Visionary Picks Drawn from the Same DNA as Human Passions: Cult Guide

Dir: Jacques Tyrol

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Human Passions perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

William Clark sends his son Billy to a brothel to learn of life's necessary evils, on the eve of his departure for college. On his Christmas holiday, Billy, who has fallen in with a fast crowd, persuades his childhood sweetheart, Margery Reynolds, to drink wine and then takes the intoxicated girl to a hotel. Back at college, Billy refuses to marry the pregnant Marge, and she, unable to confide in her father, a minister, leaves for Chicago, where her child is born blind and crippled. When Marge, forced into prostitution, recognizes Billy at a brothel, he is arrested and fined $550 for child support. After the baby dies in court, however, Billy returns home, and Marge is taken to Kate Addams' Coulter House for fallen women. At the insistence of his father, Billy agrees to marry another woman, but Rev. Reynolds, whose wife has died of grief, learns of Billy's betrayal and denounces him from the altar. Billy, taken ill, dies in his mother's arms.

Dir: Jacques Tyrol

David Belkov, a newsboy born of foreign parents who live in "New York's crucible," the East Side, admires the late Theodore Roosevelt, but when he sees a poor family being evicted, he joins the Hogan Street anarchist group, of which his father's friends and his sweetheart Yolanda Kosloff, are members. The group plans to assassinate Judge Norton, who earlier condemned one of their comrades to the electric chair. After David witnesses the bravery of twelve-year-old Mary Hogan, who sings patriotic ditties to drown out the soap box orations of the anarchists, he prints leaflets to combat the anarchist views. Mary is killed trying to thwart the anarchists' plot, and David is caught and badly beaten. After government agents, thought to be converts, break up the gang, David arrives just in time to stop Yolanda, who is dancing at a celebration at Norton's home, from dropping a bomb. David is shot by the anarchist leader, but Yolanda, realizing her error, nurses him to health.