Dangerous Hours (Silent)

College student and aspiring socialist John King is arrested for participating in a violent strike at the Paterson, New Jersey silk mill...despite not actually working there. His bail is paid by Sophia Guenri, a member of "The People's Party" who tells John he could be the next leader of her movement. In reality, she is the lover and subordinate of one Boris Blotchi, a former colonel in the Red Army who seeks to sow terrorism and disorder on American soil. Their next objective is to incite violence during the labor strike at the Weston shipyards - coincidentally owned by John's childhood sweetheart, May Weston. After seeing his new comrades use strong-arm tactics on May's workers, John becomes disillusioned with the movement and renounces his former beliefs. Discovering the Bolsheviks' plan to set off a deadly explosive at the shipyards, John races to warn May and her people in time. These are dangerous hours...

Dangerous Hours may reflect Hollywood's paranoiac fear of Communist infiltration after the Russian Revolution better than any other film of the era - to the extent that there are several shocking moments in which the filmmakers seem to throw caution to the wind, such as a lingering shot of a woman's bare breasts during a flashback to the Moscow Bolshevik Uprising! However, this is no low-budget exploitation picture, produced as it is by pioneering media proprietor Thomas H. Ince and directed by Fred Niblo - the man behind many classics of the Silent Age, including The Mark of Zorro (1920), Blood and Sand (1922) and Ben-Hur (1925). Film historian Kevin Brownlow praised "the flashes of imagination with which director Niblo and cameraman George Barnes enliven the story" while William K. Everson described the contemporary sequences as "a rather sober and interesting account of Communist tactics in fermenting unrest and strikes against labor unions." Leading man Lloyd Hughes would eventually wind up in a few prestigious silents like The Sea Hawk (1924) and The Lost World (1925), but by the talkie era he was a fixture in numerous Poverty Row "B" pictures such as The Drums of Jeopardy (1931) Midnight Phantom (1935) and A Face in the Fog (1936), to name just a few. The working title for Dangerous Hours was Americanism (Versus Bolshevism), taken from a popular pamphlet by the-then mayor of Seattle, Ole Hanson, known for being tough on strikes. The actual scenario was "suggested" by a short story called 'A Prodigal in Utopia' by Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne that originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (the story is not available for review, so the film's fidelity to it is uncertain.)