User Reviews

When Clara Kimball Young meets a handsome writer on Coney Island, her father the Senator orders her to break it off. However, when she becomes a screen star for Vitagraph, he cannot but agree to the match.

While today we seem to hold people who are young and good looking enough to be worthy of discoursing on any subject they wish, because we see them on the movie screen and this makes them very intelligent, this is a new idea. A century ago to be an actress was to be thought likely a whore, and movie actors were deemed to be incompetent of that. So Vitagraph, with its often charming quaintness when it came to ideas of romance, offered this as a charming corrective. It's a pleasing trifle and pleasantly done in a dozen minutes.

An inconsequential tale of young lovers eloping to escape the disapproval of her father that would be instantly forgettable if it wasn't for the fact that much of the action takes place in Vitagraph Studios. This means we get a rare chance to see such pioneering executives as J. Stuart Blackton, A. E. Smith and William Rock playing themselves. Florence Turner, one of cinema's first movie stars, also appears as herslf, while real-life father and daughter Edward Kimball and Clara Kimball Young play on-screen father and daughter.

A dandy offering that we feel sure will please. It tells a good story convincingly and uses the Vitagraph plant as a background and in a very interesting way. The romance has its beginning at a seaside resort of which we have some pretty glimpses. It is here that a young author (James Morrison) meets and falls in love with the daughter of a senator (Clara Kimball Young). The senator (Edward Kimball) refuses his consent and sends the girl to boarding school where we find Flora Finch as the principal. There's a moonlight elopement from the school, troubled waters for the young people and then they get a job with the Vitagraph Company where at length the forgiving senator finds them. The Vitagraph scenes are very good. In the office, Messrs. W.T. Rock, A.E. Smith and J. Stewart Blackton are in consultation. Mr. S.M. Spedon enters for a moment just before the senator is introduced. The visitor is conducted through the yard to the studio where one of Miss Florence Turner's pictures is being made. This he interrupts to greet his daughter right in the middle of a scene. Mr. James Young is both author and producer and has made an excellent offering. - The Moving Picture World, September 28, 1912