The Salvation Army Lass

Set in the hard-edged neighborhoods of turn-of-the-century New York, The Salvation Army Lass follows Mary Wilson, a young woman who slips into the company of petty criminals. When a bar brawl turns deadly and her lover is jailed, Mary loses any clear plan for her life and drifts through the streets. Salvation Army volunteers intervene, offering shelter, discipline, and a chance to change her circumstances. She accepts their care and begins to adopt their beliefs, but an unexpected reunion with her arrested lover at the very bar where the trouble began tests her commitments. The film tracks her growing personal religious conviction and the personal tensions that decision creates, without revealing how everything resolves. The picture stays focused on character.

Directed by D.W. Griffith from material by Edward Sheldon, the 1909 silent short stars Florence Lawrence as Mary Wilson, with Harry Solter, Charles Inslee, Linda Arvidson and Charles Avery in supporting roles, reflecting Griffith's prolific early production work for audiences.

Box office information for one-reel releases from 1909 is fragmentary, and no reliable gross has been documented for this title. Earnings weren't tracked in a comparable way to later features, so the film's commercial performance remains largely unrecorded and exhibition.

Though not a household name today, the film interests scholars as an early example of moral melodrama and as part of D.W. Griffith's formative output. Florence Lawrence matters to historians, since she was among the first recognized film performers, and the work helped cement Salvation Army imagery in early cinema.

Contemporary ratings are modest, the recorded average being 4.0/10 from a handful of votes. Viewers note its simple, theatrical performances and straightforward staging, yet scholars value it for themes of redemption, faith as social reform, and the constrained options available to women in urban slums of the period, and context.