Jon Mirsalis on Piano Cecil B. DeMille followed the success of King of Kings with something that purported to be its antithesis; but The Godless Girl (originally entitled The Atheist) did for atheism what Samson and Delilah did for lions. Lina Basquette, when asked to describe her role, said, "I am the Joan of Arc of atheism." She portrays the teenager Judith Craig, daughter of an atheist and founder of her high school's Godless Society. A riot led by a stalwart Christian lad, Bob (George Duryea), results in both Bob and Judith being sent to a reformatory. From this point on The Godless Girl becomes a Dickensian portrait of reformatory-style child abuse, with the youths being virtually tortured for the slightest infraction by a devilish Noah Beery. Mitchell Leisen designed the grimly realistic sets and Peverell Marley shot the film with one camera-and an ingenious maze of dollies and trams. The climactic fire-achieved by actually burning down the set, to the extreme danger of the teenage actors-would have been enough to give anyone renewed faith in Divine Providence, which was DeMille's goal not only for his heroine, but his audience as well. Lest today's audience find, in The Godless Girl's ferver against communist-atheist propaganda in our high schools, yet another example of the quaintness of our immediate ancestors, here is an excerpt from the 1929 Variety review: "(The film) may jibe with the sentiments of the fundamentalists in the more remote localities, but many intelligent churchmen will resent its bogus moralizing...(Its) insistent interpolation of Pollyanna twaddle blunts the sharp lines of the attempted photograph of conditions."