The Griffith Project, Volume 5: Films Produced in 1911 9780851709055, 9781838710781, 9781839020124

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Notes on Contributors
Note on Layout
320. Fisher Folks
321. His Daughter
322. The Heart of a Savage
323. Conscience
324. Was He a Coward?
325. Teaching Dad to Like Her
326. The Lonedale Operator
327. The Spanish Gypsy
328. The Broken Cross
329. The Chief’s Daughter
330. A Knight of the Road
331. Madame Rex
332. His Mother’s Scarf
333. How She Triumphed
334. The Two Sides
335. In the Days of ’49
336. Enoch Arden – Part One
337. Enoch Arden – Part Two
338. The New Dress
339. The White Rose of the Wilds
340. A Romany Tragedy
341. The Crooked Road
342. A Smile of a Child
343. The Primal Call
344. The Jealous Husband
345. The Indian Brothers
346. Her Sacrifice
347. The Thief and the Girl
348. The Blind Princess and the Poet
349. Fighting Blood
350. The Last Drop of Water
351. Bobby, the Coward
352. A Country Cupid
353. Out from the Shadow
354. The Sorrowful Example
355. The Ruling Passion
356. The Rose of Kentucky
357. The Stuff Heroes Are Made Of
358. Swords and Hearts
359. Dan, the Dandy
360. The Squaw’s Love
361. The Revenue Man and the Girl
362. The Eternal Mother
363. Italian Blood
364. The Old Confectioner’s Mistake
365. The Making of a Man
366. Her Awakening
367. The Unveiling
368. The Adventures of Billy
369. The Long Road
370. The Battle
371. Love in the Hills
372. The Trail of Books
373. Through Darkened Vales
374. A Woman Scorned
375. The Miser’s Heart
376. The Failure
377. Sunshine through the Dark
378. As in a Looking Glass
379. Saved from Himself
380. A Terrible Discovery
381. A Tale of the Wilderness
382. The Baby and the Stork
383. The Voice of the Child
384. For His Son
385. The Old Bookkeeper
386. A Sister’s Love
387. Billy’s Stratagem
388. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon
389. The Transformation of Mike
390. The Root of Evil
391. The Sunbeam
392. A String of Pearls
Bibliography
Index of Titles: 1911
Cumulative Index of Titles: 1907–1911

Citation preview

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT VOLUME 5 FILMS PRODUCED IN 1911

IN MEMORY OF GEORGE C. PRATT (1914–1988)

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT VOLUME 5 Films Produced in 1911

G ENERAL E DITOR Paolo Cherchi Usai CONTRIBUTORS Richard Abel, Eileen Bowser, Ben Brewster, Tom Gunning, Steven Higgins, Lea Jacobs, J.B. Kaufman, Charlie Keil, David Mayer, Russell Merritt, Scott Simmon, Kristin Thompson A SSISTANT E DITOR Cynthia Rowell

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

First published in 2001 by the British Film Institute 21 Stephen St, London W1P 2LN The British Film Institute is the UK national agency with responsibility for encouraging the arts of film and television and conserving them in the national interest. Copyright © Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2001 Reprinted 2008 Set in Italian Garamond by Ketchup, London British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0–85170–905–2/978–0–85170–905–5 eISBN 978–1–83902–011–7 ePDF 978–1–83902–012–4

CONTENTS

Foreword Notes on Contributors Note on Layout

vii x xii

320. Fisher Folks 321. His Daughter 322. The Heart of a Savage 323. Conscience 324. Was He a Coward? 325. Teaching Dad to Like Her 326. The Lonedale Operator 327. The Spanish Gypsy 328. The Broken Cross 329. The Chief’s Daughter 330. A Knight of the Road 331. Madame Rex 332. His Mother’s Scarf 333. How She Triumphed 334. The Two Sides 335. In the Days of ’49 336. Enoch Arden – Part One 337. Enoch Arden – Part Two 338. The New Dress 339. The White Rose of the Wilds 340. A Romany Tragedy 341. The Crooked Road 342. A Smile of a Child 343. The Primal Call 344. The Jealous Husband 345. The Indian Brothers 346. Her Sacrifice 347. The Thief and the Girl 348. The Blind Princess and the Poet 349. Fighting Blood 350. The Last Drop of Water 351. Bobby, the Coward

1 5 8 10 13 16 18 23 26 28 31 34 36 39 41 44 47 50 53 56 58 61 64 66 69 70 72 74 76 79 82 85

