This is a very sad story of mankind and its hideous obsession with war.
Rudolph Valentino is the dissolute Julio, who thinks nothing of seducing the young wife of his father's best friend.
The object of his desire is Marguerite (Alice Terry), drawn like a moth toward flame yet tortured by her conscience, a conflict made more intense when her husband's heroism at the front returns him home as a blind man.
Director Rex Ingram creates heart-wrenching tableaux depicting war's devastating toll on privileged and poor alike. A scene of a young girl trying to awaken her dead mother, alongside a miserable, thumb-sucking boy, is shattering, as is the movie's final frame in a horizonless soldier's graveyard.
How pitiful that in all of his 200,000 years, man still takes up arms against his neighbor!
Rudolph Valentino is the dissolute Julio, who thinks nothing of seducing the young wife of his father's best friend.
The object of his desire is Marguerite (Alice Terry), drawn like a moth toward flame yet tortured by her conscience, a conflict made more intense when her husband's heroism at the front returns him home as a blind man.
Director Rex Ingram creates heart-wrenching tableaux depicting war's devastating toll on privileged and poor alike. A scene of a young girl trying to awaken her dead mother, alongside a miserable, thumb-sucking boy, is shattering, as is the movie's final frame in a horizonless soldier's graveyard.
How pitiful that in all of his 200,000 years, man still takes up arms against his neighbor!