Anna Ascends

Anna Ascends is a 1922 silent film by Victor Fleming, based on the play of the same title by Henry Chapman Ford. Alice Brady reprises her starring role from the 1920 Broadway play. A 6-minute fragment of the film remains extant.

The Broadway play Anna Ascends is about a working class Syrian American waitress who through hard work "ascends" the social and economic ladder and becomes successful in the United States. The playwright Henry Chapman Ford loosely bases his play on a real-life Syrian immigrant waitress in Boston, named Anna Ayyoub, who mesmerized him. In his seminal book The Arab Americans: A history, writer Gregory Orfalea describes Ford's inspiration by quoting him, "Their family life, their clean way of living impressed me and I decided that the Americanization of such a race was a big factor in making the "melting pot" one of the greatest nations of history". Ford went on: "I figured here is a people who could read and write probably 6,000 years before the northern 'blue eyes'. Here is a race who had a fine culture along with the great Egyptian dynasties, and as criminology seems to be a statistical fad at the present writing, here are a people who have less, en ratio, in prisons, than any other in the world. Hence, I figured, why not write a Syrian drama, a virigin field, anent the Syrians?"