352. A Country Cupid 353. Out from the Shadow 354. The Sorrowful Example 355. The Ruling Passion 356. The Rose of Kentucky 357. The Stuff Heroes Are Made Of 358. Swords and Hearts 359. Dan, the Dandy 360. The Squaw’s Love 361. The Revenue Man and the Girl 362. The Eternal Mother 363. Italian Blood 364. The Old Confectioner’s Mistake 365. The Making of a Man 366. Her Awakening 367. The Unveiling 368. The Adventures of Billy 369. The Long Road 370. The Battle 371. Love in the Hills 372. The Trail of Books 373. Through Darkened Vales 374. A Woman Scorned 375. The Miser’s Heart 376. The Failure 377. Sunshine through the Dark 378. As in a Looking Glass 379. Saved from Himself 380. A Terrible Discovery 381. A Tale of the Wilderness 382. The Baby and the Stork 383. The Voice of the Child 384. For His Son 385. The Old Bookkeeper

92 96 98 100 105 109 110 115 117 120 122 124 126 128 130 132 134 136 139 142 144 146 148 151 153 156 158 160 162 164 166 169 173 176

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

386. A Sister’s Love 387. Billy’s Stratagem 388. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon 389. The Transformation of Mike 390. The Root of Evil 391. The Sunbeam 392. A String of Pearls

179 181 186 189 192 195 198

Bibliography Index of Titles: 1911 Cumulative Index of Titles: 1907–1911

201 202 204

FOREWORD

The year 1911 is a terra incognita in the career of D.W. Griffith. Of the seventy-two films he produced during that year (seventy-three if one counts the two-reeler Enoch Arden [DWG Project, #336 and 337] as two separate entities), twenty-one have never been viewed by modern audiences: most of them have been preserved from the original camera negatives in the form of unassembled fine grain masters, but viewing prints have yet to be created, and no elements of three titles (How She Triumphed [#333], The White Rose of the Wilds [#339], A Tale of the Wilderness [#381]) are known to survive. There are many possible reasons for this unique situation, but three stand out as the most plausible. The first is chronological: faced with a staggering amount of titles to be restored, archives have concentrated their efforts toward the earliest entries in Griffith’s creative output, following an understandable and common logic of preservation priority. It must also be kept in mind that most of these titles are available because they were deposited in the form of paper prints at the Library of Congress; without them, the list of unavailable prints for the years 1908 to 1910 would have been even longer. A third possible reason is of a qualitative nature, in the sense that widespread interest in Griffith’s later career at Biograph, and the reputation of his feature films from 1914 to the 1920s, have encouraged preservationists to allocate their remaining financial resources to titles of greater public appeal. All answers may well be inconclusive, but the fact remains that the films of 1911, made between the early period and the “golden years” of Intolerance (1916) and Orphans of the Storm (1921), have so far been left out of the rediscovery pattern. This fifth installment in the multi-year, ten-volume research project commissioned by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Sacile, involving the analysis of all the films where D.W. Griffith was credited as director, actor, writer, producer and supervisor, may be of some help in bridging such a serious gap. As in the case of Volumes 1 (1907–1908), 2 (January–June 1909), 3 (July–December 1909) and 4 (1910), contributors to The Griffith Project were asked to analyze groups of consecutive films, listed here in their shooting order. Please note that it is the last day of shooting that determines the chronology and perimeters of each volume. Every entry is preceded by a plot synopsis taken from the actual viewing of the print, and by summaries or reviews published at the time of release. The primary source for filmographic information on the Biograph period is D.W. Griffith and the Biograph Company (Cooper C. Graham, Steven Higgins, Elaine Mancini, João Luiz Vieira. Metuchen, N.J. and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1985), by far the best factual source on the subject. We gratefully acknowledge its authors and publisher, with special thanks to Steven Higgins – a longtime friend of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival – who provided invaluable advice on various aspects of the overall project. Contributors to The Griffith Project have occasionally added or amended information contained in the Scarecrow filmography. A new filmographic entry has now been added to three of the Biographs finished in November 1911 and to the six Biographs finished in December 1911, indicating the date in which a scenario was purchased by the Biograph Company. The additional evidence provided by this entry has suggested a slight shift in the chronology, therefore requiring some changes in the sequence of entries for this book. The point has been sugvii

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

gested by Russell Merritt in the following communication dated 8 September 2000, reproduced here by kind permission of the author (further details on this point can be found in Merritt’s entry for Billy’s Stratagem [DWG Project, #387]): The detailed production dating of the Biograph Camera Register ends late November, so we are limited from that point onward to the records in the Biograph Scenario Register which only indicates the month production was finished. Biograph chronologies in the past … rely on release dates to determine the ordering within a given month, mainly because after November 1911, those are the only daily dates we have. But for late November–December, we have another control: the purchase dates for Biograph scenarios are also recorded in the Scenario Register. So here’s the order I propose: A Tale of the Wilderness [no story purchase] (filming date: 8/13/14/20 November); The Baby and the Stork [story bought 4 October] (filming date: 9/22 November); The Voice of the Child [story bought 6 November] (filming date: 9/28 November); For His Son [story bought 17 September] (finished November 1911); … The Old Bookkeeper [story bought 20 November] (finished November 1911); A Sister’s Love [story bought 20 November] (finished November 1911); Billy’s Stratagem [story bought 20 November] (finished December 1911); …[A Blot in the ’Scutcheon (story bought 25 December 1910)]; The Transformation of Mike [story bought 6 December]; The Root of Evil [story bought 7 December]; The Sunbeam [story bought 11 December]; A String of Pearls [story bought 17 December].

