User Reviews

Wilfred Lucas is engaged to Lily Cahill, but stuck in a dead-end job. He goes to the city to take a job in a dance club, where he meets Dorothy Bernard. They become friends, but she harbors deeper feelings. When Lucas' uncle,dies, leaving him a farm, he needs money to pay off the attendant debts. Miss Bernard offers him her jewelry, but he is too proud to accept it.

With Mary Pickford off making movies for IMP, D.W. Griffith was trying out other actresses in leading roles. Giving this simple and rather clumsy story, She does not acquit herself well, her florid and stagy techniques looking ridiculous in contrast to Lucas' simple and solid performance. Miss Bernard would fade to lesser roles as Griffith found more suitable actresses.

Two failures do not always make a success, especially where the two are man and woman, but they most convincingly did make a success in this picture. This age is looking at failure differently from the last; it has a far more human and honest way of regarding it. This picture has the sane view and, in so far as its object goes, is highly commendable. But, after the situation has been stated, it becomes obscure for a few scenes. It seemed unnecessarily timid in stating the lesson for the hero and heroine's being found at the dance hall. The man seemed to be making what he could by singing there; she seemed to be there with other street girls. He had been a failure, losing job after job, until his sweetheart gave him up. She, it seems, had been deceived by a man and abandoned. The player who pictured the scene, creditable from every point of view, did remarkably well. The failures meet at the dance hall. A human heart leads the girl to encourage the man; but he is always failing. He gets a chance to break away from the city and make good on a farm, but has no carfare. She pawns her rings for him. He won't accept the money from the street girl. By a rule, she manages to make him take the money. At first it seems as though he were about to go away toward the light and leave her there in darkness; but the ending is very good. - The Moving Picture World, December 23, 1911