AllMovie

A graduate of Cambridge University and a prominent actor/manager, Harley Knoles played Kephren to Helen Gardner's Cleopatra (1912) before embarking on a fairly distinguished career as a director of melodramas for American film companies such as World, Famous Players, and the Mayflower Photoplay Corp., often working in collaboration with his Canadian-born wife Pinna Nesbitt. Knoles, who helmed a 1918 version of Little Women featuring Conrad Nagel as Laurie and Dorothy Bernard as Jo, later directed the infamous and still extant Red Scare melodrama Bolshevism on Trial (aka Shattered Dreams [1919]). He returned to England in 1926 and directed a series of programmers that included the flag-waving Land of Hope and Glory (1927) and the Rudolph Valentino-inspired The White Sheik (1928).