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The Hostage, the 1917 Robert Thornby silent romantic war melodrama ("By Beulah Marie Dix"; although it was made during World War I, it is not a World War I movie, but rather set in a mythical country where Reid is the son of the leader of one of two warring nations, and he agrees to serve as a hostage during negotiations, and he surprises everyone by switching sides to the enemy's!) starring Wallace Reid, Dorothy Abril, Gertrude Short, Clarence Geldart, and Guy Oliver. Note that Wallace Reid was a major star of the early 1910s, who fell in love with Dorothy Davenport, who was a young starlet. He married her, and they made many movies together in the middle 1910s, marrying in 1913. In 1917, Davenport had their son, and she made few movies after the birth of her son, but he remained a top star. In 1919, Wallace Reid was making a movie "The Valley of the Giants", and he was injured, and took morphine to enable him to finish filming. He became a major drug addict, and made 24 movies over the next 3 years, but died in 1923 at the age of 31, and it is unclear exactly how large a part drugs and alcohol played in his death, but certainly this was one of the first great Hollywood drug scandals. The following year, Davenport produced "Human Wreckage", an expose of Hollywood and drugs, billed as "Mrs. Wallace Reid", and she made a total of six movies after "Human Wreckage", always billed the same way. In 1934, she retired and she died in 1977 at the age of 82. Note that this is a "lost" film, which means that no surviving copies are thought to exist.
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