The Nth Commandment (1923)

She thought the Nth Commandment was: If you can't be good, be careful. The greatest motion pictures are made out of the lives and loves and sorrows of plain folks.

A department store clerk decides to marry a withdrawing colleague with tuberculosis, over another dashing, ambitious suitor, leads to a life of hardship and struggle. Though The Nth Commandment survives incomplete, enough exists of director Frank Borzage’s last film while under contract with William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures for scholar Hervé Dumont to declare “it the first truly Borzagian work.”