Absinthe

Herbert Brenon's 1914 Imp/Universal four-reeler, photographed on location in Paris with King Baggot and Leah Baird as the only Americans in the cast, is a temperance tragedy of the green hour. Baggot, who studied absinthe drinkers in Montmartre cafés, plays artist Jean Dumas, led by his mistress into theft, Apache crime, hallucination, and a strangling in the woods. Streets along the Seine and a cab chase through the capital give it a documentary bite rare in American features of the year. Chicago banned it. Made on the same European trip that produced Brenon's Ivanhoe, and among the first American features to use a foreign city as more than a backdrop.