D. W. Griffith's last commercial and critical success is a sublime example of his art, combining the intimacy of Broken Blossoms with the spectacle of Birth of a Nation to tell the story of two orphan girls who are separated by circumstance and become caught up in the tide of the French Revolution. Lillian and Dorothy Gish star as the two sisters, one sighted, one blind, who suffer through innumerable misadventures and near-misses before they are finally reunited. Eileen Bowser writes for The Museum of Modern Art, “The first half (of the film) is crammed with incident: a murder, kidnappings, orgies, duels, last-minute escapes and finally a pathetic scene in which Lillian Gish hears the adopted blind sister she has been searching for singing in the streets--a scene so powerful that spectators later thought they had actually heard the girl sing. The second half of the film...rises to even greater magnificence as it portrays the Revolution itself. The...storming of the Bastille, the masses surging into streets and squares with torches and weapons held aloft, must be counted with Griffith's best work. (In several shots he masks the top and bottom of the screen, anticipating the widescreen ratio, to heighten dramatic effect.)”