Lorna Doone

In 17th-century England, the outlaw Doone clan kidnaps a young girl, who grows up among them. The farm boy who met her just before the kidnapping eventually rescues her, and they fall in love.

I wasn't familiar with this story, having neither read the novel nor seen the various movie and TV adaptations. The bare bones of this boy-meets-girl tale are, of course, familiar to anyone; but (in this version, at least) it is fleshed out in a particularly engaging way. The graceful photography of Henry Sharp, under Maurice Tourneur's direction, is the movie's main asset. Both leads (Madge Bellamy in the title role and John Bowers as the hero) are strong. Frank Keenan, as the elderly leader of the outlaw clan and Lorna's protector, gives a fascinatingly florid performance (an improvement over his equally striking, but ridiculously slow-motion, acting in "The Coward" from 1915). Charles Hatton, who plays the hero as a boy, has a strong screen presence: it's disappointing to see from his IMDb filmography that he only made a few films and then disappeared.

The 2001 presentations of this film has a lovely background music by Mari Iijima; but unfortunately, Iijima didn't exactly score the film so much as write a few pieces for it, which are repeated without variation throughout the movie. The repetitiveness is a defect.