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The Tear That Burned
(1914) United States of America
B&W : Two reels
Directed by Jack O’Brien (John B. O’Brien)
Cast: Lillian Gish [Anita, the truant], Blanche Sweet [Meg, the wild girl], Josephine Crowell [the blind mother], John Dillon (John T. Dillon) [the father], W.A. Lowery (William Lowery) [Chinatown Madden], Mae Gaston [the mother’s maid]
The Majestic Motion Picture Company production; distributed by Mutual Film Corporation. / From a screen story by Anthony Paul Kelly. / Released 8 November 1914. / Standard 35mm spherical 1.33:1 format.
Drama.
Synopsis: [?] [From The Moving Picture World]? Meg was one of the “painted women,” who had got to the point where she did not care. Anita, her room-mate, on her death-bed told the cadet who managed them both about her old blind mother in another state who recently had come into a small fortune, and how she had kept hoping to go back home, but now it was too late. After the burial, the cadet told Meg that he had money in sight. She was to go with him and impersonate Anita. When she had won the confidence of the blind old woman, they would make a rich haul, and then go and live straight together. Anita’s mother welcomed her long-lost daughter, as she supposed Meg to be, and everything that she had to give she showered upon this hardened woman of the underworld. Every night she would go to her bedside and her tears of joy burned into Meg's calloused heart. Delay on the girl’s part angered the cadet. When Meg confessed to him that she could not bring herself to defraud the love-hungry old woman who called her “daughter,” he threatened to expose her and give her over to the law. But a burglar, escaping from the police, ran across the cadet’s path and the latter stopped the bullet. He was a stranger with an unsavory reputation. Nobody cared. And Meg heard the news with a deeper feeling than mere joy. Her past was dead. And there was the old blind mother to live for and love.
Survival status: (unknown)
Current rights holder: Public domain [USA].
Listing updated: 27 January 2025.
References: Drew-Speaking p. 286; Weaver-Twenty p. 146 : Website-IMDb.
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