Angry Young Men: Week of March 13th, 1920

Theda Bara in Kathleen Mavourneen,

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley mentioned a shocking incident at a movie screening:

No infuriated and excited Irishmen have torn holes in the screen of the Symphony, nor smashed the projecting machine as they did in San Francisco, on the occasion of the first showing of Kathleen Mavourneen, featuring Theda Bara, where they were incited by the showing of the home of an Irish family wherein the family horse, chickens and goat were kept in the house.

Yes, the horse was in the house

There had been a riot at the Sun Theater in San Francisco on February 8th. Here’s some of the report from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Objecting to scenes of dire poverty in Ireland as portrayed by Theda Bara in Kathleen Mavourneen at the Sun Theater, a gang of young men attempted to wreak the theater, smashed the projecting machines and destroyed or took away the films last night…The rioters objected to scenes in the picture showing two pigs in parlors of Irish cottages, chickens fluttering on stairways and other examples of dire poverty on the Emerald Isle. At last night’s performance a number of young men ranging in age from 19 to 22, according to [theater manager Abe] Markowitz, secured seats in the gallery near the projecting room, and during the picture yelled their disapproval of the film.

When the picture was through one yelled “Get the picture,” and a crowd made a rush for the operating room. The operator [William Ulrich] was pinned to the wall, and with bundles of carbons the men smashed the machines and other machinery in the room… After smashing everything possible in the operating room, the crowd tore down railings, broke chairs, and did other damage in the upper gallery, and then ran carrying with them two reels of the picture. Two more reels were torn during the excitement.

Before the smashing started, one man said to Markowitz “I’m a member of the American Committee for Irish Freedom and we don’t want any of that ___ British propaganda shown in San Francisco,” but that group denied having anything to do with it. The police never caught the rioters. Markowitz estimated that the total damage added up to $5000. He withdrew Mavourneen and replaced it with Vagabond Luck, a “happy, snappy racing comedy.”

According to historian Gary D. Rhodes, this wasn’t the first Irish-American protest against the film. In October 1919 a group of organizations wrote a letter to the theater manager in Bayonne, New Jersey before it opened, and he decided not to show it. In November, the manager of the Palace Theater in Hartford, Connecticut cut the objectionable scenes and it screened without incident. Markowitz at the Sun previewed the film with two Catholic priests earlier in the day, and cut some scenes at their suggestions. But this censorship wasn’t enough to appease the young men.

So going out to the movies could sometimes be dangerous even in 1920. This appears to worst incident in the film’s run, though according to Bara biographer Eve Golden, some Irish-American groups also objected to a Jewish woman playing an Irish woman. The film soon disappeared and now it’s lost.

Kathleen Mavourneen was based on a popular Civil War era song that became a play. Kathleen is forced to abandon her true love and marry the local squire, then the true love is framed for murder and hung (ballads are awfully bleak!). There had already been three earlier films based on the story. The 1919 version had a twist: instead of ending tragically, it turned out it was all a dream she had on the eve of her wedding, and Kathleen marries her true love.

In Los Angeles, the film ran without much comment. It was billed as part of a St. Patrick’s Week special that included Henry King’s rendition of the original song. Kingsley’s problem with the film was that it was boring:

Kathleen Mavourneen unfolds its peaceful five reels without anything more exciting happening to it than the orchestra. It’s in truth, a charming little story nicely produced and acted with many picturesque touches showing Theda as the very poor little colleen.

Which does prove the rioters’ point: it seems she thought that rooming with the livestock was ordinary Irish poverty. It least she didn’t much care for the film, preferring something else on the bill: “There’s a hilariously funny Christie comedy, which to my mind is the best part of the Symphony show this week.” Unfortunately, nobody said which one it was.

Charles Brabin

Bara made only two more films for Fox Films, then she retired. Mavourneen was the first time she got to work with the man who became her husband in 1921, director Charles Brabin. They were happily married until her death in 1955.

Constance Talmadge and Rockliffe Fellowes

Kingsley had much more fun this week at a film made by some of her favorite artists:

The lady in search of a perfect devil of a man is found embodied with happy whimsicality in the Constance Talmadge—Anita Loos—John Emerson combination of star and comedy at the Kinema this week. It is entitled In Search of a Sinner, and it shows all three of these clever ones at their clever best.

