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The Love Light (Frances Marion, 1921)
Topic Started: Jun 15 2015, 02:20 PM (264 Views)
brian d
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The Love Light is less visually inventive than the first two lighthouse films, but it is more emotionally touching than either The Lighthouse Keepers or Le Tempestaire. This was the directorial debut of Frances Marion, who was one of the main screenwriters for Mary Pickford films, and also wrote films starring Greta Garbo, Marie Dressler, and Marion Davies. Here she is on the set with Pickford:

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She was the first screenwriter to win two academy awards for writing, and beyond writing and her two directorial projects, was involved in the production of most of the projects she worked on in various (uncredited) ways.

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Frances Marion

A brief synopsis of the film (with some spoilers) from The Women Film Pioneers Project:

Using the Pickford-Marion formula of adding slapstick comedy to drama, the film begins with Angela (Pickford) as an Italian peasant girl chasing her brothers around several inebriated farm animals. This scene is singled out by the Photoplay reviewer as the best thing he remembers except that the film "takes the nation’s sweetheart out of her curls and short frocks and makes a woman of her" (77). Marion uses beautifully framed long shots of the coastal overlook to show the lighthouse, which is left for Angela to manage when her brothers go off to war. One day, after a storm, Joseph (Fred Thomson) washes up on shore and is taken in by Angela, who does not know that he is a German spy. Thinking that he is a deserter from the American Navy, she hides him, but they quickly fall in love....

The plot devolves to a climatic shipwreck, which Marion chose to film during a real storm with a real ship, putting her assistant director in peril. In [her autobiography] Off With Their Heads! Marion writes, "If only women’s lib had been active in those days!" in response to a reviewer who nearly fifty years earlier had dismissed the scene with "A man wouldn’t try to get away with that phony miniature."

I've been swamped with other things lately, so you get one measly shot from the film. Enjoy :toast: :

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I will talk breathlessly about Spanish and Portuguese cinema, João César Monteiro, Ritwik Ghatak, and Jacques Rivette, and hardly ever about anything else.
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