The Whispering Chorus

John Trimble, who has embezzled money, takes on a new identity by having an unrecognisable body buried in his place. But after a while he is arrested, and the charge is this: committing his own murder. During the trial his mother knows the truth; before she dies she asks him not to reveal who he is, because his wife is now married to the governor and is expecting a child. The film is one of the moral melodramas of the silent period, yet it does not simplify the decision; the man’s silence is both a sacrifice and the giving up of his own life. The account uses methods unusual for its time to make an inner voice visible. Raymond Hatton plays the lead in Cecil B. DeMille’s eighty six minute American film, completed in 1918.