GOING STRAIGHT
Starring Norma Talmadge and Ralph Lewis
VARIETY
June 26, 1916
"Going Straight" is a Fine Arts (Triangle) five-part feature by Bernard McConville, directed by C.M. & S.A. Franklin, that starts off like a world-beater but peters out into a very conventional tale, the psychology of which is all wrong. A prosperous businessman is very happy in his home life, with a wife and three children. He and wife read a newspaper clipping about a robbery whereupon there is flashed for an entire reel their past life showing they had been crooks; the man had done his "bit" but had determined to go straight when he learned in jail of he birth of his first child. A former associate who had double-crossed him on a previous occasion blackmails him and finally demands he participate in just one more robbery on penalty of squealing on the wife who hadn't served her time. He is finally compelled to acquiesce, but just why one crook would trust another who had once doubled on him is one of those things that only a screen author could answer. Of course, you know from the first reel that the double-crossing crook has to die, and the second, third, fourth and most of the fifth reels are taken up with good acting and fine visualization of "suspense," "anguish," etc. Norma Talmadge and Ralph Lewis are finely cast, but the story is ridiculously impossible.