“‘Your Girl and Mine’ is a big play with a big mission built on a big scale.  It is a whole evening’s entertainment, and a very interesting evening at that.”  Here endeth the newspaper notice.  Compare it with the Biograph advertisement of Judith in chapter six.

There is nothing in the film that rasps like this account of it.  The clipping serves to give the street-atmosphere through which our Woman’s Suffrage Joan of Arcs move to conquest and glory with unstained banners.

The obvious amendments to the production as an instrument of persuasion are two.  Firstly there should be five reels instead of six, every scene shortened a bit to bring this result.  Secondly, the lieutenant governor of the state, who is the Rudolf Rassendyll of the production, does not enter the story soon enough, and is too James K. Hacketty all at once.  We are jerked into admiration of him, rather than ensnared.  But after that the gentleman behaves more handsomely than any of the distinguished lieutenant governors in real life the present writer happens to remember.  The figure of Aunt Jane, the queenly serious woman of affairs, is one to admire and love.  Her effectiveness without excess or strain is in itself an argument for giving woman the vote.  The newspaper notice does not state the facts in saying the symbolical figure “fades out” at critical periods in the plot.  On the contrary, she appears at critical periods, clothed in white, solemn and royal.  She comes into the groups with an adequate allurement, pointing the moral of each situation while she shines brightest.  The two children for whom the contest is fought are winsome little girls.  By the side of their mother in the garden or in the nursery they are a potent argument for the natural rights of femininity.  The film is by no means ultra-aesthetic.  The implications of the clipping are correct to that degree.  But the resources of beauty within the ready command of the advising professional producer are used by the women for all they are worth.  It could not be asked of them that they evolve technical novelties.

Yet the figures of Aunt Jane and the Goddess of Suffrage are something new in their fashion.  Aunt Jane is a spiritual sister to that unprecedented woman, Jane Addams, who went to the Hague conference for Peace in the midst of war, which heroic action the future will not forget.  Aunt Jane does justice to that breed of women amid the sweetness and flowers and mere scenario perils of the photoplay story.  The presence of the “Votes for Women” figure is the beginning of a line of photoplay goddesses that serious propaganda in the new medium will make part of the American Spiritual Hierarchy.  In the imaginary film of Our Lady Springfield, described in the chapter on Architecture-in-Motion, a kindred divinity is presumed to stand by the side of the statue when it first reaches the earth.

High-minded graduates of university courses in sociology and schools of philanthropy, devout readers of The Survey, The Chicago Public, The Masses, The New Republic, La Follette’s, are going to advocate increasingly, their varied and sometimes contradictory causes, in films.  These will generally be produced by heroic exertions in the studio, and much passing of the subscription paper outside.