A Child of the Ghetto (1910)

Director: D. H. Lawrence

Cast: Dorothy West, Kate Bruce, Dell Henderson

Synopsis: After her mother’s death, a young woman struggles to support herself as a seamstress.

Dorothy West (His Trust: The Faithful Devotion and Self-Sacrifice of an Old Negro Servant, The House with the Closed Shutters) plays a typically timid and somewhat helpless early Griffith heroine in A Child of the Ghetto, a drama that appears to be having a sly swipe at the exploitation of the poor by the rich. Following the death of her mother, West manages to make ends meet by sewing shirts, but when she’s falsely accused of stealing money from her employer she is forced to flee to the country, where she meets and falls in love with a farmer’s son.

It’s a fairly slight story that doesn’t justify even its brief 15-minute running time, but it’s reasonably entertaining. The film is enlivened by a couple of location shots on the streets of New York, but sadly these too are all too brief. There’s no real suspense in A Child of the Ghetto, and the culprit never does get his comeuppance.

(Reviewed 3rd February 2012)