The A.B.C. of Love

Mae Murray is a penniless orphan when playwright Holmes Herbert encounters her exhausted on the road. He carries her as far as the nearest inn, where they promise to care for her tenderly. That means dressing her in rags, working her to exhaustion, forcing her to fight the dog for scraps of food on the floor, beating her, and trying to rape her. She repays these kindnesses by breaking a bottle over her assailant's head and running away. Eventually she arrives at Herbert's country home, and soon they are married.

They are very happy, but next it's off to the Big City. Dorothy Green thinks the best way to get the lead in Herbert's new play is to have an affair with him. He thinks that's a swell idea. Miss Murray doesn't know what to do.

Yes, it's about as raw as that in this Mae Murray vehicle directed by Léonce Perret. Miss Murray is charming, capricious, shows a lot of skin while bathing in the kitchen sink and looks fabulous in her fashionable clothes in the second half of the movie. there's a charming little set-piece in which Miss Murray dreams of a big alphabetary of love, in which scenes of conjugal bliss with Mr. Herbert are enacted. Clearly this was calculated to drive home the idea that Miss Murray was less sinner than sinned against. I got the idea. It clearly pleased her audience. Me, I'll take vanilla.

The copy I saw was derived from the Dutch print at the Eye Institute. Although the IMDb's plot summary indicates that some of the story's details have been changed, the basic story seems to remain the same.