Kattiera Nana I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

JinRoz For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

preppy-3 Norma Shearer plays two roles here. One is Florence Benning who was bought up in a privilege's life. The other is the polar opposite--Molly Helmer who is introduced leaving reform school! She's dating nice but stupid Chunky Dunn (George K. Arthur). Then Molly meets handsome David Page (Malcolm McGregor) who likes her...as a friend. He then meets Florence and falls for HER! It ends pretty predictably.This is well-done. There are quite a few nice directorial touches her and there and Shearer is great in BOTH roles...but there's nothing new here. It was done before and has been done since. This one at least DOES run quick (a little over an hour). It's also fun to see Shearer in a silent picture--I thought she only did talkies! So worth catching for Shearer fans but no great shakes.

hcoursen The strength of this one is the way the camera tells the story -- beautifully. The film justifies the artistry often claimed for silent films. The weakness of the film is the story itself. It starts out like "A Place in the Sun" (George Stevens' great film of 1951), with an ambitious young man loved by a lower class woman and an aristocrat. Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy,'on which the Stevens film was based was published in the year of 'Woman of the Night' (1925). But the film becomes conventional, when Molly decides that Chunky will at least be a lot of laughs. The fact that the two women do look alike, in spite of the makeup and garish costumes that Norma's Molly wears, is not exploited. The "double story" a la 'Dorian Gray,' 'Jeykll and Hyde,' Poe's 'William Wilson,' Dostoyevski's 'The Double,' James' 'Jolly Corner,' and Conrad's 'The Duel' is not told, so there's no point in having Shearer play both women. In fact, Joan Crawford, who must have just changed her name from Lucille LeSueur, plays Molly when the two women are on screen. I wonder how Crawford felt later, when Shearer got all the parts that Thalberg bought for her during the early days of talkies. Crawford told us when she commented on Shearer and Howard in the 1936 'Romeo and Juliet': "I couldn't wait for those two old turkeys to die -- could you?"

movingpicturegal Norma Shearer is terrific playing a dual role in this well-done silent film about two women - Molly, the daughter of a convict and Florence, the daughter of the judge who sentenced him. Molly of the heavily painted face, huge feather hat, and big beaded necklace, lives in a flat on the wrong side of the tracks and goes out with a little local named Chunky. But while out at the nearby dance hall she meets a handsome, crooked grinned lug named Dave Page, who she instantly falls in love with. Dave has invented, of all things, a device that can open any safe in the world - encouraged by Molly to "not go crooked", he sells the invention to the judge and a group of bank directors, and soon literally bumps into Florence - and into a love of his own! Poor, poor Molly.Norma Shearer is so good in this, the characters of Molly and Florence completely seem like two different women, and excellent split screen photography is used here when they are both on screen at the same time. I thought there would be something in this about the fact that the two are lookalikes, perhaps switching places or something - never happens. The fact they look alike is just not part of the plot here. The lighting is done in an interesting way in this - Norma as Florence seems to be shot in more filtered, subtle lighting and she looks very lovely - Norma as Molly is severely lit to make her look more sharp and, boy oh boy, does the thick makeup she wears as this character look really harsh - she looks almost like a prostitute here. The print of this film looked gorgeous, full of sharp contrast, and brightly tinted in sepia/orange, pink, and blue shades. The piano score for this, done by Jon Mirsalis, is wonderful and matches the story well.

mgconlan-1 This is a pretty straightforward silent romantic melodrama, and it's unclear why Norma Shearer was cast in a dual role when the two characters are not related and there's nothing in the plot that requires them to look at all alike, but it's made interesting by the excellent performance Shearer turns in as Molly. Florence is a typical goody-good Shearer characterization but Molly is a much more fascinating character, not really a "bad" girl but a young woman who's living by her wits, close enough to the underworld to be involved with a shady character like "Chunky" Dunn but decent enough to steer the hero away from criminal temptations. Beautifully made up and costumed (those feathers in her hat seem to have a life of their own!), Shearer as Molly turns in a sensitive performance, alive to the pathos of the character: it's a real pity she didn't make more films playing roles like this instead of the impossibly good heroines (like Florence in this film) for which she became known. (Incidentally the print I saw on Turner Classic Movies ran only 64 minutes and did not contain a two-strip Technicolor sequence — a real pity since I like the look of two-strip and am always glad when I can see a well-preserved example of it.)