When Love Comes

• 1922

• Watchlist

This commonplace rural drama was purely filler for Helen Jerome Eddy, Harrison Ford, and the theaters that booked it. Jane Coleridge (Eddy) and Peter Jamison (Ford) are a pair of small town sweethearts. She's an old-fashioned girl and he's timid, but he manages to get up the nerve to propose and asks her to run away with him. Unfortunately, around the time Jane's supposed to meet him at the station her father dies and she has to take care of her brothers and sisters. Jamison believes she loves someone else and disappears for several years. When he finally returns, he has a three-year-old child in tow. But he explains that his wife has been unfaithful and he and Jane renew their romance. Then wife shows up and causes trouble by claiming that Jamison left her for Jane. The townsfolk, who don't know this woman at all, choose to believe her and ostracize Jane, whom they've known all their lives. The brand new dam breaks (in a very cheaply made miniature), washing the woman away. Jane tries to rescue her, which means Jamison has to leap in and save them both. The wife, conveniently, is dying, but before she breathes her last, she confesses that she was lying. Jane is cleared in the eyes of her fellow men and women, and she and Jamison can now wed.