The Unattainable (1916)

Interesting facts

The Unattainable is a 1916 American black and white silent drama directed by Lloyd B. Carleton. The film is based on the story by Elwood D. Henning. The photoplay stars Dorothy Davenport and Emory Johnson.

Production

In the book, "American Cinema's Transitional Era," the authors point out, The years between 1908 and 1917 witnessed what may have been the most significant transformation in American film history. During this "transitional era", widespread changes affected film form and film genres, filmmaking practices and industry structure, exhibition sites, and audience demographics. One aspect of this transition was the longer duration of films.

Laemmle would continue to buck this trend while slowly increasing his output of features.

In 1914, Laemmle published an essay titled - Doom of long Features Predicted. In 1916, Laemmle ran an advertisement extolling Bluebird films while adding the following vocabulary on the top of the ad.

Carl Laemmle released 91 feature-length films in 1916, as stated in Clive Hirschhorn's book, The Universal Story.

Dorothy Davenport (1895–1977) was an established star for Universal when the 21 year-old actress played Bessie Gale. This feature would be Davenport's introduction to the Bluebird program. She had acted in hundreds of movies by the time she starred in this film. The majority of these films were 2-reel shorts, as was the norm in Hollywood's teen years. She had been making movies since 1910.

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