"Barbara, leave this wretchedness to the charity workers and let us find happiness together," callous society scion Norman (Robert Frazer) says to his socially conscious girlfriend, Barbara (Pinna Nesbit), who is caring for sick and needy tenement dwellers. Norman is soon consumed with ideas of liberty and equality for all and organizes a utopian society on an island off the coast of Florida. He naively becomes the pawn of a nefarious rabble-rouser who calls himself Herman Wolff (Leslie Stowe). The Utopian Society -- where everybody aspires to become poets and musical comedy stars rather than submit themselves to hard labor -- turns into a Communist conspiracy to take over the entire world, and Norman has to be saved by white-clad All-American marines. Produced by the Mayflower Photoplay Corp. during the first Red Scare period in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Bolshevism on Trial -- "The timeliest picture ever filmed," as the add-copy proclaimed -- is often dismissed as putrid propaganda. Up until the nefarious denouement, the film is actually fairly tongue-in-cheek and may remind some viewers of similar Utopian communes flourishing in the late '60s. The original author, the infamous Thomas Dixon, naturally had an entirely different agenda. It is no coincidence that the heroes, misguided as they may be, have solid Anglo-Saxon names like Worth or Mooney whereas the rabble-rouser and his vaguely Semitic-looking henchmen are called Wolff or Androvitch. The surviving print, a reissue released under the less inflammatory title of Shattered Dreams, comes with more recent intertitles and several of the characters have been awarded different names. Thus Norman Worth is now Norman Bradshaw and Barbara Bozenta is called Barbara Alden.
by Hans J. Wollstein
review
