Robert Vaughn

A canal boat captain disowns his daughter when she marries a circus performer. Years later he is reunited with the granddaughter he never knew.

As heiress to a large fortune, Marguerite is able to satisfy her love for beautiful clothes and a taste for adventure, while confronted by a multitude of schemers and gangsters bent on reducing her to poverty.

A small town marshal’s secret past as an outlaw comes back to haunt him when an old associate shows up and threatens to expose his former dark deeds.

Unable to agree on the man responsible for the plays commonly attributed to William Shakespeare, Miss Gray, who favors Francis Bacon, and Lieutenant Stanton, who accepts Shakespeare as the author, break off their engagement. Stanton then arranges to be transferred to the Mexican border, and while fighting there is badly wounded. When she hears the news about Stanton's condition, Miss Gray faints, and then dreams that she has been transported to Elizabethan times. Then, after Bacon falls in love with her, she discovers his obsessive jealousy of Shakespeare, and learns that he has bribed a courtier to accuse him of stealing Bacon's plays. As a result, when Miss Gray wakes up, she realizes that she has championed the wrong poet, and so she immediately is reconciled with Stanton, who soon recovers from his wound.

Margery Carew and her widowed sister, Anna Prentice, find work in a brokerage firm, James Gray, the junior partner, soon falls in love with Margery, while his boss, William Cleves, does his best to seduce Anna. In fighting off William's advances, Anna kills him, but Margery, hoping to protect Anna's child, takes the blame and then escapes to the West, after which she gets married and begins a new life. Following a lengthy search, the police manage to track her down, but Margery still refuses to save herself by telling the truth about the murder, even though Anna and her child died several years before in a car crash. Finally, however, because he still loves her and because he has been stricken by a deadly disease that will kill him in a few months, James confesses to the murder, thereby freeing Margery to return to her husband.

The production vindicated the new feature-length movie format by restoring several characters, plot complications, and atmosphere that had been truncated in Thanhouser’s 1910 version of less than one-sixth the length.

The Thanhouser Co. has reissued a number of its surviving films on video. FIRES OF YOUTH existed at around 52 minutes in its original release. A shortened version running just over 31 minutes has survived at the George Eastman House and has now been released by Thanhouser. Jeanne Eagels does well as the neglected young daughter in a factory town. She appears in 22 scenes and delivers a sensitive performance.

When Miriam Smith's devoutly religious aunt and uncle insist that she marry pious Simeon Althoff, she answers an ad in a matrimonial newspaper and runs away to New York to meet her correspondent. Upon learning that Miles Sprague, the man in the ad, is coming to claim her, Miriam gets cold feet and begs her experienced friend Kittie Swasher, the hotel telephone operator, for help. When Miles arrives, Kittie pretends that she is Miriam and the three go to a cabaret. Meanwhile, the detectives employed by Miriam's aunt and uncle to bring her home appear and arrest Kittie, thinking that she's Miriam. Simeon arrives soon after and identifies the real Miriam, who is then taken home and locked in her room. Kittie and Miles follow and rescue Miriam, who realizes that she has fallen in love with the man from her ad.