Bruce Loeb on Piano. Smouldering Fires is the first important work of veteran director Clarence Brown, whose films, from Flesh and the Devil to The Yearling, were always characterized by imaginative visuals. With exteriors shot in Yosemite Valley, Smouldering Fires is a Mizoguchi-like tale of a businesswoman (Pauline Frederick, in a revealing portrayal of a woman's role in business in the early twenties) who falls in love with and marries a young employee, only to sacrifice him in the end to her younger sister. "It is only just to give partial credit to the authority with which Pauline Frederick, who has here her best role, plays the woman of forty....The intelligence with which Brown had sketched the difficult feminine characterization...no doubt led him to be chosen to direct Garbo in Flesh and the Devil."- Jeanne & Ford, Histoire du Cinema