A peculiar, rather sick story – but what a beautiful looking film! John Noble made several films in Florida, and he exploits the scenery even more impressively in Song of the Soul than in his Ethel Barrymore film, The Call of Her People (1917). The scenario, however, is grim. Adopted from a William Locke story – the writer of Stella Maris – its sickly sentimentality sticks out as exceptional. Silents may have been sentimental from time to time, but they were seldom as lurid as this. (Oddly enough, last year at Cinema Ritrovato we saw Murnau Der Gang in die Nacht which had a remarkably similar situation – except that the doctor cures a stranger of blindness, putting him up in his own house, and the stranger falls in love with the doctor’s beloved mistress).

Kevin Brownlow