacqueline Logan), and she falls in love with him. Gang leader Bud McGinnis (the imposing George Siegmann) wants Mary for himself and makes plans to do away with the interloper. There is a brutal fight between Minuit and McGinnis, but ultimately McGinnis is shot by one of his own henchmen. The gang is rounded up and Minuit weds Mary and takes her uptown to live. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Imported from the USSR to direct the vehicles of silent-screen diva Pola Negri, Dmitri Buchowetzki eventually found himself working with such lesser (but in fact more popular) stars as Laura LaPlante. Set in pre-revolutionary Russia, the story gets under way when both the Grand Duke Sergius (Pat O'Malley) and banker Ivan Kusmin (George Siegmann) falls in love with American-born ballerina Olga Balashova (Laura LaPlante). For her part, Olga has eyes only for handsome young military cadet Alexei Oroloff (Raymond Keane). When the Grand Duke is found in an innocent but compromising situation with Olga, the infuriated Alexei strikes the man down -- whereupon he is arrested and sentenced to be executed. Desperately, Olga goes to Kusmin, begging him to use his influence to save Alexei. Instead, Kusmin lures Olga aboard his yacht, intending to seduce her. She is saved from that famous Fate Worse Than Death by the Grand Duke himself, who proves that he's a regular guy by rescuing Alexei from the firing squad in the nick of time. Based on a novel by Lauridas Brunn, The Midnight Sun was originally released as a "road-show" attraction, complete with reserved seating and an intermission. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide