The wild and wonderful scenery of England's Pennine Moors is a gorgeous backdrop to Cecil Hepworth's excellent melodrama HELEN OF FOUR GATES, based on the 1917 novel by Ethel Carnie Holdsworth.
Alma Taylor stars as Helen, raised by a brutal father (James Carew) with a secret. He's set out to make the daughter as unhappy as he has been since he found out his bride was already pregnant.
She falls in love with a man (George Dewhurst) but he is driven off by the father with tales of family lunacy. He then cruelly bribes a tramp to marry the girl. But the father is dying and the boy comes back. How will it all end? Taylor is sensational as the wild child Helen with her gypsy beads and long hair blowing in the endless wind. Perched beside a brook or on a rocky crag, she is the personification of the countryside, and Hepworth superbly films the rolling hills and dales as a backdrop.
As noted, the intertitles are taken from the book and are in a dialect a little hard to read, but the viewer will catch on. Sadly this may be one of only four surviving features from Hepworth's silent film career. The film is a true treasure.
