The Mothering Heart
About The Mothering Heart
A young woman, played by Lillian Gish, tends a garden and saves a puppy. She marries a melancholy man, Joe. Money is tight. She takes in laundry. When he gets a good job he takes her to a restaurant with an Apache dance. She looks out of place. He starts an affair with a wealthy woman at the next table, who travels with a chauffeur. Pregnant, the wife finds a glove in his coat, follows him, and sees the affair. She goes to her mother's and has the baby. The other woman leaves Joe for a richer man. He comes to the house. She will not take him back. The child sickens and dies while Joe sits in the garden. She finds him mourning at the crib. They embrace.
Cast & crew
More about The Mothering Heart
D. W. Griffith directed. G. W. Bitzer photographed it. Biograph released it in the United States on 21 June 1913. It runs 23 minutes at 18 frames per second. Walter Miller plays Joe. Viola Barry plays the other woman. Kate Bruce plays the wife's mother. Charles Murray and Gertrude Bambrick dance the Apache. A print is at the Museum of Modern Art.
Themes
Making
Griffith sets the marriage, the restaurant, the mother's house, and the crib in one two-reel shape, and brings the couple back to the garden where the wife was first seen with the flowers.
Look
G. W. Bitzer photographed the garden, the laundry, the Apache-dance restaurant, and the crib.
Music
Silent.
Preservation
A print is in the Museum of Modern Art.
Notes
- The glove in the coat pocket is what sends her after him.
- Jennie Lee is a wash customer. Josephine Crowell collects ironing. Adolph Lestina plays the doctor.
- Charles West plays the richer man the other woman leaves with.
- The garden that opens the film is where she grieves and where he is sitting when the child dies.
- An Internet Archive copy is filed as TheMotheringHeard.
Scenes
- She finds another woman's glove in Joe's coat and follows him.
- At the restaurant she sits beside the Apache dancers in a plain dress.
- She comes in from the garden and finds him at the dead child's crib.
Also available
- Internet Archive (TheMotheringHeard)
- Wikimedia Commons (The Mothering Heart (1913).webm)
