The Godless Girl is a drama film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, shown for years as his last completely silent film.
Plot
This drama features a romance between two different teenagers: a young atheist girl, Judith Craig, and the male head of a Christianyouth organization, Bob Hathaway. The two leaders and their groups attack each other, starting a riot that kills a young girl. Followed by a goofy boy, Bozo, the three are thrown into a juvenile prison with a cruel head guard and bad living conditions. The film maker makes a point of talking about the truth of prison cruelty in the middle of the movie. Bob, who is in love with Judy, eventually rescues her and takes shelter in an old farm where Judy, breath-taken by the romance and beauty of the forest, realizes there must be a God. They are found and taken back to prison and held in solitary confinement until a fire breaks out. Mame is Judy's new friend who is trying to get her out before she burns. But the rest of the prison girls escape. Bob, who is trusting in God to help them, finally rescues Judy with the help of Mame and Bozo; they also rescue the cruel head guard who pleads for his life and, as he is dying, sets them free for their kind act and rescue. At the very end, Bozo and Mame seem to end up together while Bob and Judy and their rekindled faith ride off together as the movie ends.
The UCLA Film and Television Archive later restored the film's sound version, in which dialogue scenes were added to the final reel, a film that was one of DeMille's first part-sound efforts. Actor Fritz Feld filmed the sound sequences without DeMille's supervision since DeMille had already broken his contract with Pathé, and signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The title character is based on Queen Silver, a child prodigy and socialist orator who was accused of leaving atheist pamphlets in student lockers at Hollywood High School in 1927. The lead actress, Lina Basquette, named her autobiography, Lina: DeMille's Godless Girl, after the film.
Reception
The film was very popular in the U.S.S.R. and in Germany. The film’s popularity in the Soviet Union is believed in part to be due to the fact that the USSR’s film censors edited out the main character’s conversion to Christianity near the end of the movie. It was a box office disaster in the US. When released in August 1928 in its silent film version, it was not a success. DeMille attributed the film’s failure to its already outmoded position in the transition from silent to sound cinema. Nor did it recover more than two-third of its production costs when released in a so-called "goat gland" version with the addition of a final talkie reel in 1929.
