THE GOLDEN CHANCE (1915)

Contrived, but effective meller from Cecil B. De Mille’s early days has a set-up he liked enough to reuse as a romantic comedy. (A servant girl who subs for refined society lady at an upper crust party has to maintain the deception when a young swell falls for her.) The comic variant, FORBIDDEN FRUIT/’21, is unusually relaxed moviemaking for C.B. and manages to fix up some of the story bumps, but taken together they certainly add dimension to what we think of as a typical De Mille pic. Cleo Ridgely makes for a surprisingly earthy leading lady, but the big kick is seeing Wallace Reid (one of the first casualties of the Hollywood drug culture) in his prime. Tall & ruggedly handsome (a young Sean Connery type), he makes a dashing hero for the dining room & the boudoir, or for giving out blows in the remarkably brutal tenement finale. Alvyn Wyckoff offers such outstanding lensing, you soon forget this is a 1915 production.