Video Details
This rarely-seen film directed by legendary Oscar-winning screenwriter Frances Marion (Stella Maris, The Wind, Camille) provided Mary Pickford with one of her most fully realized adult characters. Angela (Pickford) tends a lighthouse in an Italian fishing village while her brothers are fighting at the front. She discovers a foreign sailor washed ashore and nurses him back to health while falling in love. After they marry and have a child, Angela learns that he is a German spy and her innocent actions have helped cause the death of her brother. Marion showed Hollywood she could hold her own behind the camera in this beautifully atmospheric, gorgeously shot and deeply moving film.
Review
"Angela, I am an enemy of your country, but not a traitor to you. You can't hate me for serving my own country. It is every man's duty." It is this moment in The Love Light when Mary Pickford discovers that the man she had sheltered through World War I is not an American deserter but a German spy. As played by Fred Thomson, the debuting husband of screenwriter-director Frances Marion, the scene is so much more startling because of his all-American looks. It is also very adult for Pickford, who obviously sought to escape, if briefly, from the spirited tomboys she played so often and so well. Not that "Our Mary" resembled an Italian lighthouse keeper too much; she may have played a grown-up this time, but those abundant blond curls were obviously not to be messed with. Rumors have it that Pickford resented Marion's supposed overemphasis on her new and exceedingly handsome husband, but they are just that: rumors. In fact, the scenes between the two look extremely comfortable. That, alas, cannot be said for Miss Marion's screenplay, which is mostly overly melodramatic but at times also somewhat ambiguous. (Were Angela and Joseph ever secretly married, as a title wants us to believe?) And in between the heavy drama -- Pickford was rarely this demonstratively broad -- director Frances Marion spends an inordinate time on silly barnyard follies. Thanks to ace cinematographers Charles Rosher and Henry Cronjager, not to mention set designer Steven Goosson, The Love Light survives as one of the most visually beautiful of silent dramas. Something of an accomplishment in an era ripe with pictorial excellency. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide
