Hearts Adrift (1914)

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Mary Pickford | Harold Lockwood | Edwin S. Porter (Director | Cinematographer)

Rest of cast:

Mary Pickford (Writer) | Cyrus Townsend Brady (Story) | Daniel Frohman (Presenter)

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“Hearts Adrift”

Miss Pickford, under the direction of Edwin S. Porter, appears in a superb four-part Famous Players subject.

Reviewed by George Blaisdell.

Miss Pickford triumphs again. Sharing with her in the honors of Hearts Adrift, a four-part subject released by the Famous Players on February 10th, is Edwin S. Porter, the producer of the picture. The backgrounds are remarkable for natural beauty; and the photography will delight the eye of the connoisseur. The story is told in the primitive outdoors, and by the sea. Back from the beach rise great caved cliffs. From their elevation we look down at times on the gently rolling surf; at others we are among the rocks with angry waves breaking at the bottom of the screen. Some scenes there are of civilization — of spacious stuccoed homes, surrounded by lawn and garden. There are few titles — it is said there are but 100 feet of them in the four parts — and we could read the story with even less.

In this “romance of tangled lives” it is always Little Mary that holds our interest. There are others in the cast, as there must be, but the sympathy is with Nina, the half-wild maid. In her abbreviated garb of skins she bounds from rock to rock with the agility of the chamois, and along the beach she runs with the light-footed speed of a deer. The hardships of her five years’ battle for existence on the island have converted her into a half-savage. With a rod she spears fish. Yet she is always intensely feminine, “with the heart and hopes of a woman.” There is the love of companionship as exemplified in her friendship with the wolf and later in her coy demeanor toward the man so strangely sent into her life.

A child of perhaps a dozen years is cast upon an island. Five years later she finds on the beach the figure of a man, cast up by the waves. He had escaped from a burning yacht. Nina brings water and fruit to the nearly dead man, but keeps away from him. As he revives he discovers a footprint, then he catches a glimpse of the girl, but he is not able to find her. There is a pursuit; there are several, in fact, when he does locate Nina, but it is not until she falls exhausted with terror at the sight of a volcano in eruption that he reaches her side. Jack had a wife when he set sail on the yacht. She had left the burning craft on the first boat. As time elapses the man tells Nina they must marry, and a ceremony is performed by the two. A child comes to Nina. Jack confesses to the mother of his little one that he had been married. When one day he sees a vessel in the distance he signals it. A boat comes ashore, and he goes down on the beach and meets his wife, who had interested the government in her husband’s disappearance. Nina takes her child and climbs to the edge of the crater of the smoldering volcano. Jack and his wife, come to the cliff to find Nina, are too late to prevent her jumping with her babe into the depths.

A simple story, is it not? Yet, from first to last, it holds tight. Nina’s first appearance in the likeness of Little Mary is where she breaks through thickly-leaved bushes and discovers a wolf. Her attempt to escape and her later effort to establish friendship with the animal thrill. The beast comes slowly to her. His tail is as inflexible as that of a bird-indicating pointer’s. He seems about to tear her to pieces. The fast friendship is broken by the fatal injury of the beast. The grief of Nina as she falls on the grave of the animal brings the first touch of pathos in the picture.

Nina’s discovery of the unconscious man on the beach is dramatic. There is a bit of comedy as the two, each seeking the other and on their hands and knees, come face to face at the side of a boulder. It is a real pursuit that ensues. Nina runs along the beach, and when she finds the stranger is gaining on her she plunges into the surf and outswims him. Later Jack, from the cliff, sees the elflike Nina dancing on the sand and playing with and talking to her shadow. When Nina relents and decides to approach the strange being it is with the absolute disregard of womankind in general for selecting the psychological moment. Jack is thinking of his wife and spurns the girl. Days later, however, when he sees far down the beach, hundreds of feet away, a tiny figure dancing in the sunlight, he tries to catch up with Nina, but she eludes him.

There is comedy and drama as the two marry themselves. In spite of her stone age surroundings, Nina develops advanced suffragette symptoms. To one of Jack’s questions her swaying head signals an emphatic negative. Did he ask her to obey? The mirth is chilled as we see the figure of Jack’s wife come between the two. In fact, the memory of the wife is ever present in Jack’s mind. His active conscience is responsible for abrupt behavior toward Nina, who, on one of these occasions, goes to the grave of her wolf, and to the little mound of sand tells her troubles. Did she whisper to the beast, in the words of someone else, that the more she saw of men the better she liked dogs?

There is not space adequate to describe the last reel. It is crowded with dramatic situations, with deep appeal in all of them. Reference has been made to backgrounds and photography. Many of the scenes are as animated paintings. The views of the ocean, some with the camera pointing toward the sun, the waves reflecting the rays, are exceptional. Hearts Adrift is the first production of the Famous Players on the Pacific Coast. It is a picture of beauty, of power.

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Nina repulses the Shipwrecked Stranger

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Collection: Moving Picture World, February 1914