Orphans of the Storm

In the college where I taught for some ten years we were asked to provide classes for adults who did not attend the college; I chose "Films" as my subject.
I thought I'd start by giving a talk on the silent film director D. W. Griffth, famous for two big films: "Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance". I hired a Griffith film from the British Film Institute; or, rather, a sort of compilation film lasting about half an hour - scenes from one of his films put together so that it worked quite well as a story. It was called "Orphans of the Storm" and starred the then famous Lillian Gish.
It was set in the French revolution and some of it was, quite blatantly, taken stright from Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities".
The courses were advertised in the local area and quite a lot of people turned up for some of the courses on offer - but no one turned up for my course.
So, the next day, when I had a class in General Studies on "Films", I showed the D. W. Griffith film to the class of about twenty young men and wondered how this old, silent film would go down with them.
They watched it in silence and at the end we discussed things about it - the French Revolution, the director, the actress, Dickens's novel and so on.
In the General Studies course on films which went right through the year I showed all sorts of films, most of them fairly modern, talkies I mean: "12 Angry Men", "The Third Man", "Shane" I recall.
At the end of the course I asked them what film they had enjoyed most and they pretty well all said "Orphans of the Storm".
At first I couldn't believe it; then I thought back to seeing it myself and I thought "Yes, it was a damn good film."