It is also worth reminding the reader of the criteria adopted for our inventory of preservation copies. In film, archival sources may be defined as the complex of all the elements held by moving image repositories and museums (regardless of their status as masters or duplicates). Alternatively, they could be identified as the extant preservation material (closest to the original camera negatives) utilized for the making of viewing copies. In the former sense, every film print – including, for instance, a 16mm duplicate of late generation – is considered an archival source. In the latter definition, such term is used only for the ur-elements from which viewing copies are made, such as paper prints, nitrate negatives, positive prints generated at the time of the film’s commercial release and re-release, archival negatives struck before the corresponding nitrate print decomposed, or fine grain masters and modern positive prints or negatives if no other material is available. The second (admittedly more restrictive) approach has been adopted within the framework of this project. For example, a 35mm paper print, a camera negative, a nitrate 35mm release print with English titles and a nitrate 35mm release print with German titles are listed as separate archival sources of the same film, as it is presumed that all the known preservation material and access copies in existence derive from one or more of these prints. Therefore, a 16mm generated from one of the above elements (such as many Biograph shorts distributed by Blackhawk in the 1970s for non-theatrical use) is not included in the inventory. On the other hand, a 16mm copy derived from a nitrate 35mm print distributed in Spain would be regarded as an archival source as long as the corresponding nitrate print or 16mm reduction negative are no longer extant. None of these criteria is altogether immune from drawbacks and ambiguities. A comprehensive and reliable census based on the first method is virtually impossible to achieve, as we will never know exactly how many copies were made from a given source. On the other hand, archives often possess 16mm prints of unknown origin, and their generation cannot be established without a parallel examination of all the other surviving elements. However germane to the endeavor, this kind of comparative analysis requires an effort well beyond the scope of the project. Moreover, the procedure adopted here has the advantage viii

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

of minimizing the possibility of redundancies, thus providing a preliminary guide for further inquiry in this important area of research. Copies of undetermined origin have been included with the other sources, in the hope that future studies will bring conclusive evidence of their identity. It should be stressed – especially in the context of this volume – that the presence of an archival source does not necessarily mean that a corresponding access print is actually available. It is possible, for example, that a film preserved in three different archival sources may be seen only in a copy derived from one of these sources, not always the best, nor the most complete. In other cases, a title that survives in the form of a single archival source may not be currently accessible because no viewing print has been made yet. It is our hope that The Griffith Project will generate enough scholarly attention to bring these films to the public view. A list of all the 1911 titles currently available for screening – including their archival source and length – can be found in the catalogue of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, published in conjunction with the 2001 retrospective. The Griffith Project would not exist without the generous help of all the individuals and institutions involved in the preservation of Griffith’s work. Our special thanks go to Mary Lea Bandy, Anne Morra and Steven Higgins (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), David Francis, Patrick Loughney, Madeline Matz and Mike Mashon (Library of Congress), who are currently in charge of this massive undertaking, initiated several years ago by Iris Barry and Eileen Bowser at MoMA and by the staff of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division at the Library of Congress. We also wish to express our gratitude to Elaine Burrows (National Film and Television Archive, London), Robert Daudelin (Cinémathèque Québécoise), Mark-Paul Meyer and Rommy Albers (Nederlands Filmmuseum), Eva Orbanz (Berlin Film Museum), Eddie Richmond (UCLA Film and Television Archive), Dan Nissen (Det Danske Filmmuseum), Paulina Fernandez Jurado (Fundación Cinemateca Argentina), Lúcia Lobo (Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro), Edward E. Stratmann, Karen Latham Everson, Caroline Yeager, Chad D. Hunter, Daniel Wagner, Kristen A. Merola, and all the staff of the Motion Picture Department at George Eastman House for their generous help in retrieving and sharing information on archival sources. Last but not least, we are grateful to all the interns and students who contributed to the early stages of preparation of this volume: Elizabeth Coffey, Brandee Cox, Patricia De Filippi, Amy Gallick, Martin Glaus, Kae Ishihara, Dorothy Love, Srdjan Luki´c, Anke K. Mebold (recipient of the 2001 Giornate del Cinema Muto Fellowship and editorial assistant for this volume), Florence Paulin, Brigitte Paulowitz, Samantha Safran, Katie Trainor and Tim Wagner, students of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House, as well as Linda Shah, intern for the Motion Picture Division at the Library of Congress. My colleagues on the Board of Directors of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Davide Turconi, David Robinson, Piera Patat, Livio Jacob, Lorenzo Codelli, Carlo Montanaro, Piero Colussi and Luciano De Giusti) were instrumental in turning the Griffith retrospective into a unique opportunity to reassess the extraordinary contribution of D.W. Griffith to the art of film. Commentaries on the goals and methodological issues raised by The Griffith Project before and after the series started in October 1997 can be found in Griffithiana, Vol. XXI, Nos. 62–3, May 1998, 4–37 and in the French journal 1895, No. 29, December 1999, 187–8. Paolo Cherchi Usai Rochester, February 2001

