Lost Illusions (1911) User Reviews

Her Just Deserts

[boblipton · 7/10 · 3 October 2016]

Lois Weber has a child with Phillip Smalley, but when a rich city man asks her, she gives up the day-to-day drudgery and runs away with him. In the end, everyone must pay for her failure in this short film from Rex.

After he left -- or was pushed out of -- Edison's movie division, Edwin S. Porter formed a new company, Rex, to produce his pictures. His association with the company did not last long, but he did bring in Weber and Smalley, who produced pictures that told their stories of women's issues innovatively and well.

As does does this one. Weber's abandonment of husband and child is not handled as a heartless woman who must pay for her melodramatic sins. She is clearly overwhelmed by work and responsibility and everyone suffers as a result. It may seem a tiny distinction, but for the era, it was huge.

The picture has much of interest, is well-knit and intelligently acted

[deickemeyer · 23 April 2016]

Nell lived in a forest cabin with her father and has a forest lover, but an artist spends the summer in the neighborhood and she falls in love with him. He returns to the East. Two years later, when the father dies. Nell marries the forest lover, who sells his claim and takes her to the East. Nell's clothes humiliate her and she buys much fine raiment. She meets the artist. After a tense scene or two, her husband leaves her and returns to his cabin alone. The girl finds that the artist is married. She loses an illusion. Returning home, she is wounded by her husband, who takes her for an intruder. This is the cause of a reconciliation. The picture has much of interest, is well- knit and intelligently acted. The subject is sensational; that is its chief drawback. - The Moving Picture World, October 14, 1911

The PRICE - previouskly incorrectly identified film in EYE archive

[kekseksa · 5 October 2016]

The review that appears here is of a film preserved in the EYE institute under this title. It was wrongly identified as Lost Illusions but has since been correctly identified as The Price (1911).

Lost Illusions was a film about an unmarried country girl who falls in love with a visiting young artist. She subsequently marries a countryman but persuades her husband to take her to town so that she can seek out the man she still loves. He however is married and rejects her and so at first does her husband, when she returns to him, although they are eventually reconciled.

The EYE film concerns a young married couple in the country, who have a young child. The wife is seduced by a city-man and goes off to become his mistress, abandoning husband and child. She at first enjoys considerable social success but her lover tires of her and she endured the usual fate of the fallen woman (poverty and sickness). In the meantime, back in the country, her child has died but the husband remains heart-broken. When the doctor lets him know of his wife's approaching death, he rushes to town but only arrives in time to witness her decease.