The Godless Girl
About The Godless Girl
Judy Craig forms a high-school atheist club, The Godless Society, and Bob Hathaway, head of a Christian student group, leads a mob that breaks up a meeting. A railing gives way and a girl falls to her death. Judy, Bob, and their classmate Bozo are convicted of manslaughter and sent to a reformatory that separates the boys and girls with barbed wire and an electric fence. Judy's friend Mame helps them escape; on a farm where they hide, Judy comes to believe there is a God. After they are dragged back, a fire starts when a cat knocks over a lamp, and Bob pulls Judy and the head guard out of the burning building before the dying guard lets them go.
Cast & crew
More about The Godless Girl
Cecil B. DeMille produced and directed for DeMille Pictures Corp., and Pathé Exchange distributed. Jeanie MacPherson wrote the story, continuity, and dialogue, and she and Beulah Marie Dix wrote the titles, with Frank Urson and Curt Rehfeld as assistant directors. After DeMille left Pathé for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Fritz Feld shot the talking scenes Pathé added; researchers had already collected affidavits on reform-school water torture, chains, ropes, straitjackets, and bloodhounds.
Themes
Background
DeMille made it after The King of Kings. He had looked at a T. E. Lawrence story, dropped it because the rights were too expensive, and turned to reform schools and a fight between student atheists and a Christian group. Anne Bauchens edited the film.
Making
For the climax DeMille burned the reformatory set designed by Mitchell Leisen, and extras were sprayed with asbestos.
Reviews
A New York Times critic described a story that runs from ludicrous slapstick into a burning reformatory as intense as movie depictions of the French Revolution, broken by vapid religious warnings, including crosses burnt into the heroine's palms.
Audiences
DeMille wrote in his autobiography that a 1931 Soviet showing, with the reel of Judy's return to faith left out, was taken there as a film about American police brutality.
Look
J. Peverell Marley was director of photography, with additional photography by J. F. Westerberg. A camera platform rode a monorail over the reformatory set.
Music
The part-talkie uses RCA Photophone for dialogue, effects, and score, with English intertitles still in the print. The theme song is "Love (All I Want Is Love)," by Josiah Zuro and Charles Weinberg.
Preservation
UCLA restored the sound version, including the dialogue scenes in the last reel. In 2007 Photoplay Productions, George Eastman House, the Cecil B. DeMille Foundation, and Film4 restored DeMille's nitrate print and accompanied it with a modern score.
Notes
- A silent version premiered at the Biltmore Theatre in Los Angeles on 20 August 1928. The sound version opened at the Cameo Theatre in New York on 31 March 1929.
- Tom Keene, as Bob Hathaway, was billed as George Duryea. Lina Basquette plays Judy, Marie Prevost plays Mame, Eddie Quillan plays Bozo, Mary Jane Irving is the girl who falls, and Noah Beery is the head guard.
- The silent cut ran about 9,019 feet. The release print is 9,328 feet, twelve reels.
- The American Association for the Advancement of Atheism objected to the working title The Atheist, according to Variety of 2 November 1927.
- The club at the school was suggested by a 1927 atheist group at Hollywood High School led by Queen Silver.
- Robert Young appears uncredited as a student. Clarence Slifer won a Screenland contest to work as an assistant cameraman to Peverell Marley.
- Lina Basquette had been a Ziegfeld dancer and was briefly married to Sam Warner.
Scenes
- The staircase railing collapses during the fight and the girl falls.
- Bob is shocked on the electric fence while he is holding Judy's hand.
- A cat tips an oil lamp and the reformatory catches fire.
Influenced by
- Reports of abuse in American reform schools
- A 1927 atheist club at Hollywood High School
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (The Godless Girl (1928) by Cecil B. DeMille.webm)
