Orphans of the Storm
Dir: D. W. Griffith
1921
*****
A beautiful melodrama following two sisters on a journey of loss and recovery during the French Revolution. Historically impeccable and based on the novel by Adolphe d'Ennery & Eugène Cormon, Orphans of the storm could easily be made today to great success but finding a pair of sisters as wonderful as Lillian Gish & Dorothy Gish would be a much harder task. The set is amazing, it's hard to believe it was all filmed on a New York set. My favourite scene was when the peasant woman gets run over and killed by a carriage and the aristocrat that gets out pays her husband a penny and apologises for the inconvenience. It reminds me of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in many ways although I should point out that Battleship Potemkin came out three years later but this must have been an influence. I watched the Alpha video version on DVD and while the visual quality is good, the music they have put to it is awful, although their soundtrack to Way Down East is much worse.