ix

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

RICHARD ABEL is a professor in the English Department at Drake University. He has published extensively on silent French cinema as well as early cinema in the United States. His most recent book is The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (1999). Currently, he is serving as general editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Early Cinema and working on a cultural history project about moving pictures in the USA, 1910–1914. EILEEN BOWSER is a film historian and curator emeritus of the film archives, Department of Film and Video, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is cataloguer of the D.W. Griffith Collection of papers at the museum, author of The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915 (1990), co-author (with Iris Barry) of D.W. Griffith (1965) and editor of Biograph Bulletins 1908–1912 (1973). BEN BREWSTER is the assistant director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. He is co-author (with Lea Jacobs) of Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (1997) and author of many articles on early cinema in Screen, Film History, Cinema Journal, and Griffithiana. PAOLO CHERCHI USAI, senior curator of the Motion Picture Department at George Eastman House, is associate professor of Film at the University of Rochester and director of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, established in 1996. Co-founder of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, he is an adjunct member of the National Film Preservation Board and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). His latest book is The Death of Cinema (2001). TOM GUNNING is professor of Art History and member of the Committee on Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago. He is the author of D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (1991) and numerous articles on early cinema (including “the Cinema of Attractions”). He was a founding member of Domitor, the international society for the study of early film. His most recent book, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000), is published by BFI Publishing. STEVEN HIGGINS is curator in the Department of Film and Video, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. LEA JACOBS is professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her latest book, in collaboration with Ben Brewster, is Theater to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (1997). J.B. KAUFMAN is a film historian on the staff of the Hispanic Research Center, Arizona State University. He has written extensively on silent film and Disney animation and is co-author, with Russell Merritt, of Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney (1992). CHARLIE KEIL is associate professor of History and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 (2001) and has published extensively on early cinema.

x

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

DAVID MAYER is emeritus professor of Drama and research professor at the University of Manchester, England. His books include Harlequin in His Element: English Pantomime, 1806–1836 (1969) and Playing Out the Empire: Ben Hur and Other Toga Plays and Films (1994). He is author of numerous essays on nineteenth and early twentieth-century popular stage entertainments and links with early film. RUSSELL MERRITT is visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley and has written, with J.B. Kaufman, an account of Walt Disney’s silent cartoons, Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney (1992). CYNTHIA ROWELL graduated in 1999 from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House. She is director of Acquisitions for Milestone Film & Video. SCOTT SIMMON is author of The Films of D.W. Griffith (1993) and other volumes on American film and film preservation. For the Library of Congress, he supervised restorations of Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919) and Lois Weber’s Where Are My Children? (1916). He curated the National Film Preservation Foundation’s “Treasures from American Film Archives” (2000), a DVD set of fifty preserved films from eighteen archives. Currently, he is visiting associate professor at the University of California, Davis. KRISTIN THOMPSON is an honorary fellow in the Communication Arts Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her books include The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985), co-written with David Bordwell and Janet Staiger, Exporting Entertainment: America in World Film Markets 1907–1934 (1985), and Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (1999). She is at work on a study comparing Ernst Lubitsch’s silent German and American features.

xi

NOTE ON LAYOUT

Program sequence number, production company Filmographic information Plot summary from historical source Plot synopsis from actual viewing Critical analysis

