A rare Pathécolor print of an elegant and lyric film by Balboa Company, Long Beach (CA), has been discovered in the Cinemathèque Française: The Company produced features for Pathé Exchange. A girl and three men, from three different social classes: the worker (kind-hearted and honest), the middle-class man (good and learned), the wealthy (the decadent villain). Innocence seduced by luxury, only the young woman’s sense of honour comes to the rescue, and the timely appearance of the good-hearted worker wrenching her from the nabob’s claws in the timeless combat between good and evil. The happy end is reserved to the middle-class man, as the girl weds the young doctor.

A former artist’s model and chorus girl, blonde Jackie Saunders was, like so many of her contemporaries, discovered by D.W. Griffith. She didn’t remain with Griffith and the Biograph company for long, however, instead signing a contract with the Balboa company of Long Beach, CA. The little company embarked on a heavy advertising campaign and by 1914 she was widely known as the “Maid of Long Beach” or the “Little Sunbeam,” the latter from her starring role in a three-reel melodrama of that title. She became an important box-office draw with The Will o’ the Wisp (1914), in which her evil stepfather sells her to a scoundrel, and some reviewers compared her favorably to Mary Pickford.

Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide