Part of TCM’s special lineup tied to its Story of Film documentary series, tonight’s prime-time early cinematic offerings from around the world begin with a very rare telecast of this 1923 silent French film by Abel Gance, who later directed the sprawling masterpiece Napoleon. This movie is sprawling, too: Originally, it was eight hours long, more like a pre-television miniseries. Here, it’s pared down to about half that, but includes many of the same visual innovations and images that made Gance such a film pioneer. The movie itself, starring Severin-Mars and Ivy Close, is about a railroad engineer who adopts an orphaned girl (the survivor of a train crash), only to have his own son eventually fall in love with her.