The Love Pirate (1915)
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Collection: Moving Picture World, February 1915
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Fay Tincher | Raoul Walsh | Elmer Clifton
Rest of cast:
Beulah Burns | Bobby Ray | Frankie Newman | Theodosia Harris (Story)
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“The Love Pirate”
Two-Reel Reliance presenting woman’s character from a utilitarian standpoint.
Reviewed by Louis Reeves Harrison.
Cast.
Viola… Fay Tincher
The Magnate… Raoul A. Walsh
The Young Clubman… Elmer Clifton
Without touching upon woman’s enfranchisement, The Love Pirate unconsciously raises a question of concession. Without depreciating noble women. and without belittling our ideals of womanhood, the story points out a very common weakness that is liable to remain a serious weakness in the gentle sex until they are given equal opportunity with men from babyhood. The very childishness that strong men often admire in women, possibly because such women are nearer to the children they bring into the world, is coincident with an inability to think logically, and liberty might not mean greater freedom of thought to such creatures but merely an enlargement of her range of caprice.
It is not at all strange that women who strongly attract men, whether by “fatal beauty” or by a peculiar fascination that makes her an easy medium for male hypnotism should live lives replete with adventure. The very lack of consciousness of what she is doing, sometimes ascribed to innocence, in her relations with men, is a sort of passivity, with which she receives affection from parents, relatives and friends, without apparent perception that she is merely a recipient, without, in contact with a lover, perception of wrong. This difficult portrayal is attempted in The Love Pirate and more delicately than adequately treated.
Viola Marsh discovers while at school that she strongly attracts strong boys. They fight for her, struggle for her preference. Her passive acceptance of the masculine point of view as to her value persists after she leaves school. She becomes the stenographer of a married man, one happy in his family relations, and her susceptibility is so great that she cannot act in opposition to it. She has no desire to destroy the happiness of his wife and child, but her opinions have become incorporated with his, and the very consciousness of her weakness rejoices in triumph over his slavery. He ruins himself for her and passes easily out of memory when she elopes with the next admirer. No real knowledge of what her course should be has appeared in her experience and it must come from the outside to affect one of her limited comprehension.
In a life of luxury she discovers among her servants a newcomer, the first admirer, driven by desperate poverty to become a valet. She becomes hysterical under the menace of his presence in the house. “I intended no harm,” is her self-defense. “It is all forced upon me.” She is incapable of understanding that she has wronged anyone until a letter from the first man’s wife falls into her possession. It tells of desperate poverty and misery. Viola is moved by a compassionate impulse to help the wife, and at last a conscience is awakened in her being.
The leading role is admirably impersonated by Miss Fay Tincher, and the story, self-defense. “It is all forced upon me.” She is incapable in spite of much constructive commonplace, will prove interesting.
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Collection: Moving Picture World, February 1915
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see also