xii

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

320 BIOGRAPH

FISHER FOLKS Filming date: 5/6/7 January 1911 Location: Santa Monica, California/Los Angeles Studio Release date: 16 February 1911 Release length: ca. 998 feet Copyright date: 18 February 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Harriet Quimby [“Story of a Fishing Village”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Steve Hardester); Linda Arvidson (Bertha); Vivian Prescott (Cora); W.C. Robinson, W. Chrystie Miller, Alfred Paget, Jeannie MacPherson (At wedding?); Verner Clarges (Minister); Joseph Graybill, Mack Sennett, Claire McDowell, John T. Dillon, W.C. Robinson, Alfred Paget, Edward Dillon (At fair); Kate Toncray, Jeannie MacPherson (On beach); William J. Butler (Fisherman) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative (no intertitles) No matter how homely the exterior a pure soul will so light up a personality that the plain personal appearance will be obliterated in its radiance. True love is born of the soul, hence it is stable, but love induced by personal appearance is as transitory as winds, changing with each new attraction. In this Biograph subject the line is clearly drawn comparing the two, with fate a controlling power. Steve Hardester, a handsome young fisherman, is infatuated with Cora, the village flirt. She, though really caring for him, must indulge her inclination to coquetry, laughingly flinging love back into his face, often making him the target of derision. Our story opens on the day of the Fair in the little fishing village. Bertha, a poor cripple, with a slightly deformed figure, but a pure sweet face, being too frail to undergo the toil of the fishergirl, ekes a livelihood selling flowers to the gallant fisherboys with which to deck their sweethearts’ tresses. On this day Bertha starts out long before daybreak to gather the dewy blossoms and form them into nosegays for sale to the young swains before the opening of the Fair. This done long before the dawn, she reclines on the beach and dozes off through sheer fatigue and sleeps until the morning sun awakens her. Going through the village she meets Steve as he is about to enter his cottage. Offering her bouquets, he purchases one to give to the object of his affection, Cora. Sad of heart, poor Bertha wishes she had some one to show her those little attentions, particularly Steve, as she has always loved the handsome young fisherman. Cora, though, imagining that she can have her choice of the boys on account of her attractiveness, takes delight in holding Steve’s little favors up to ridicule and this occasion is no exception, for when he invites her to attend the Fair and presents her with the bunch of wild flowers, she pokes fun at it. This is the last straw and Steve snatches the flowers from her and crushes them under his heel, leaving her for good. This at first amuses Cora for she thinks herself irresistible and he will come back. But not so, for as he dashes back to his cottage he meets again the little flower seller. Her sweet face at once appeals to him and in a moment of pique through wounded pride, rather than a tender feeling for Bertha, he asks her to attend the Fair with him. Her joy is ecstatic at this and she and Steve make their way to the fair grounds, much to the chagrin of Cora, who has from a distance witnessed their meeting. However, Cora assumes an indifferent mien, feeling that Steve’s action is induced by a spirit

1

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

of revenge. This is at first true, but Steve’s association with Bertha cultivates something more serious. He now realizes the worth of an affection born of a pure soul, and they become betrothed, their marriage following shortly after. Cora is now the one to suffer wounded pride. She realizes she has lost the best catch in the village, and to one whom she regards as so inferior. Obsessed by a desire for revenge she determines at any cost to wreak it. Some time later she visits the young couple’s cottage, ostensibly to congratulate them, but upon leaving slips a note to Steve to meet her at the old trysting place. More than mere curiosity impels him to see her and on the eve of his departure on a long cruise he is there to bid her an adieu. More than a year passes and no word comes from the fishing crew, until late one afternoon their vessel is seen in the distance slowly nearing the shore. The little village is at once alive with excitement. Kindly fishermen inform Bertha of the approach of the long absent fisher crew and she takes up her little charge, which had arrived in the meantime, to make her way as fast as possible to the landing place. Her heart is almost bursting with joy in the anticipation of Steve’s surprise when she places in his arms their little son. But what grief awaits her, for Cora arriving first lures him off to her cottage, Bertha arriving just in time to see them going hurriedly up the beach. Almost heartbroken and forlorn she wends her way homeward when at a turn in the lane she comes face to face with Steve. What a shock. He now realizes what a contemptible brute he is and so has not the heart to face her. Bertha, however, has nothing but forgiveness and love portrayed in her countenance so Steve takes the little one from her outstretched arms and together they go to their humble cottage, leaving Cora transfixed with suppressed rage on the sands. Biograph Bulletin, No. [?], February 16, 1911

The day of the village fair in the little fishing village, Bertha the crippled girl gathers flowers before dawn to sell to the young fishermen for their sweethearts. Steve, unaware that Bertha loves him, buys one of her bouquets to give to the village flirt, Cora. Cora, overconfident of Steve, teases him by poking fun at the bouquet. Steve is tired of being ridiculed, and with wounded pride, he asks Bertha to go to the fair with him. He subsequently falls in love and marries her. Cora, obsessed with revenge, visits their cottage and gives Steve a note luring him to an assignation. The fishing boats set out to sea again, not to return for a year. Bertha goes to meet the boat with their new son in her arms but sees Cora and Steve go off together. Returning sadly to her cottage, Bertha encounters Steve, who is too ashamed to face her. But Bertha is all forgiveness, and they go home together.

The Biograph Camera Register lists Fort Lee as one of the locations for Fisher Folks but without a date, according to D.W. Griffith and the Biograph Company (Graham et al., p. 104). The exterior scenes are recognizably the California coast, and I think it is most likely that the interiors were filmed in the new West Coast studio. I suspect the Fort Lee location is simply an error in the records. This is the first film made on the second trip to California, a very different trip from the first. The company that went to California was a much larger group of people than the year before. A new open-air studio awaited them at Georgia and Pico Streets in Los Angeles, and they planned to stay longer this time. For a month or two, the new California productions were released alternately with films made in New York, or some of them combined New York studio footage with California exteriors, in order to meet the regular release schedule despite the time lost during the train trip west. The larger producing organizations continued production in New York or Chicago while sending separate companies to California, Florida, and elsewhere, but Biograph had only one production 2

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

company at this time, headed by D.W. Griffith. The New York studio was not producing films, yet the company in California had to keep up to the same schedule as Vitagraph and Edison. The extraordinary beauty of The Unchanging Sea [DWG Project, #252], made on the earlier trip to the West Coast, was still in everyone’s memory a year later. The company hurried back to the seashore at Santa Monica to try to recapture the magic. Griffith appears to have been captivated by the aesthetic quality of the images, in addition to the potential of seascape (as he used landscape elsewhere) to characterize people and their feelings. The film opens on a slow fade in, an evocation of dawn, on the cliff above the beach at Santa Monica. The little crippled girl wakes up in the foreground, against a background of great depth, looking down on the beach where gentle waves break. This composition will be recognized from several other Biographs made at the sea’s shore. However, the lyrical qualities found in the opening image are not as important to this film as they were in The Unchanging Sea. This may be accounted for by the fact that the earlier film was based on a famous poem, while Fisher Folks is a more prosaic tale. Composition in depth, however, is an important element in Fisher Folks. To properly appreciate these compositions, we need a good restored print that has been aperture adjusted. The present 16mm reduction print is also seriously out of order and lacks intertitles. The unfortunate result of the lack of assembly is that Steve proposes marriage to Bertha just before he invites her to go out on a date for the very first time. The final scene of the reconciliation with the help of their baby occurs immediately after that, long before we are ready for it. It will be quite confusing for anyone who has not read the synopsis. The aperture misalignment in the print viewed and the reduction to 16mm exaggerate the relationship of the foreground figures to the frame. The actors are taken at closer range, hips or thighs at the bottom of the frame, the heads sometimes scraping the top of the frame. Groupings of fisher folk move around in the background while the chief action is played out near the camera. The Punch and Judy show at the fair draws a crowd of fascinated spectators looking to the side of the screen, while the protagonists of the drama interact in the foreground. Scenes crowded with action and interesting details are nevertheless quite clear, which may be credited to the care taken in composition. The closeness of the camera to the leading actors and the depth of field for the background result in a startling intimacy compared with the film made a year before. The lighting also plays a strong compositional role. The people at dawn on the beach are side-lighted by the rising sun. In the proposal scene, Steve’s dark figure is outlined by the bright white of a woman’s sunlit dress in the background. The actors are shown in front of drying fish nets, dark against the brilliant light of the beach behind. Bertha watches as, in another shot, Steve and Cora embrace in the dark at the side of the frame as though another actor was going to enter, but no one does. The centering of the image is no longer considered a necessity as it was in earlier films. The lighting is expressionistic in most of the interior scenes, highlighting the baby and side-lighting the other characters, in a setting so dark that we lose all the details of the room. The effect is contrived with sunlight and sliding canvas shades in the open-air studio. The lighting style may have begun out of necessity, but it ended in dramatic and emotionally expressive photography. The casting of Vivian Prescott, a capable comic actor, in the role of Cora the flirt is a disturbing factor. She acts in an exaggerated fashion, which fits well in the scene in which she toys with Steve and rejects him in front of laughing spectators, imitating his indignant walk. But when she finds that she is rejected by Steve in favor of Bertha, her outrage seems overdone. She moves in jerks, and bends over sharply as though she has stabbed herself in the stomach. Linda Arvidson, as Bertha, on the other hand, is restrained in her moving per3

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

formance. Until we can see the film assembled in the correct order it is difficult to know how to view this combination of comedy and tragedy. According to a contemporary commentator it is “one of those domestic stories, filled with dramatic interest, because it depicts what actually occurs in human hearts” (The Moving Picture World, March 4, 1911, p.482). A note about Harriet Quimby, the author: she was a journalist and photographer, and was the first American woman to be granted a flying license. This was in 1911. In 1912, she was the first woman to fly the English Channel solo. She died in a plane crash that same year. During 1911, seven of her stories supplied screenplays for Biograph productions. She was one of those adventurous young females referred to by journalists as the “New Woman” in American life. Eileen Bowser

4

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

321 BIOGRAPH

HIS DAUGHTER Filming date: 11/12 January 1911 Location: Sierra Madre, California Release date: 23 February 1911 Release length: ca. 997 feet Copyright date: 25 February 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Belle Taylor [“Due to Her Trust”?] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Florence Barker (Mary); Edwin August (William Whittier); W. Chrystie Miller (William’s father); George O. Nicholls (Mary’s father); Gladys Egan (Mary’s little sister); Kate Bruce (A neighbor) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate positive; Nederlands Filmmuseum, 35mm nitrate positive (Dutch titles) HER FUTURE HAPPINESS JEOPARDIZED BY HIS WORTHLESSNESS An inordinate desire for drink made this man the beast he is, for his early life must have been exemplary, or he could not have been the father of a girl of such fine character. A miner, he had made some money, but instead of purchasing a future for himself and child, Mary, procures a host of most undesirable friends (?). In short he becomes a worthless drunkard, chumming with the most despicable parasite in the village. On the other hand, his old neighbor, John Whittier, has been more provident and saved his earnings to provide a future for his son William. William and Mary have grown up together and have been sweethearts from earliest childhood; although not really engaged, there is a tacit understanding between the two. William is leaving for college, where he is to pass his last year in his medical studies, to return at the end of this season a full fledged medical doctor. It is at this parting that their betrothal takes place, he promising to return and make her his wife. This is the happiest moment of her life, despite the thought that they are to be separated for a long school session. This dream of happiness has a rude awakening at the appearance of her besotted father demanding money for drink. However, she is ever hopeful and when later she receives a letter from William informing her of his early return, she is beside herself with joy. Hastening to William’s father she finds he has a letter stating that the boy will return that same day. The old man is counting his savings figuring that the money will start his boy up in business in good shape. The letter received by the father contained a photograph of the boy in his graduation clothes. Of this the old man is very proud and hastens out to show it to his friends in the village. In his haste he falls and injures himself. This accident occurs outside Mary’s home so she takes him in and cares for him there. The old man’s first thought is the money and he insists upon going back, but Mary realizing that it would prove disastrous for him to make the journey in his condition, volunteers to get it and bring it to him. To this he consents, and she leaves, at the same time sending for medical aid for the injured man. On her way back with the money she meets her father, who guessing the contents of the bag, his cupidity is aroused and he plans to get it. Following her at a safe distance he peers through the window and sees her hide it under the mattress in her bedroom. Here he evolves a scheme.

5

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Securing the coat and hat of his chum, whom he somewhat resembles, he masks his face with a handkerchief, effects an entrance through the window and is about to make off with his loot when surprised by his daughter with a pistol. She secures the bag and forces him out at the point of the gun, intending to take him to the lock-up, of course imagining him to be her father’s chum. On the way they are met by William, who has just alighted from the train and he, tearing the mask off, discovers the identity of the thief. What a blow this is to the poor girl, and seeing the money safe in the old man’s hand, she, broken by the disgrace, makes a desperate attempt to leave the place. William, however, will not blame her for her father’s deed and hastens after her to renew and put into effect the promises he made before leaving for college, realizing that she needs his protection now more than ever. Biograph Bulletin, No. [?], February 23, 1911

William Whittier bids farewell to his father and to Mary, his childhood sweetheart, whom he promises to marry when he returns from his last year of medical studies. Mary’s alcoholic father spoils her happiness. He demands money and beats her little sister until interrupted by visitors. Later, Mary receives a letter from William and hurries to see William’s father, who also has a letter. His missive announces William’s return that same day. Mr. Whittier has been counting his savings, ready to use them to set William up in practice as a doctor. He hurries out to show his friends a photograph of his son in his graduation robes, but in his haste he falls and is injured. Mary takes him in to her house, but he is frantic about the money he left behind. Mary sends for medical help and then goes to get the money in order to reassure him. Mary’s own father watches and sees her hide the money. In disguise, he enters through the window and is making off with the money when Mary confronts him with a pistol in her hand. She is taking him to jail when they encounter William. He rips off her father’s disguise. Mary, feeling the disgrace of having a thief for a father, tries to run away, but William will not free her from her engagement.