Though nobody can guess how it all happened, short of chloroforming her, we find Constance tied up at the beginning of the story with one of those awfully good dullards who gets her out of bed at 7 in the morning to play golf and on holidays takes her to the Metropolitan Museum. He dies ere long, however, and then, as a young widow, Constance starts out to find a wild man. Oh, of course, in New York; where else does wildness become, so to speak, so nicely finished? She finds him finally in a restaurant.

Alas, it turns out he’s a perfectly respectable friend of her brother-in-law so she needs to make him naughtier. She succeeds too well: ”he gets wilder than she intends and follows another wild woman off.” Oh no! Whatever will she do? Kingsley concluded: ”there are series of humorous complications and touches such as only Anita Loos and John Emerson know how to give, and Miss Talmadge, of course, as usual reflects their comedy brilliantly.”

Other critics liked it too

It’s been preserved at UCLA and at the Library of Congress, but it hasn’t been released on DVD. You don’t suppose she marries him?

Bebe Daniels kept fit

Physical fitness has always been important for performers. Kingsley visited a class teaching the latest fad for Hollywood actresses: classical dance. One afternoon at the Theodore Kosloff ‘s school she saw Alla Nazimova, Gloria Swanson, Bessie Love, Ruth Stonehouse, Bebe Daniels and May Allison all “learning to express the poetry of their souls.” Kingsley observed:

If you would be an up-to-the-minute star, go and study pantomime and classic dancing! That’s what many of our most famous screen luminaries are doing these days.

Honestly, it now appears that unless you can go up on your toes without falling over on your nose you’re in no condition to promise the beautiful hero with the Catalina-seal hair that you will wait for him undo death, or tell the villain where to head to.

All of the actresses were enthusiastic about their studies. Bebe Daniels said, “Why, he can teach you to express in a couple of kicks and a nod of the head even such abstractions as that your mother is a Methodist and your father a Democrat!”

Kingsley concluded with a secret: “Kosloff also has another ‘prospect.’ Sh! He’s Fatty Arbuckle!”

Roscoe Arbuckle already knew how to dance.

So fitness fads have always been a part of Hollywood. Learning classical dance was certainly less extreme than the muscle-building regimes of modern Marvel stars.

 

 

 

“Mob Raids Sun Theater: Irish Film Wrecked,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 9, 1920.

Gary D. Rhodes, “Irish American Film Audiences, 1915-1930,” Post Script, June 22, 2013.

“Vagabond Luck New Film at the Sun,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 12, 1920.

 

Such Hard Work: Week of January 24th, 1920

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley had news from Mamaroneck, New York:

A highly interesting letter has just been received from Lillian Gish, star of D.W. Griffith productions, and of late director of Dorothy in a comedy entitled She Made Him Behave. Miss Lillian related just how it feels to be a director, also, how the company likes, or rather doesn’t like, New York.

“What do you think of my turning director? I never dreamed it was such hard work. It makes one get into condition where one can’t sleep or eat. I really don’t understand how the directors direct and live! I certainly understand why Lois Weber goes to the hospital between pictures. I have seen the picture so much that I don’t know whether it is good or bad, but Dorothy says it is her best.”

The film’s title was later changed to Remodeling Her Husband and it was Lillian Gish’s only attempt at directing. It’s a lost film. The plot involved newlywed Dorothy Gish catching her flirtatious husband (James Rennie) in questionable situations with other young, pretty women and she eventually leaves him. After he threatens suicide, they reconcile. Variety was not impressed; they said the story “was not a world-beater but with the action Dorothy supplies it gets by with laughs.” (December 31, 1919)

Plainly, Lillian Gish didn’t enjoy directing at all and she never changed her mind about the job, even after her initial exhaustion wore off. Later in 1920, she explained to Motion Picture Magazine, “There are people born to rule and there are people born to be subservient. I am of the latter order. I just love to be subservient, to be told what to do.” So there was at least one person in Hollywood who didn’t want to direct!

She had no idea how much cold was in store for her (Way Down East, 1920)

Gish also reported on how the Griffith company were all faring in snow country:

“Here we are,” writes Miss Gish, “all the Gishes in New York, living out in the country in an old-fashioned house where the pipes freeze and the water won’t run in or out, and the heat—well sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t—it all depends. The snow looks perfectly beautiful, but I do miss my California. It’s a joke around the studio. If anyone starts to even talk about Los Angeles you see tears in the eyes of the property boys, the electricians and the actors. We are all of us having a good case of homesickness.”

