I love Lillian Gish and I enjoy silent pictures, but this movie is just plain silly. It's two stories in one and each manages to cancel out the other. I'm a sucker for a good weepy, sentimental potboiler. This one starts off good but it takes forever to come to its inevitable sappy ending because the French Revolution keeps butting in and spoiling everything. The effect is quite comical. It seems criminal to go to such lengths to re-create a great event in history only to burlesque it in the service of a contrived melodrama. (The same crime was repeated by the makers of TITANIC many decades later.) The last minute race to the gallows is more of the same hokum that cheapened INTOLERANCE. The movie leaves you with the feeling that the entire Revolution just sort of blew over and the cleansing spirit of DEMOCRACY made everyone live happily ever after. What about Napoleon?
Review of Orphans of the Storm
