AllMovie

Oscar Apfel, the man who collaborated with Cecil B. DeMille on the direction of the pioneering feature film The Squaw Man, wielded the megaphone for the Jesse L. Lasky production The Master Mind. Repeating his stage role, Edmund Breese plays Henry Allen, a revenge-driven ex-convict who hopes to get even with the judge who mistakenly sentenced Henry's brother to the gallows. He arranges for the judge to fall in love with a "woman of the world," then exposes the magistrate as a hedonistic fraud. Eventually, however, Henry has a change of heart and decides to allow the judge and his sweetheart to live out their lives unmolested. Based on a play by Daniel D. Carter, The Master Mind was remade in 1920 with Lionel Barrymore in the old Edmund Breese role.