Griffith’s Studio

They had only been away from Los Angeles a few months, having left in September, so it’s no wonder they were homesick. The company was to stay in Mamaroneck for five years, until Griffith was forced to sell the studio to cover its debts. They had several more cold winters to get through.

Constance Talmadge

Irving Berlin

This week, Kingsley also reported a piece of gossip I hadn’t heard before:

Lovely Constance Talmadge, picture star, is engaged to wed Irving Berlin, noted popular music composer, according to word just received from New York by intimate friends of Miss Talmadge in this city. Just how soon the marriage is to occur is not ready to be announced.

Miss Talmadge and Mr. Berlin have been acquainted for several months; in fact, she met him in New York during a visit some time ago, before she finally went East, and the two have been good friends for a long time, but no news of the romance developing between the pair has heretofore been disclosed.

In June, 1920 the Los Angeles Herald even reported that the two were married, but they never did. Instead she married John Pialoglou, a Greek tobacco importer, on December 26, 1920. It was a double wedding with Dorothy Gish and her Remodeling co-star, James Rennie. Gish and her husband stayed married until 1935, but Talmadge divorced Pialoglou in 1922.

John Pialoglou

Constance Talmadge

After the divorce, Photoplay ran an article about Talmadge called “The Most Engaged Girl in the World.” (October, 1923) It listed five past fiancés: Irving Berlin, Irving Thalberg, the film executive, John Charles Thomas, a singer, Kenneth Harlan, a film actor, and William Rhinelander Stewart Jr., a millionaire and “society favorite.” Talmadge told them what she was looking for in a husband: a “good bad man. You know, the man who’s been a regular Bluebeard, but is willing to give it all up for our sweet sakes.” Given that, it’s not too surprising that her three future marriages didn’t work out.

Ellin and Irving Berlin

Berlin had much better luck. He was happily married to Ellin Mackay for 63 years from 1926 until her death in 1988. It seems he knew quite well what Talmadge was like; when Anita Loos asked him for a suggestion for title for a script she’d written for her, he said “A Virtuous Vamp.”

Kingsley’s favorite film this week as The Thirteenth Commandment, and she used it as a stick to beat tired movie tropes with:

Amidst the dreary desert of turgid trash, the pale piffle, the mawkish flapdoodle which the screen reviewer has weekly to drag wearily through, is found once in a while a resting place, a green and flourishing oasis in the shape of a story which is sane and wholesome and normal, and yet which really reflects life vividly in a mirror. Once in a while, in other words, some director will fold the much-worn and mangy tiger skin of purple passion away in moth balls, send the vampire home to rest up and get her face fixed against the ruination of another batch of weak-minded males; will send the sweet little ingénue back to the family flat to look after her husband and babies…

Such a story is The Thirteenth Commandment, adapted from Rupert Hughes’s story, in which Ethel Clayton is starring at Clune’s Broadway this week. Its theme is the eternal problem of civilized latter-day womanhood, the alternative of economic dependence or independence, done into a human, absorbing story with sidelights of natural and inherent and unforced humor, and with every character vividly and logically drawn.

Ethel Clayton

Ethel Clayton played a small-town girl with extravagant tastes who learns the error of her ways when she moves in with her brother and sister-in-law. They teach her that 13^th Commandment, “Don’t spend more money than you make.” A title card explains why they skipped a few numbers: “It’s called the thirteenth, because it’s so unlucky to break it!” Kingsley particularly enjoyed Clayton’s performance, saying “Miss Clayton as usual blends rare intelligence with fine dramatic feeling and gives us a portrayal many-hued in its revelations of the character of a young modern woman.” Sadly, it’s a lost film.

Tsuru Aoki

Prohibition continued to beleaguer everybody this week:

We’ll say Tsuru Aoki is a real philanthropist. A physician recently prescribed champagne for one of the Universal actresses taking part in Miss Aoki’s picture. But, owing to red tape necessary to get the drink by prescription, also owing to its cost, it looked as if the suffering lady would have to do without any bubbles in her diet. Then came forward Miss Aoki and donated several bottles of champagne, and now the invalid is reported doing as well as could be expected.

Tsuru Aoki was a fine and generous person, but my question is: what disease could it possibly have been? Just like wine, champagne has health benefits. It contains the same antioxidants that prevent damage to blood vessels, reduce bad cholesterol and prevent blood clots, lowering the risk of heart illnesses and strokes. But researchers didn’t confirm the link until this century. I have no idea what the unfortunate actress suffered from – though it sounds like Miss Kingsley wanted a slight case of it, so she could have her own prescription.

