AllMovie

This five-reeler from the Alliance Film Corporation was the first of several cinemaversions of Edward Eggleston's novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Stage star Max Figman is cast as Ralph, a former Union officer who settles in a Confederate-sympathizing Indiana town in the months following the Civil War. Finding work as a schoolteacher, Ralph slowly wins over the hostile townsfolk, only to find himself in a mess of trouble when he clashes with a "carpetbagger" who tries to fleece the citizenry with a phony land deal. An attempted lynching and last-minute rescue bring this otherwise laid-back rural drama to a Griffith-like conclusion. Co-starring in The Hoosier Schoolmaster is the lovely Lolita Robinson, who'd previously appeared with Max Figman in Cecil B. DeMille's What's-His-Name?.