Jon Mirsalis on Piano Viola Dana scores twice here, portraying the two daughters of a rural violin mender: Unity, disdained by Daddy for not having inherited her mother's musical ability, and Priscilla, whose talent at the violin is matched only by her ambition for celebrity. Enter Ivor, the cynical musician who persuades the would-be diva to steal church money and let the blame fall on Unity, the "girl without a soul" of the film's title. William K. Everson writes, in American Silent Film, "All of (director John H.) Collins' films were splendidly cut and photographed, with a mobility, pace and sense of pictorial beauty perhaps found only in the films of Tourneur and Griffith...Viola Dana's contributions to these films is an important one. (She was) an unusual actress (with) a kind of inner beauty...Not only was Dana's dual role characterization helped by some astonishingly skillful split-screen camera trickery, but it was one of the few such characterizations (Fredric March's in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was another) where one wasn't aware of one person playing two roles but genuinely felt a sense of separation, of two individuals." The Girl Without a Soul was a hit at last year's Pordenone festival of silent cinema, where it was called "a brilliant exercise in directorship...A rural drama whose tones are as sorrowful as they are distant from the (already few) concessions to sensationalism of (Collins-Dana's) Blue Jeans, released a short while earlier..."