 

“Constance Talmadge Weds Irving Berlin,” Los Angeles Herald, June 4, 1920.

Hall, Gladys. “Lights! Says Lillian!” Motion Picture Magazine, April–May 1920, p. 30-31, 102.

 

Entertaining But Clean: Week of October 25th, 1919

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley reported on the latest attempt to make kid-appropriate films:

For a long time now, mothers, women’s clubs and others have been asking for human, bright, entertaining but clean pictures…Now comes that Mark Twain of the screen, Judge Willis Brown, with a picture which is sponsored, even owned, by the women’s clubs of the country. It is entitled Surprising Carlotta, and it is on view at the Alhambra, and it fulfills all the exactations of those who have been calling for “human, bright, entertaining but clean” pictures. It is, indeed, a classic of childhood, with an understanding of and sympathy with boy nature which is fairly uncanny. It is humorous, human, sympathetic, comparable indeed only to, and almost a unctuously funny as Huckleberry Finn and Penrod [a popular Booth Tarkington novel, now forgotten], containing also a highly appealing little love story between the young lady heroine and the handsome hero, though this latter is submissive to the story of childhood. There is no preaching in it, and no moral, except, possibly, a sly poking of fun at the pompous stupidity of older people in dealing with childhood.

Unusually, instead of just complaining about not enough films for children, a group formed by women’s clubs called the National Federation of Better Film Workers were paying the Alhambra to run Surprising Carlotta for two weeks. They put their money where the mouth was!

However, it didn’t have a very successful run, according to an article by Kingsley’s co-worker Myra Nye; she wrote that Carlotta’s box office receipts were “surprising, but not surprising enough….By Tuesday night the manager at the Alhambra doubted if the play could run two weeks as it was booked.” It did stick around for a second week, since the Federation had paid for the theater, but after that, it disappeared. As Kingsley observed before, people say they want clean movies, but they don’t buy tickets for them.

Judge Willis Brown, the producer behind Carlotta, had quite a varied career. First he was the manager of the Oregon Fruit Union, a growers’ advocacy group. Around 1898, he formed the Anti-Cigarette League, headquartered in Chicago, and he gave speeches in support of their work. In 1905 he was appointed judge of the juvenile court in Salt Lake City, but his powers were limited because he wasn’t qualified to be a judge in Utah (he hadn’t lived there long enough; later they found out he wasn’t a lawyer). He continued his speaking tours; for example, in 1906 his speech in Los Angeles was called “The Devil’s Sunday School” – he said that saloons were the devil’s church and cigarette smoking was its Sunday school teachings. The L.A. Times was impressed by his delivery and impact:

The enthusiasm of this boyish-looking judge is infectious, and that he had made his presence felt here was demonstrated by the fact that an eager and interested audience—larger than any that has ever before greeted a speaker along similar lines—was present and applauded frequently.

Nevertheless, he was asked to resign from the Salt Lake City court in early 1907, and after a fight, he did. So he continued on the lecture circuit, and he used his earnings to start Boy City in Charlevoix, Michigan, a home for unwanted boys. Later he opened a second branch in Gary, Indiana. His first brush with the movies was in 1910, when Selig Polyscope made a short documentary about his organization called The City of Boys. This inspired him to form his own film production company in 1913, the Youth Photo Play Company, and he hired John M. Stahl to direct a feature-length film, The Boy and the Law, about a wild boy reformed by a stint in Boys City. (Stahl went on to direct classics like Imitation of Life (1934) and Leave Her to Heaven (1945).) Brown moved to Los Angeles and started a new production company in 1917, Boy City Film, to make a series of twenty shorts. He hired King Vidor (The Crowd (1928), Stella Dallas (1937), to direct. The first, Bud’s Recruit, holds up pretty well, according to Michael at Century Film Project:

Given the heavy-handed intentions and presumably limited budget, it is a very effective movie, especially in terms of its comedy. The boy actors are charming, and always seem to give the adults a run for their money…The movie comes across as innocently naïve, where it could have easily been foolish or preachy.

