Viola Dana shows up in town, wearing overalls. She's run away from the orphanage.Young Robert Walker, riding his modernistic pennyfarthing bicycle, spots her and rescues her from corrupt politico Clifford Bruce. She rooms with a sweet old couple, Russell Simpson and Margaret McWade. Walker is running for office against Bruce, and wants to marry Miss Dana, but Sue Eudaly wrecks his ambitions by stating that she is married to him. He replies that she was already married when the ceremony was performed, but she replies "You can't prove that."
All of these plot points will have to be connected in a neat bow in this melodrama. Why should anyone care about this set of antiquated issues in a form so lost that its only echoing survival is in Mighty Mouse cartoons and similar works that don't take it seriously?
Motion picture power couple John H. Collins and Viola Dana make it clear how to make this melodrama work: take the plot points seriously and make the people filled with passions the audience can understand: love, hate, lust and sorrow. Certainly Miss Dana -- she was also Mrs. Collins -- is beautiful and virtuous and loving and supportive. Russell Simpson and Margaret McWade also give fine performances. The other characters are reduced to stereotypes. It's understandable, given the vast number of subplots that have to be given some coverage in this well-remembered meller. Yet even the details of its stagey high point are confused; it is not the beautiful and innocent heroine who is about to be sawn in twain, but the hero.
It's pretty much the high point of classic melodrama -- assuming that's not an oxymoron -- in the movies. The form was already in decay, and while 1922's THE NINETY AND NINE seems to have been its equal in staging, production and popularity, only a short cutdown of that survives. Movie comedians were already burlesquing the genre, which today is remembered largely in Dudley Dooright cartoons.
Yet here it is, done right. Enjoy!
