Mary Alden Movies

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

According to this film, Man's Prerogative would seem to be to cheat upon his sweetheart whenever and wherever he pleases. This, at least, is the philosophy of one Oliver Rand (Robert Edeson). Though promised in marriage to Elizabeth Town (Mary Alden, Oliver dallies with a pretty artist's model (Billie West). But when Elizabeth decides to play the field herself, she is branded as a brazen hussy -- the Double Standard at work again. The producers of A Man's Prerogative made their point early in the film, then proceeded to beat it to death. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This race-themed melodrama is the first two-reeler directed by Tod Browning. Indians kill homesteader Bob West (Otto Lincoln) and capture his little daughter Ida. They sell her to a slave trader named Morgan, who uses her in place of a dead mulatto slave child and sells her to a kindly couple. When Fred Gilbert (W.E. Lawrence), the couple's nephew, visits them a dozen years later, he falls in love with Ida (Teddy Sampson) -- much to the consternation of his aunt and uncle, who believe the girl to be of mixed race. Morgan's mulatto slave Sally (Mary Alden) gives the family a letter written by Bob West shortly before his death, and a fingerprint on the document reveals that Ida is indeed West's daughter and is Caucasian. Morgan is killed by a posse and Fred and Ida marry. Note actor Otto Lincoln, who changed his name to Elmo Lincoln by the following year, when he played The Mighty Man of Valor in the Babylonian sequence of D.W. Griffith's masterpiece Intolerance; in 1918, Lincoln found fame as the screen's first Tarzan. 15/2rl ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide

This Reliance feature bore a striking resemblance to the previous IMP release Driven By Fate. Deserted by her husband, a pregnant chorus girl finds herself stranded in a backwater town. She gives up her baby to a Quaker family then disappears into the night. Flash-forward several years: The child, now grown up into a beautiful young woman (and now played by Dorothy Gish) begins to develop unexplained yearnings to go on the stage. With the help of a benevolent theatrical manager, she quickly rises to the heights of success on Broadway. If only Gish knew that her personal maid is actually her long-lost mother.... ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

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

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 Good Bad Man is at once a straight western and a gentle spoof of the genre. Douglas Fairbanks plays a fellow who calls himself "Passin' Through." Orphaned at birth, Our Hero grows up to be a Robin-Hood-like bandit, robbing the rich so that he can finance a home for unwanted children. In this guise, he meets Bud Fraser (Sam DeGrasse), the man who killed his father. Bessie Love plays the obligatory heroine, who frankly hasn't much to do in the proceedings. The Good Bad Man was directed by frequent Fairbanks collaborator Allan Dwan; it was photographed by Victor Fleming, who later became an excellent director in his own right (one of his 1930s films was a little something called Gone with the Wind). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Argyle Case was based on a play by Harvey J. O'Higgins and Harriet Ford, which in turn was inspired by the official files of the William J. Burns Agency, an international private detective organization. The head of the house of Argyle is murdered by espionage agents who wish to undermine the well-being of the United States (the film was made the same year that America entered the first World War). Robert Warwick (who also produced) plays the scientific detective who brings the miscreants to heel. The Argyle Case was directed by Ralph Ince, brother of silent-movie mogul Thomas Ince. The film would be remade as a talkie in 1929, with Thomas Meighan in the lead. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In the days before television and the Internet, faraway places such as the Middle East and Asia -- and their cultures -- seemed especially mysterious and unfathomable. Rudyard Kipling was one author of the late 1800s and early 1900s who fed readers' taste for the exotic with his tales of India and its clashes with English life. In 1892 he co-wrote The Naulahka with Wolcott Balestier, and in late 1917 it was made into a motion picture. The story begins in Colorado where two towns are fighting to become a stop for the new railroad that is being built. When Nicholas Tarvin (Anotonio Moreno), the representative from one town, discovers that the rail owner's wife wants the Naulahka, a jeweled girdle from India, he travels there to get it for her. Tarvin's fiancée, Kate Sheriff (Helen Chadwick), has already gone to India because as a physician, she wants to help India's poor, suffering masses. While they are in India they become involved in halting the machinations of Stahbai, a gypsy queen (played by the famed dancer Doraldina), to depose the rightful heir to a throne. Although imperiled a number of times, Tarvin and Kate make it back home to Colorado to discover that their town has won the railroad. As the Maharajah, Swedish Warner Oland plays one of his usual Oriental characterizations. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Erstwhile Susan was based on Helen R. Martin's novel Barnabetta, which previously had served as the basis for a play by Marian De Forest. Constance Binney plays the daughter of a strict Pennsylvania Dutch household. She is rescued from this atmosphere by her stepmother, who provides the girl with enough money to attend school out of state and start a new life. The film has been noted as a sociological curiosity, painting a bleak picture of Pennsylvania Dutch paternalism and offering a rare nice stepmother. Most of the villainy is in the capable hands of Anders Randolph, who during his long screen career menaced everyone from Douglas Fairbanks to Garbo to Laurel & Hardy. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Alisa Randall (Mildred Harris) is a young wife whose neediness is driving her husband Knox (Milton Sills) up a wall. She finally figures out that maybe if she treated him indifferently instead of constantly calling him at the office, she might get better results. This tactic also works for her friend Clarissa (Mary Alden), who is Knox's sister. But Clarissa gets involved with another man, and to save the marriage, Alisa pretends to be the one who is having the affair. Her husband, however, knows the truth and understands. This picture was based on the play by Frank Stayton. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide