The Battle of the Sexes (1914 film)
Frank Andrews (Donald Crisp) is a well-to-do, middle-class apartment dweller who is devoted to his wife (Mary Alden) and two children, John (Robert Harron) and Jane (Lillian Gish).They hatch a plan whereby one of Cleo's former beaus (Owen Moore) appears to be courting Jane in front of Andrews, who swiftly condemns his daughter's interest in the man.He had already begun The Escape (1914), but production had been stopped when actress Blanche Sweet fell sick with scarlet fever, and the Reliance-Majestic Studio was already in trouble and in need of a viable Griffith property, fast.Several reasons have been advanced for the impasse, but scholar Paul Spehr has suggested that both Reliance-Majestic and its distributor, Mutual, were having difficulty developing an effective distribution strategy for longer, multi-reel films in a market still dominated by one- and two-reel subjects.Were there a minute or two more of this fragment extant, it might be possible to see Rudolph Valentino's alleged screen debut in the bit part of a taxi dancer; he is known to have played as an extra in an early Griffith feature, and a shadowy figure tentatively identified in one of the stills for The Battle of the Sexes may be him.