Having long been familiar with William Desmond Taylor's mysterious death and recently reading about him I decided to go beyond the man's tragic myth and have a watch on his actual work. "The Soul of Youth" proves to be a good first impression depicting childhood and life with tenderness and humor.
William Desmond Taylor may be better known as the victim of one of Hollywood's most sensational unsolved crimes but in reality, like Marshall Neilan, he was a sensitive director who had an uncanny talent at drawing out the best from young performers. He had already kick started Jack Pickford's career with "Tom Sawyer" and "Tom and Huck" and was fatefully given "Anne of Green Gables" to direct for the young star Paramount thought would supersede Mary Pickford in popularity - Mary Miles Minter.
A print of this so-called 'lost' film is in the Library of Congress, copied from a nitrate print which had an X-mark scratched into the last frames of each sequence. The print is intact with its original intertitles (some of them quite inventive).
This film is part of a collection entitled "American Film Archives: Vol. 3: Disc 1".
William Desmond Taylor (1872-1922) unfortunately remains one of the best-remembered directors of the silent era for entirely the wrong reason that on 1 February 1922 he was the victim of Hollywood's most notorious unsolved murder. Kenneth Anger in 1959 devoted a lip-smacking chapter of 'Hollywood Babylon' to the case; while Sidney D.
