The Conquest of Canaan

Thomas Meighan is a layabout in the town of Canaan in Indiana, despised by the people who run the town, and they are an unsavory, snobby lot. His only friend in town is Doris Kenyon. When her poor artist father inherits money, they go to Paris, and Meighan leaves town to study law. When he returns, he becomes a defense attorney, which arouses the ire of the newspaper's editor, who advocates lynching.

Eventually Miss Kenyon returns, and there's a murder, and it's up to Meighan to defend the accused man. It's rather an abbreviated and odd sort of trial. I suspect it's gone into in greater and better detail in the Booth Tarkington novel it's based on. As it currently exists, it's very odd, and I suspect it's due to cropping in the copy that was repatriated from Gosfilmfond in 2010. Other films have been abbreviated to make propaganda points, like the Mabel Normand comedy MOLLY O', which had all its jokes and gags removed. Here, there's a sequence in which Meighan gets drunk, and there's no point to it.

Although only five minutes seem to be missing from this movie, I suspect the loss is greater, and it's difficult to form any clear, positive attitude to it. Neither, considering the apparent butchering, will I suggest it's a bad movie. In its current form, so far as I can tell, it doesn't really exist.