LOVE NEVER DIES (1921) B/W "silent" 60m dir: King Vidor

w/Lloyd Hughes, Madge Bellamy, Joe Bennett, Lilian Leighton, Fred Gambold, Julia Brown, Frank Brownlee, Winifred Greenwood, Claire McDowell

This is an early "silent" feature made by the great director, King Vidor. The film itself isn't held in tremendously high regard by critics, but it's recommended by FilmFrog for this rare opportunity to see a seldom-screened work by a director who would become a mainstay of the classical Hollywood cinema. LOVE NEVER DIES was Vidor's eighth feature-length film.

The extract below, from John Baxter's book about Vidor, is the only information FilmFrog has been able to find about the film.

From John Baxter's King Vidor: "The high cost of location shooting made The Sky Pilot [Vidor's previous production] too expensive for a big profit. Though First National released the film, they would not finance any further Vidor productions. Since the spectacular cattle stampede had drawn a lot of attention, he planned and shot an elaborate model scene of a train tumbling into a flooded river from a collapsing trestle, persuading Thomas Ince that a film with such a climax could not help succeeding. Ince agreed to back the film, but typically Vidor used the disaster early in Love Never Dies (1921), putting more emphasis on the rural love story (influenced, he agrees, by [D.W.] Griffith) which makes up most of the film.

"After his idyllic marriage has been broken up by his wife's father (a theme to recur in The Crowd), young architect John Trott leaves the small town of Ridgeville with only an orphan girl and her dog for company. Hoping to start a new life, he reports himself dead in the train crash he survives, and settles down in another town. Years later, he returns to find his wife remarried to a wastrel, whom he nevertheless tries to rescue from the river after a suicide attempt. (The motivation for the suicide is eccentric; after drawing his gun on Trott, the second husband feels his wife could no longer love him after such an act and throws himself into the river in remorse.) The husband dies, and John and Tilly are reunited. Except for a pleasant scene of a barbecue in the Ridgeville town square to celebrate the laying of a foundation stone, and the appearance of the lovely Madge Bellamy as the young wife, Love Never Dies is a routine work, though the dramatic use of rivers throughout the film marked a motif that was to become typical of Vidor's work."