Surprising Carlotta was the end of Brown’s film career. When I say it disappeared, I mean it completely disappeared: after the Los Angeles showing, there’s nothing in digitized newspapers or the Media Digital History Project about it, and it’s not in the AFI Catalog, IMDB or the Silent Film Survival database. Judge Willis went back to the lecture circuit. He died following a heart attack at home in Los Angeles on April 30, 1933, leaving a widow and three children. (no, Wikipedia and IMDB, he wasn’t the Willis Brown who was shot by a spurned lover in Columbus Ohio, nor was he formerly known as James Willhenry Brown—I’ll send them a correction.)

Kingsley’s favorite film this week, The Temperamental Wife, had a “brilliant photoplay” by some of her favorite writers, Anita Loos and John Emerson. She said:

the story is full of fresh ideas, humorous situations and scintillating subtitles….The photoplay is full of clever touches for which the Loos-Emerson combination is famous and it is quite impossible to convey a sense of its amusing quality in the small space allotted me. Perhaps the best guaranty I can give you is the fact that the audience yesterday was kept in a constant uproar by the fun of the action and the amusing subtitiles.

A complete copy of it is at the Library of Congress, but the plot (a jealous wife learns that her husband’s secretary is -gasp- a woman!) might be what’s keeping anybody from releasing it on DVD.

 

 

“Former Utah Jurist Drops Dead in L.A.,” San Pedro News Pilot, May 1, 1933.

S.J. Griffin, “Judge Willis Brown,” Ogden Standard, May 29, 1909.

“Juvenile Judge Won’t Quit,” Deseret Evening News, January 24, 1907.

Grace Kingsley, “Making the Boys Behave,” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1919.

“National Fruit-Growers Association,” Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1896.

“New Court to Open Soon,” Salt Lake Herald, April 10, 1907.

Myra Nye, “Commercializing Goodness in Films,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1919.

“Willis Brown Appointed Judge,” Salt Lake Herald, March 31, 1905.

 

Week of June 22nd, 1918

Enrico Caruso

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley reported on a lucrative film contract for a Metropolitan Opera star:

Enrico Caruso, the greatest of all living tenors, will lay his voice away in cotton wool for the summer, and, having listened to the lure of the purring camera and the rattle of chink in the pockets of the picture magnates, will become a picture star for Lasky-Famous Players during his vacation, receiving therefore the princely sum of $300,000 for the services.

It might seem odd that people would want to see him without sound, but his fellow Met star Geraldine Farrar was in the middle of a successful film career so there was a precedent. Also, when Kingsley spoke to Cecil B. De Mille to confirm the report, he assured her that

Enrico Caruso is a corking fine actor as well as the world’s most wonderful tenor…When I was in New York I used to frequently drop into the Metropolitan Operahouse and watch Caruso rehearse, so I know of his splendid ability as an actor, and I think that he will be a big success on the screen, not only from the fact that millions of people have heard of him and will be attracted to see him in the silent drama, but because he will score an artistic success as well.

Enrico Caruso and Carolina White in My Cousin

Enrico Caruso was one of the biggest celebrities of his time. He toured extensively and sold millions of records. However, his film career wasn’t as successful. In his first film, My Cousin, he played a dual role: a poor maker of plaster casts and his cousin, a famous tenor. The tenor helps the artist win back his love after a misunderstanding. When it came out in Los Angeles later that year, LA Times reviewer Antony Anderson admired Caruso’s acting, saying “in opera he didn’t get half a chance, but the camera offered every opportunity and he took them.” He liked the film, too, because “the story has charm, simplicity and tenderness.” He mentioned that during the screening, the orchestra at Grauman’s mostly played music from the operas that Caruso had sung.

The studio tried — they issued a press book to help sell the film

Ormi Hawley and Enrico Caruso in A Splendid Romance

The film didn’t sell as many tickets as they’d hoped, and Lasky’s never released his second film, A Splendid Romance, in the United States. That film is lost, but My Cousin survived and is available on DVD.

Kingsley’s favorite film this week was The Lesson, a Constance Talmadge comedy, “so true to life from all angles that one has a guilty feeling of spying through a window to look at it.” She particularly admired the “brilliant and facile” star:

For those who would learn sincerity and naturalness, let them study Miss Talmadge; and these qualities are all the more to her credit in that, being a person of incisive personality, she might easily impose mannerisms upon us. The Lesson is from Virginia Terhune Vandewater’s appealing story of the same name, is human and intriguing, revolving around a wife married to one of those dog-in-the-manger husbands, who while limiting the amount of sauce for the goose, believes in an overdose of that commodity for the gander.

In this lost film, Talmadge’s character dumps the skunk and returns to her small-town sweetheart.

