The restoration of this movie had its Turner Classic Movies premiere, and I have spent a pleasant couple of hours looking at it. It stars Lillian Gish as Annie Laurie ... but it is more accurate to say that it co-stars Miss Gish and Norman Kerry as Ian MacDonald in one of those I-love-you-I-hate-you plots that was often used while some minor event was taking place, like World War II or the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, to give the movie a little gravitas. Here it's the Massacre of Glencoe, laid here entirely to the perfidy of the Campbells, led by Hobart Bosworth. Look it up if you care to know what it was. In this movie it's an excuse for a bang-up battle sequence at the very end, made possible by Miss Gish being shot, but still scrambling to the top of a hill with a bloodthirsty highlander close behind her, trying to stop her setting alight the signal that will call the the MacDonalds to save their embattled chieftain. Will she succeed? Will the lovers survive for a final two-strip Technicolor sequence?
Miss Gish decried her comedic abilities as "Funny as a barrel of dead babies", but she has a very funny sequence, in which, as mistress of her father's house, she is very full of herself as she prepares the place for a peace meeting between the clans. At other times she runs through her gamut of serious emotions, and does very well with them, thank you. Kerry is boisterous and charming in the early part of the movie, trying to buckle his swashes (whatever those are) like Fairbanks or Milton Sills. The rest of it has the usual late-silent players -- Creighton Hale, Patricia Avery, and Russell Simpson playing their parts very well. Although it appears to have been shot entirely on sets, director John S. Robinson does an impeccable job. Alas, it didn't do well at the box office.
I should mention Robert Israel's score, full of traditional Scottish airs and occasional bagpipes. He shows a dab hand at his job, as might be expected, with the title tune occasionally bringing a tear to my eye, and not just in pain at hearing the pipes.
