The Godless Girl

I had a fair number of silent movies sitting on my DVR in addition to some of the other genres that are disproportionately represented on the DVR. One of the movies that I had somewhat surprisingly not heard of before it got an airing on Silent Sunday Nights: The Godless Girl. But with it being a Cecil B. DeMille movie with an interesting synopsis, I recorded it in order to be able to finally watch it and put up a post on it.

The movie starts off in a high school with some interesting clubs. 21-year-old Lina Basquette stars as Judy Craig, aka The Girl. She's one of the prime movers of the school's Atheist Club, which seems like a rather odd thing for what I'd guess is a public school to have. Also, this being the 1920s, it's unsurprising that there are a lot more believers in God, and specifically, the Christian God since this is after all a DeMille movie and he certainly promoted his perception of Christianity in his films. The Boy, actual name Bob Hathaway and played by 32-year-old Tom Keene (credited as George Duryea), is the head of the Christian students' group, and boy is he irritated that atheists not only don't believe in his God, but that they might want to advertise their belief that there is no God. So he and his friends disrupt the Atheist Club meeting, leading to a riot that causes a banister to break and a female student to fall to her death.

It's not quite clear who should get the lion's share of the blame for what happened, although nobody intended for this thing to result in a death. But it did, and legally that's probably involuntary manslaughter. In any case, it's convenient for the justice system to declare it manslaughter and send both of the protagonists off to reform school, which is sex-segregated although the two halves of the reform school are right next to each other. At the school, Judy is roomed with The Other Girl, Mame (Marie Prevost), who shows Judy the ropes, and eventually becomes friends with Judy. Over on the boys' side, Bob meets Bozo (Eddie Quillan), and those two become friends as well.

Bob tries to make up with Judy, probably because he feels it his Christian duty, and tries to figure out a way to protect her, having fallen in love with her along the way. It also doesn't help that this is the sort of "reform" school that figures physical violence is the best way to reform the kids in the school. You'd think the kids might riot at some point the way they will in The Mayor of Hell some years later. And indeed, the climax is going to be set against a riot.

But first, Bob decides the best way to help Judy is to get her out of this place, which means effecting an escape. The two break out by commandeering a truck and eventually wind up on an abandoned farm, where life is idyllic for just long enough for Judy to conclude that perhaps there really is a God. But since there's that climax against a prison riot, you can guess that the young lovers are going to be caught and sent back to the reform school, which is only going to get more brutal than it was before the two escaped.

This being a Cecil B. DeMille movie, it's not exactly subtle in presenting DeMille's views and the triumph of Christian good over evil. but DeMille was a talented director and showman, and he's more than able to come up with a good story and compelling visuals to get his obvious points across, especially in the climactic prison riot complete with a fire and collapsing cell block. The print on The Godless Girl is also quite good. Unfortunately, by the time DeMille finished production sound movies, or part-sound movies, were becoming big, and the movie wasn't very successful, also being re-edited to include partial dialogue sequences. The version TCM ran, however, was silent. I don't have a copy of Kino Lorber's restoration release, so I'm not certain if both versions are available on it.