Alternately gentle and tumultuous, Orphans of the Storm is an adaptation of Les Deux Orphelines, a French historical melodrama from 1874 about two sisters in Revolutionary France seeking a cure for blindness. Les Deux Orphelines became the most popular production in turn-of-the-century American theater and Griffith conceived of the film as a template for an ambitious eight-to-ten film "pictorial history of the world." His utopian conception of cinema as a universal language is evident in the abstract personification of complex forces, which are made vivid and comprehensible by gestural echoes, variations in movement, Dickensian cross-cutting, and the carefully balanced performances of Lillian and Dorothy Gish. The political analogies are often strained, but the operatic scope and total variations make this the last of Griffith's great silent epics.