In a small Italian fishing village during World War I, a young woman, Angela Carlotti (Mary Pickford), says goodbye to one brother, then another as they depart for battle. The Love Light (1921) starts out on a cheerful, silly note, with much slapstick humor including a scrappy Angela tussling with her teasing younger brother, and a scene where the family's livestock becomes drunk on spilled liquor. But the film quickly turns into a twisting, turning melodrama of the highest order, as Angela finds out her older brother Antonio, and then her younger brother Mario, have died in the war. When a stranger, Joseph (Fred Thomson), claiming to be an AWOL American washes up on the beach where Angela operates a lighthouse, she agrees to hide the fugitive in her modest cottage. Eventually, she falls in love with the handsome stranger and marries him in secret with the assistance of the village priest. Only later does Angela discover a dark secret about Joseph; that he is in actuality a German spy. In the second phase of the tangled story, Angela bears a child by Joseph but the child is stolen by a bereaved village woman who has lost her own child.

The Love Light was written and directed by the prolific and enormously successful Hollywood screenwriter Frances Marion, who amassed more than 130 screen credits (including Camille, 1915 and 1936, Stella Dallas, 1937, Dinner at Eight, 1933). At one time, she was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood in a career that spanned from 1915 to 1940. Marion was also the first female writer to win an Oscar, for her influential 1930 prison drama The Big House.

Marion was a well-liked and well-connected talent in Hollywood, a close friend to Billie Burke, Marion Davies, Marie Dressler and Pickford as well, who she first met when Pickford's then-husband Owen Moore invited her to paint a portrait of his wife. Samuel Goldwyn called Marion his favorite screenwriter and she had close friendships with other powerful figures in Hollywood like Irving Thalberg. But Marion paid her greatest debt to the women like Pickford who helped her career along the way, saying ¿I owe my great success to women. Contrary to the assertion that women do all in their power to hinder one another¿s progress, I have found that it has always been one of my own sex who has given me a helping hand when I needed it.¿

Marion and Pickford became such good friends, they even honeymooned in Europe together when Pickford married Douglas Fairbanks and Marion married Fred Thomson. Thomson was an ordained minister turned actor who she cast as Joseph in The Love Light -- one of several villains he played in his wife's films. Thomson soon developed into an important Western star, in 1927 according to Exhibitor's Herald, surpassing even Pickford's husband Douglas Fairbanks in box office popularity. Thomson died very suddenly and tragically of tetanus in 1928 at the age of 38, leaving Marion to raise their two young sons on her own.

Producer: Mary Pickford
Director: Frances Marion
Screenplay: Frances Marion
Cinematography: Henry Cronjager, Charles Rosher
Film Editing: Stuart Heisler
Art Direction: Stephen Goosson
Cast: Mary Pickford (Angela Carlotti), Evelyn Dumo (Maria), Raymond Bloomer (Giovanni), Fred Thomson (Joseph), Albert Prisco (Pietro), George Regas (Tony).
BW-89m.

by Felicia Feaster