The Love Light (Mary Pickford Corporation, United Artists, 1920, released 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 18) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’s “Silent Sunday Showcase,” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart (an African-American woman whose presence on TCM is welcome proof that you don’t have to be either white or male to be a film geek), called The Love Light. It was filmed in 1920, though not released until 1921, and was a co-production between two powerful and influential Hollywood women: Mary Pickford, producer and star; and Frances Marion, director and writer. Charles and I had watched it together before off a videotape I’d recorded from TCM when the film was in an earlier stage of restoration: the current print runs about 100 minutes (the previous restoration was 89) and was pieced together from a partially decomposed print in the U.S. and another print preserved in Europe. (Silent films were frequently shot in duplicate: one negative for the U.S. and one for Europe and the rest of the world. Also, the European versions contained just one frame of each intertitle so the English titles could easily be removed and replaced with titles in the language of the country where that version was to be released.) Pickford and Marion were such good friends that when they both got married in 1920 – Pickford to Douglas Fairbanks and Marion to actor Fred Thomson – they honeymooned together in Italy, where Pickford and Marion heard a true-life story which became the basis for this film. The Love Light is set just before, during, and just after World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II) and it begins as a bucolic, pastoral comedy set in a small village on the Italian coastline just before the war begins. Angela Carlotti (Mary Pickford) is a farm girl and keeper of the local lighthouse who lives with her parents and two brothers, Antonio (Jean De Briac) and Mario (Eddie Phillips). Angelo is a hard worker; Mario is a cut-up who in one of the film’s most remarkable scenes is such a contortionist he’s able literally to wrap himself around a chair. There are some quite good, charming scenes as well as some gags that suggest Mary Pickford was, in her subtle way, potentially one of the screen’s great comediennes.

There are also scenes with a local couple, Pietro (Alberto Pisco) and Maria (Evelyn Duomo), whom Angela adopts as role models for the sort of happiness she hopes to have some day with a man. And there’s a man named Giovanni (Raymond Bloomer) who has an unrequited crush on Angela and literally serenades her from afar. (It’s a testament to Frances Marion’s skill as a filmmaker that we get the point without sound.) Then the war starts and Antonio, Mario, Giovanni, and Pietro all set off to fight. Angela rescues a fleeing man named Joseph (Fred Thomson) who passes himself off as an American who got left behind when his ship set off to sea again after a particularly rambunctious leave in Genoa. (Remember that in World War I, unlike World War II, the U.S. and Italy were on the same side.) Angela is working as a lighthouse keeper, and Joseph, who has married her secretly (the local priest, Father Lorenzo – played by a quite distinguished-looking elderly actor regrettably unidentified on imdb.com – officiates the ceremony and is the only person in the town besides Angela and Joseph who know it’s taken place), implores her to demonstrate her love by flashing a signal from the lighthouse at midnight using Morse code for the letters “I LOVE YOU.” What neither she nor we know quite yet is that Joseph isn’t an American, but a German, and the real reason he wanted Angela to flash the lighthouse signal was to let a German submarine know that an Italian ship carrying wounded soldiers was about to dock nearby so they could sink it. Already Angela was reeling from the death of her brother Antonio in combat, and she really freaks out when she realizes that her brother Mario was on the troop ship the Germans sank, thanks to her signal, so in effect she’s responsible for his death. The townspeople chase Joseph and he falls to his death off a cliff, but Angela soon learns that she is pregnant with Joseph’s child.

The shock of her responsibility for Mario’s death sends her spiraling into a nervous breakdown, though the routine of caring for her baby, a daughter, gradually brings her back to sanity. The next complication arises when Maria, already grieving from the death of Pietro in combat, loses the baby son they had together. Maria hatches a plot to grab Angela’s baby by persuading the nuns who seem to run the village’s whole health care system that Angela’s too crazy to be entrusted with a child, so they should take the baby away from her and give it to Maria. Maria’s sufficiently off the deep end herself that she treats the baby as if it were her long-lost son and doesn’t seem to notice the gender difference. When Angela comes home and notices her baby gone, she starts putting two and two together. Maria is so determined to keep Angela’s baby that she and Tony (Georges Regas, just about the only person in this film besides Pickford who lasted into the sound era, albeit mostly as a character villain) plot an escape to Genoa, only they sail into a huge storm which acts as a deus ex machina. Ultimately their boat is shipwrecked, and Angela literally burns down her own house because the lighthouse fails on the precise night it’s most needed as a beacon. Tony and Maria are both killed in the shipwreck, but the baby survives and Angela stages an heroic rescue of her daughter. The film ends with yet another deus ex machina in the form of Angela’s old friend Giovanni (ya remember Giovanni?) turns up, alive but blinded from the war. Giovanni declares his love for Angela, who tells him that she will be his eyes from then on, and this weirdly co-dependent relationship is what passes for a happy ending.

The Love Light got mixed reviews at the time; a print ad in the Urbana Daily Democrat called the film “a thing so exquisite, so rich in detail, so full of human pathos and lovely comedy, that we do not hesitate to recommend it to our patrons as the greatest success in Miss Pickford’s remarkable career.” A more objective reviewer, Burns Mantle, wrote in Photoplay, “The Love Light is a poor picture in the sense of being quite unworthy of the star's talents. The story is developed without reasonable logic and filmed with only the value of the pictures in mind. The Love Light's one value to my mind is that it takes the nation's sweetheart out of curls and short frocks and makes a woman of her.” That last was a sore point with Mary Pickford, who when The Love Light was made was 28 years old and was getting royally tired of playing children on screen. In 1925 she desperately published an appeal in a movie magazine asking her fans what roles she should play from then on, and got exactly the opposite response from the one she was hoping for. One woman fan even wrote in and said something along the lines of, “It gives me great pleasure to see you portraying a child even though I know you are an adult woman.” When Charles and I first saw The Love Light in an earlier stage of the film’s restoration, my reaction was that if I hadn’t known that the director and the writer were the same person, I would have given the director credit for taming the unreasonable melodramatics of the script. This time around I liked the film considerably better; it could be used as a model for three-act structure by teachers of courses for aspiring screenwriters, and its understated but unmistakable anti-war message is communicated powerfully. This was a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans were convinced that our entry into World War I had been a mistake foisted on us by British propaganda, and films like The Love Light (even though it was a box-office disappointment on its initial release and Frances Marion got to make only two more films as director, though she’d be strongly in demand as a writer and would win back-to-back Academy Awards for screenwriting for The Big House, 1930; and The Champ, 1931) make it clear the source behind the isolationism that gripped so much of the American population it bedeviled President Franklin Roosevelt between 1939 and 1941, as he saw the imminent threat from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan but was at his wit’s end trying to figure out how to drag a recalcitrant America into the next world war.