“A two-part offering that tells a pretty story and would have been a strong release in one reel. At the end the blind girl has her sight restored, as is usual in these stories. She is sent, an orphan, to her uncle whose family is walking in dangerous places and brings love and light to them. This is very pretty, but to have her marry the rake of a son seems hardly convincing. One thing it is very strong on, and that is photography—some of its scenes are nothing less than lovely. It will be liked for its good things.”
REVIEW by Louis Reeves Harrison, The Moving Picture World, August 15, 1914:
“A humanizing well-acted drama, The Guiding Hand gently reproves the selfishness of those whose circumstances should make them unselfish, but whose finer qualities have to be brought out in the crucible of bitter experience. The Stevens family, consisting of a wealthy businessman engrossed in his work, his wife and their son, is representative in a way of many others in our civilization. The wife and son have no ideals, nothing to do, and the lack of work or incentive to work seems to exercise a demoralizing effect among the rich quite as much as among the poor. The wife is gambling at bridge whist to the extent of exchanging her jewels for paste imitations, while the son has become a chorus girl johnnie and barroom sport of dress suit caliber.
“The husband is strong, and in his strength is unsuspicious of the weakening his wealth and indulgence has created. He is slightly bored when Mignon, a blind niece, becomes his charge, but he is not otherwise unkind to the helpless girl. The dense selfishness of both mother and son are exhibited in their early treatment of Mignon, but that mysterious sweetness of character which sometimes comes to the blind—perhaps in compensation for their affliction—is the ruling spirit in Mignon’s character and she insensibly wins her way into the hearts of all in the household. Stevens capitulates in a lonely moment to the blind girl’s charm of simple goodness, and both his wife and son yield in time to an influence so gentle that it draws with invisible threads. The whole family is on the way to gradual betterment when a sudden impulse of the wayward son lays bare the wretched fabric of the social pretense. The boy attempts to steal his mother’s jewels in the dead of night and is caught by the father. The latter’s fury draws the mother, and then is made the humiliating discovery that her jewels, like her social position, are a hollow mockery, are a base imitation of the real thing.
“Tragedy is very near when the blind girl, in an exquisite matinee of white silk, appears and succeeds in calming the infuriated husband and father until the whole incident can be hushed up. The story continues along well-known lines, during which the blindness is cured by the customary specialist, but it has obtained a strong grip in the beginning and sympathy holds through to the end. There is an exquisite purpose in the drama, and it is faithfully considered during most of the presentation. Mignon Anderson as the blind girl does not have to act—her sweetness is obvious—and she easily carries off the honors, though this not in detriment to the well-balanced cast. The story is clean, sympathetic and sure of an appeal to all classes.”
