Inspiration Pictures

Inspiration Pictures belonged to that hopeful breed of early-1920s independents built around a single luminous talent. It was formed in 1921 so that Richard Barthelmess, the sensitive young star of D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms and Way Down East, could produce his own vehicles rather than answer to a studio. Barthelmess founded the company together with the businessman Charles Duell and the gifted director Henry King, and its first release announced its ambition at once.

That film was Tol'able David, King's 1921 pastoral drama in which Barthelmess played a mild mountain boy who finds his courage. A critical and commercial triumph, admired for its naturalism and its rural American texture, it established Inspiration as a house capable of art as well as box office, and it remains a landmark of the silent era.

Emboldened, the company pursued prestige on a larger scale, and Henry King carried its banner to Italy to make two ambitious features starring Lillian Gish: The White Sister, in which she played a woman who takes the veil believing her lover dead, and the lavish Renaissance drama Romola. Both showcased Gish at the height of her silent-screen artistry and confirmed Inspiration's reputation for handsome, serious pictures, even as their costs mounted.

The collapse came not from the screen but from the ledger and the courtroom. The company's finances, entangled with money-man Charles Duell, unraveled amid accusations of misconduct, and a sensational lawsuit erupted around Duell and Lillian Gish, who charged that she had been defrauded under her contract. The scandal and the financial disarray broke the enterprise. Barthelmess moved on to a contract at First National, and Inspiration Pictures, which had briefly proven that a star and a director could make their own fine films, faded away by the mid-1920s, a casualty of the treacherous economics of silent-era independence.