Robert Conness is a young seminarian who falls in love with a good-time girl. To save his future, she walks out on him; a friend dies, leaving him a ward to raise. Fast forward a while, and Conness is now an industrialist with child laborers in unsafe condition. His ward is Robert Walker, a socially progressive minister, who attempts to save good-time girl Viola Dana.
It's a set-up for melodrama, and melodramatic is it indeed. However, this is one of the movies that John H. Collins directed his wife, Miss Dana in, and while the melodrama is there, and the camera set-ups are simple, the editing is amazing, and the way the characters behave and evolve is absolutely believable. Miss Dana may reform, but she reforms over the course of several incidents, and she still feels the old urges to go out dancing. Walker is well meaning, but he is also a bit of a prig who is not clear on his own motivations. With these two in the foreground, Conness' evolution from budding theologian to seemingly heartless capitalist seems possible, as well as the big finale, a deadly fire at his factory.
That's based on the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, and it's here that Collins shows his special magic, by the editing. The camera set-ups are simple, but he is willing to edit them for speed and excitement in a way that none of his contemporaries did. Griffith's looks slow; the Russian Academicians look like burlesques. Collins cuts and cuts, and cuts again, and shows you an image of the dead children laid out on the ground for just long enough to register.... and then cuts away.
It's no wonder that the two of them, working in tandem, easily survived the collapse of the Edison Film Company. Alas, the Spanish Influenza epidemic killed Collins in 1918. Miss Dana's screen career extended through the end of the silent era, and she passed on in 1987 at the age of 90.
