This is an unintentionally hilarious silent film, and I do know how to appreciate the good ones. It has every dramatic Victorian trope under the sun, but the problem is Queen Victoria has been dead for 16 years when this film was made. The title cards are as talkie as an early sound film and with language so flowery I expect to see "Twas a Dark and Stormy Night" on one of them. But I guess this much literary detail was needed because this production is not exactly a hallmark of the art of pantomime. Also the plot is impossible to follow and full of holes. For example, a preacher is tending to a man with chronic amnesia. The preacher receives a letter that appears to be written in the same hand as a letter in possession of the amnesiac. Aha! He now knows who the amnesiac is! But these letters were written by two different people. It is things like this as the film drifts about that make it feel like the story was written as part of a relay race. It plays like one writer starts then hands off to the next writer and so on. At the beginning, the film makes a grand introduction of an evil man who was heartless to his children. And then he disappears ten minutes into the film.
What is good about it? It is perhaps an unintentional story of female empowerment. The lead actress in the film plays a woman unfairly accused of infidelity and booted, along with their baby daughter, from her husband's house . Isn't it her house too? I guess community property was not all it was cracked up to be in 1917, but I digress. At any rate, this wronged woman manages to become a nurse in record time AND patrol Alaska's "Great White Trail" and become handy with a gun and dog sled with no training. When her husband arrives in Alaska to track her down, he doesn't exactly demonstrate the same resourcefulness. Instead, upon arrival he is almost immediately hit over the head and robbed by the film's villain, "The Vulture", which seemingly turns him into Santa Claus as he is reduced to wandering about incoherently with a long white beard looking to be about 70 at this point although he is in fact about 40.
And what of the baby daughter? She grows to marriageable age - which is apparently 14 in 1917 - becomes an animal hoarder, a pyromaniac, and develops a taste for harmless goofy men. But there is much more to her story than that. Let's just say that complications ensue.
It certainly is not boring but it is incomprehensible as far as the details go.
