Hearts of the World has unquestionably the most tangled origins of any film Griffith ever made. Following Intolerance, widely seen as a pacifist film, Griffith was commissioned by the British War Office to create a film that would encourage America's entry into the First World War. The film that emerged became Griffith's war spectacular, an epic family melodrama with war front footage (real and faked), historic tableaux, and lurid war atrocities. Lillian Gish and Robert Harron star as two American expatriates who fall in love just as Germans invade France and bombard their village. Dorothy Gish costars in one of only two features she ever made with her sister.