A Mormon Maid

Report from Cinesation 2006: A MORMON MAID (****) Mae Murray and parents are taken in after an Indian attack by a Mormon community co-led by a lustful Noah Beery, who has eyes on making Mae the fifth or sixth Mrs. Beery. In a long career that included the likes of The Great Ziegfeld and Esther Williams, Robert Z. Leonard was never accused of an excess of personal style. Yet even he had enough skill and instinct to take full advantage of the visual opportunities provided by an army of ominously hooded religious zealots, lined up at night in gleaming white, or marching in lockstep with a defenseless young girl as their prisoner.

The Variety review quoted in the program guide inexplicably suggests that a short running time kept this 1917 film from achieving all it could. To modern eyes it's the fact that it races along at such a ferocious clip that is its greatest strength, along with the effective use of visuals which make the religious zealots more ominous and convincing villains than the usual rake lusting after the virginal heroine. In fact, for a change, the big strapping father is as much a victim trying to protect his chastity as the girl is, since he's ordered, to his horror, to take a second wife-- a sequence you haven't seen before in a silent movie, and one that's played for all it's worth.

There are some impressive names involved in this 1917 Lasky Production that so distorts the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that you would think that it was one of author Zane Grey's early Western tales that depicted the Mormons as villains. Come to think of it there were a couple of Grey's anti-Mormon novels made into movies around this time: RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE and its sequel, THE RAINBOW TRAIL(by William Fox IN 1918). The male lead of A MORMAN MAID is played by future Academy Award director Frank Borzage (he won the first year of the Oscars for 7th HEAVEN and a second Oscar for his directing of the sound BAD GIRL four years later). Borzage was born and raised in Salt Lake City among the Mormons -- he plays the role of a Mormon boy who is not aware of the evil practices of his Faith until he has to rescue his girl from the clutches of a forced marriage. And this film was photographed by the great cinematographer Charles Rosher (Oscar winner for SUNRISE [1927] and THE YEARLING [1946]). As to the supposed star of the film, Mae Murray, she gives a terrible impression of a Mary Pickford! Interesting today only as an example of how motion pictures are often used to present fabrication as being the truth! Like the later British film TRAPPED BY THE MORMONS (1922), A MORMON MAID is fascinating today as one of the few anti-Mormon films to survive.

Throughout most of her career, superstar beauty Mae Murray collaborated with director Robert Z. Leonard, her husband, creating a long string of silent successes. She often earned writing credit and participated in other aspects of production as well as acting.

This very early work is an amazingly imitative exercise in the "art film" category before Mae was reinvented, utilizing her true talent and personality, as the glamorous "girl with the bee stung lips."

Here, Mae is a pure and simple Mary Pickford imitator as were so many stars of the earliest silent era, and the film itself is a patent imitation -- although lacking the brilliance -- of D.W. Griffith conception and directorial excellence.

Please look to plot summary contributed elsewhere.