Hearts Adrift on AllMovie

Famous Players earned themselves a suit for plagiarism with this four-reel shipwreck melodrama, which was ostensibly written by its leading lady, Mary Pickford. Pickford had warned her producer, Adolph Zukor, that the story wasn't quite fresh, but the company went ahead anyway. Cyrus Brady Thompson, whose As the Sparks Fly Upward bore an incredible resemblance to Hearts Adrift, promptly sued, despite the fact that Thompson himself had "borrowed" from a 1912 play, Bird of Paradise. Pickford and Harold Lockwood are both marooned on a deserted island. Romance blossoms, and in time, they have a child. But then Lockwood's wife arrives with a rescuing party and Mary throws herself into a volcano, as one reviewer put it, "with her island baby clasped in her arms." Young Lockwood, who had been slaving away in Selig potboilers up until then, was handpicked by Zukor and Pickford for this, the company's first film to be lensed in California, earning a contract with Famous Players for his efforts. Hearts Adrift proved so popular that Pickford asked for hefty raise of her salary to an unprecedented 1,000 dollars a week.