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The Warning
(1914) United States of America
B&W : One reel
Directed by Donald Crisp
Cast: Dorothy Gish [Dorothy], Mae Washington (Eleanor Washington) [Dorothy’s mother], Donald Crisp [Mr. Edwards]
Majestic Motion Picture Company production; distributed by Mutual Film Corporation. / Scenario by Russell E. Smith. / Released 13 October 1914. / Standard 35mm spherical 1.33:1 format.
Drama.
Synopsis: [?] [From The Moving Picture World]? Dorothy, flighty little country girl, dissatisfied with humdrum country life. longs for the gaiety of the cities. She meets a man from city on vacation; he makes cavalier love to her. She is interested and becomes infatuated. Mother warns her against him and begs her to be contented in country life. Dorothy is petulant. She lies in a hammock under the trees, and wishes the city man would come and take her away from the life she hates. Dorothy falls asleep in the hammock. The city man appears and finds her asleep. He kisses her awake and makes more violent love to her. He urges her to flee with him to the city by recounting the pleasures he can give her. He promises they will be married. She agrees to go, gets her things together and they start. Arriving at the city he takes her to a boarding house and pretends to arrange marriage in the morning. Then the fake marriage and his subsequent tiring of her and finally the desertion and her discovery that it was all a false marriage. Her heart breaks and she tries to find work, but all in vain. Suicide seems her only hope, but she is urged by a kindly landlady to return home to mother. This she does, but her mother refuses to receive her and she is turned away. Going to a small bridge over a stream or lake, she prays and starts to jump in, but the scene fades out and into her falling out of the hammock. Scared to death she jumps up crying. The city man appears through the trees and accosts her, but she shrinks from him in horror and runs to her mother and cries on her shoulder, resolving never to disobey her or be discontented again.
Reviews: [The Moving Picture World, 24 October 1914, page ?] The story of a willful girl who dreams she takes her own way, gets betrayed and tries twice to commit suicide and wakes to find she has nearly broken her head in tumbling out of the hammock. A good, clean story with a moral and an element of farce in it.
Survival status: (unknown)
Current rights holder: Public domain [USA].
Listing updated: 15 November 2022.
References: Weaver-Twenty p. 144 : Website-IMDb.
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