The Little American

Mary Pickford plays an American girl whose ship is torpedoed by a German U-boat on the way to France — a sequence Cecil B. DeMille staged as open propaganda while the United States was still deciding whether to join the war. Rescued and sheltered in a French chateau near the front, she is caught between a French officer and a German officer who both love her, and the film builds to the occupation of the chateau and an attempted assault that American audiences in 1917 read as Germany's crimes in miniature. Released months after the US entered the war, it was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. A 1917 release, it is in the public domain.