The Godless Girl (1929) - Cecil B DeMille.avi

Title: The Godless Girl (1929)

Directed by: Cecil B. De Mille



The Godless Girl (1929) is a film directed by Cecil B. De Mille, shown for years as his last completely silent film. However, the UCLA Film and Television Archive restored the film's dialogue scenes that were added during the transition of films from the silent era to the sound era, thereby restoring a film that was one of DeMille's first part-sound efforts. The title character is based on Queen Silver, a child prodigy and socialist orator.[1] The lead actress, Lina Basquette, named her autobiography after the film --Lina: DeMille's Godless Girl.



Featuring Dennis James on The Paramount's Mighty Wurlitzer Organ



Completed as a silent film, Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl was quickly converted into a part-talkie by the simple expedient of tacking on a 10-minute coda, wherein the characters discuss the weather. The film begins as a condemnation of the atheistic movement then prevalent on high-school and college campuses. Heroine Judith Craig (Lina Basquette) and hero Bob Hathaway (George Duryea, later known as western star Tom Keene) hold secret anti-religious meetings with their friends. During one such meeting, the police stage a raid, whereupon a stairway collapses and a young girl is killed. Arrested for complicity in the girl's death, Judith and Bob are sent to reform school, where they suffer mightily at the hands of their sadistic jailers. Likewise brutalized is hard-boiled Mame (Marie Prevost), who in one of the film's most notorious scenes is strung up by her wrists and beaten (DeMille claimed that he was only mirroring "real life," but he was always saying things like that). Somehow, their horrible experiences serve to renew Judith and Bob's faith in God. In a harrowing climax, Bob rescues Judith from a fire, a scene so realistically staged that, for the rest of her life, the actress retained vivid memories of how close she came to being genuinely incinerated. Featured in the cast are Noah Beery Sr. as "The Brute" and Eddie Quillan as "The Goat." The Godless Girl represented Cecil B. DeMille's final production for Pathe; shortly afterward, he moved to MGM, then to Paramount.

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Bruce Calvert

http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com




Plot

This drama features a romance between an atheist girl, and the male head of a Christian youth organization. The two are at odds when they are thrown into a reform school, but fall in love. The film ends with a fire that breaks out in the school; after the girl is rescued there is an epilogue in which she and the boy seem to agree that there is room for both of their views.



The film was very popular in the U.S.S.R. and in Germany, though it was a box office disaster in the US. When released in August 1928 in its silent film version, it was not a success. De Mille attributed the film’s failure to its already outmoded position in the transition from silent to sound cinema. Nor did it recover more than two-third of its production costs when released in a so-called "goat gland" version with the addition of a final talkie reel in 1929.



In 2007, a version was released by Photoplay Productions and George Eastman House, in association with the Cecil B. De Mille Foundation and Film4, restored from deMille's own nitrate print, with a new music score by Carl Davis.





http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019935/

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/08/46/godless-girl.html