Social Briars

There was a close tie for best line this week. About the latest Mary Miles Minter film Kingsely wrote:

The writer of One in a Million is all wrong; he evidently hadn’t seen many pictures or he would have known that 999,999 of the poor little country girls who go to New York without previous training step right out upon the musical comedy stage and register a big hit.

So that was already a tired trope in 1918. Despite that, she decided “One in a Million is a clean, engaging little comedy which any girl can safely take her mother to see.” The film got a new title, Social Briars. I wonder if the producers read this and decided to change it.

 

Kingsley’s other nifty line was regarding Rupert Julian’s new film, Midnight Madness:

It is chock full of mystery, gobs and hunks of it, so thick as to make the plot rather bewildering.

The story involved a detective tracking down jewel thieves, and Mr. Julian didn’t include the usual scenes in which the investigator stops and theorizes about whodunit. Kingsley thought that was confusing. I hope you don’t have too many gobs and hunks of mystery this week!

 

 

 

Week of November 24th, 1917

Happy holiday!

Even though the Thanksgiving holiday (November 29^th in 1917) brought a slow news week, Kingsley didn’t take time off. She gave her readers some cheerful little stories about the stars.

Cleopatra (1917)

What’s wrong with “Theodosia” for her?

The last bits of the truly imaginative ballyhoo around Theda Bara were being swept away:

At last Theda Bara has told her real name! Not in reckless confidence, however but to a New York court, and in order to have her stage name legalized. The truth about Miss Bara’s name, as revealed in the proceedings, is that it is Theodosia Goodman…And however could a person with such a nice, innocent name as Theodosia Goodman ever expect to become a high-power vampire? The court took one look at Miss Bara and decided that Theodosia wasn’t the name for her at all.

Kingsley also mentioned that Miss Bara was born in Cincinnati, not in the Sahara Desert under the eye of the Sphinx, etc.

Now I suspect the name Theodosia will have a revival, as we all sing along with Mr. Odom.

I couldn’t find a photo of him bundled up.

According to a recent Stuff you Missed in History Class podcast on Lon Chaney, he wanted to keep his private life out of the press. However, Kingsley managed to run a story that didn’t intrude on that at all:

It was one of those warm days last week, and the scene was the café at Universal City. Enter Lon Chaney for his noon pork-and-bean rations, clad in heavy Eskimo clothing and perspiring freely. ‘What’s the matter, Lon?’ called out a friend. ‘Well,’ said Lon, ‘the matter is I’m in Alaska—but I don’t know it!

Natalie, Constance and Norma Talmadge

Norma Talmadge revealed one way to keep the audience in their seats. She told Kingsley that when she and her sisters were little “we used to give shows in our cellar. Constance and Natalie and I, we had a very good way of keeping our audiences in until the show was finished. We simply locked the door.”

Kingsley’s favorite film this week was The Regenerates, which was “surprisingly human and natural, and more than this, it has a fresh and ingenious plot, and there is hardly a superfluous foot of film in the whole thing.” She used it as a stick to beat up other films:

One hardly ever enters the theater with the idea of seeing logic or good sense or naturalness portrayed—that is, one doesn’t expect or demand them. Wherefore, when a picture appears in which characters act like reasonable human beings, viz., sin a bit, repent a bit, love a bit, hate a bit, are sometimes wise and sometimes foolish, and otherwise refuse to be either incarnate virtue or incarnate vice, one registers surprise.

Now the plot summary sounds like it was anything but natural (which just shows what the other films Kingsley was watching were like). It’s so convoluted that it defies summation, so here’s what the AFI Catalog says:

Mynderse Van Dyun, a wealthy old New York aristocrat, has one goal in life, to see his granddaughter Catherine and grandson Pell married; for, although they are cousins, the marriage would perpetuate the family name. Catherine, however, is in love with Paul La Farge and detests her drug-addicted cousin, who seduces and then secretly marries her maid, Nora Duffy. After a son is born to Nora, who dies in childbirth, the infant is taken to the Van Dyun house where, only a few days before, Pell, in a dispute involving drugs, had been thrown from a window by his valet and killed. When the old man refuses to acknowledge the child, Catherine and Paul adopt the baby, leave the Van Dyun house and are married. Five years later, Catherine comes to visit the old man with his great-grandson, and, seeing what a fine boy he is, the old aristocrat is forced to admit that the boy is worthy of bearing his name.

It’s been preserved at the Library of Congress and at the Eastman House.