Dinty is Wesley Barry, already a five-year veteran of Mary Pickford features and Ham & Bud shorts. He's a good-hearted street kid in San Francisco, taking care of tubercular mom Colleen Moore by selling papers on the street, too honest to take any money when he returns a lost wallet to city attorney Pat O'Malley, and leading a proto-"Our Gang" multi-racial collection of urchins against an older gang of nasty kids. When Judge J. Barney Sherry heads an investigation against Chinese opium smuggler Noah Beery, the villain responds by kidnapping Sherry's daughter, Marjorie Daw, imprisoning her in a Pit-and-the-Pendulum torture chamber and abandoning his wife, Anna May Wong, to flee to China with a White woman. Is it up to Wesley to save the day?
Marshall Neilan's feature is episodic in nature, veering from comedy sequences among the kids, to pathos with Miss Moore, to dated melodrama with the "serious" plot, but it hangs together astonishingly well for a century-old movie. Most of that can be attributed to the good-natured Irish-American blarney of the lighter moments and the good, casual-seeming acting of Master Barry -- it's only in his his darkest moments that I can see him clearly being directed. Miss Moore, before she adopted her trademark hairdo, shows off a wide variety of looks, from fresh-faced youngster to worn-out and dying woman, almost looking and acting like the person she is supposed to be.
The camerawork is not so good; in this period, a lot of features seemed to have the camera stuck in medium-long shot, as if afraid to show expressions or crowds, and this movie is no exception. However the movie has so many moments of fun and excitement, that anyone who takes an hour to look at it is sure to be charmed.
Marshall Neilan's feature is episodic in nature, veering from comedy sequences among the kids, to pathos with Miss Moore, to dated melodrama with the "serious" plot, but it hangs together astonishingly well for a century-old movie. Most of that can be attributed to the good-natured Irish-American blarney of the lighter moments and the good, casual-seeming acting of Master Barry -- it's only in his his darkest moments that I can see him clearly being directed. Miss Moore, before she adopted her trademark hairdo, shows off a wide variety of looks, from fresh-faced youngster to worn-out and dying woman, almost looking and acting like the person she is supposed to be.
The camerawork is not so good; in this period, a lot of features seemed to have the camera stuck in medium-long shot, as if afraid to show expressions or crowds, and this movie is no exception. However the movie has so many moments of fun and excitement, that anyone who takes an hour to look at it is sure to be charmed.
