Young clergyman Cyril Maitland, engaged to a respectable young woman, falls in love with and impregnates Alma Lee. When her father finds out about the pregnancy, he attacks Maitland and is killed in a fall down the stairs, for which accident Maitland allows his best friend, Dr Henry Everard, to take the blame. Twenty years later, when Everard is released from prison, he seeks revenge on the unfaithful clergyman, now Dean Cyril Maitland.
According to the Daily News (Perth), 'This is a big Australian production, four acts, and a sermon, and when shown in Sydney at the Criterion Theatre a few months ago created universal interest' (Sat. 24 Oct. 1914, p.6). The following month, the same newspaper notes, 'The photographic and histrionic qualities of this production are excellent, the producer having not only kept closely to the text of the novel, but carefully selected his artists with a view to preserving the facial characteristics of the dramatis personae' (Mon. 2 Nov. 1914, p.4).
An adaptation of the 1886 novel The Silence of Dean Maitland by English novelist Mary Gleed Tuttiett (11 Dec 1846 - 21 Sep 1923), who wrote under the pen-name Maxwell Gray. The novel, a popular best-seller, had been made into a successful stage play in the late nineteenth century as The Silence of Dean Maitland and would be subsequently filmed in 1915 in the United States by John Ince (as Sealed Lips) and in 1934 in Australia by Ken G. Hall (as The Silence of Dean Maitland).
Longford's film is one of Australia's lost films.
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