Life's Shop Window (1914)

Life's Shop Window is a 1914 American silent drama film directed by J. Gordon Edwards and starring Claire Whitney and Stuart Holmes. It is a film adaptation of the eponymous 1907 novel by Annie Sophie Cory. The film depicts the story of English orphan Lydia Wilton (Whitney), and her husband Bernard Chetwin (Holmes). Although Wilton's marriage is legitimate, it was conducted in secret, and she is accused of having a child out of wedlock. Forced to leave England, she reunites with her husband in Arizona. There, she is tempted by infidelity with an old acquaintance, Eustace Pelham, before seeing the error of her ways and returning to her family.

Life's Shop Window was the first film produced, rather than simply distributed, by William Fox's Box Office Attractions Company, the corporate predecessor to Fox Film. Several reviewers approved of the film's expurgated treatment of the novel's plot, although opinions of the quality of the film itself were mixed. It proved very popular upon its initial release in New York, and that success was used to advertise the film elsewhere. Like many of Fox's early works, it was likely lost in the 1937 Fox vault fire.

Synopsis

Bernard Chetwin is a boarder at John Anderson's farm in England. He is unimpressed by Anderson's spoiled daughter Bella, but is attracted to their orphaned servant, Lydia Wilton. She tells him of her dreams for a happier life, and they fall in love. Wilton also meets Eustace Pelham, who introduces her to his philosophy of "life's shop window": that many people make life decisions on purely superficial grounds. Chetwin marries Wilton in a secret ceremony.

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