For the second film made on this second trip to California, the company went to the mountains. The Sierra Madre Mountains dominate the background of the exterior scenes. The repeated locations serve the function, as in so many Griffith films, of endowing places with specific meaning. The well-known Griffith gate is actually just the end of a fence in this film, but it serves well as the site of significant emotional reunions. It is the place where Mary accepts William’s proposal, the place of refuge to which the injured father staggers to a chair after his fall, and where Mary is persuaded to accept William again after her disgrace. The high sandy bank and the curve of dusty road nearby is the site of violence and disastrous encounters. Here William’s father takes a serious fall and here it is that Mary’s father is unmasked in front of her eyes by the returning William. Aside from these serious episodes, there are such charmingly natural and light-hearted scenes as the one that shows Mary and William’s father struggling playfully for possession of the photograph William has sent. The pace is quickening. All through 1911 we will see the number of shots encompassed by the one-reel film growing. The story is melodramatic, to be sure, and Mary’s inability to recognize her own troublesome father under the hat and kerchief is unbelievable, but the acting is restrained and natural, and the mountain scenery is the backdrop to a human-centered tale. Non-recognition scenes are a frequent problem throughout the silent period, together with the convention of the characters unable to hear sounds that were unheard by audiences. There was occasional comment in the trade publications of 1911 that Biograph was slip6

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

ping a bit from its high peak of achievement, but I have a theory that it was the absence of the well-known actors who left Biograph for other companies in 1911 and were not on this California trip – Mary Pickford, Marion Leonard, Henry Walthall, Arthur Johnson – that was influencing these comments. That would explain the reference of the commentator in The Moving Picture World to the “old Biograph stock company”: This picture has something of the spirit and character of the old Biograph stock company’s work. It is a story of love which did not have to be thwarted to make it flow true. The girl’s father is depicted as a despicable wretch, which he undoubtedly was, but the steadfast honesty of the young man in not only remembering his sweetheart, but in accepting her after he discovers that her father is a villain, is an episode that increases the interest of the film considerably. It is, perhaps, as good a love story as has been told by this company in some time, and the actors have caught the spirit of it so that it is interpreted with a clarity which leaves no room for misunderstanding. The staging is up to requirements and the photography could scarcely be improved. (March 11, 1911, p. 540)

Eileen Bowser

7

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

322 BIOGRAPH

THE HEART OF A SAVAGE Filming date: 17/18 January 1911 Location: Mount Lookout, the Santa Monica Mountains/Sierra Madre, California Release date: 2 March 1911 Release length: ca. 991 feet Copyright date: 6 March 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer NOTE: No viewing material survives from which the cast may be determined. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A REDMAN’S SACRIFICE THROUGH GRATITUDE One thing seems strange in the Indian and that is his unflinching fulfillment of his moral obligations, especially those incurred by a feeling of gratitude. In this Biograph story the Indian lays down his very life for the one who bestowed upon him a small kindness. Into a camp of peaceful Indians fires a gang of miner thugs. They evidently regard the poor Indian with less consideration than a wild beast and to shoot him is simply one kind of sport. Several of the Indians are killed and wounded, but two escape into the brush and elude the varlets as they run by. One of the wounded redmen is driven through fear further away from the Indian village and though merely bullet-stunned falls exhausted by the side of a spring, apparently to perish, being helpless to reach the water, though in sight of it. On the brow of the hill there lives a prospector and his happy little family of a wife and small girl child. The prospector having departed for his claim, the wife goes to the spring for water and seeing the Indian prostrate before it, thinks his mien hostile and is about to brain him with a club when he feebly looks up. She sees at once he is suffering and in need of aid which she at once administers. Relating the incident to her husband later, he tells her to be careful, as the redman is cunning and should be avoided, but she is sure that he was truly grateful for what she had done. Meanwhile, the other wounded Indian has made his way to the village and told the story of the dastardly attack upon them by the thugs and a council is at once held and war is declared against all whites. The first Indian arrives just as the war-dance is participated in and realizing the danger in which his benefactors are rushes off to warn them. The poor fellow, however, is unable to make himself understood to the woman who is alone with her child. Finding it impossible to make her understand him he resorts to the subterfuge of snatching up the child and carrying it away knowing that the woman will follow. On and on they go until the summit of the mountain is reached, where he again tries to explain the situation, when a bullet from the husband’s gun fells him to earth, he having arrived at his cabin and finding his wife and child gone, follows their foot tracks to find them in the company of the Indian whose designs he feels are sinister. Leaving the poor fellow on the ground they make their way back to the cabin which they find is now a huge pile of ashes, the Indians having set it afire on their march of devastation. It is now and not until now that they realize the poor Indian’s good intent. Shocked beyond measure at the thought of

8

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

misconstruing his motive with such disastrous result they hasten back to the scene where he fell only to find that the shot was fatal. Grief-stricken the two pay him posthumous honor by digging a grave and burying him. The production comprises a series of most beautiful scenes taken on Mount Lookout, a peak of the Santa Monica Mountains in California. Biograph Bulletin, No. [?], March 2, 1911

The Heart of a Savage is not a lost film, but there is no viewing print available at the present time. The film is preserved by a fine grain master made from the unassembled original negative at the Museum of Modern Art. It appears likely that when The Heart of a Savage can be seen again it will turn out to be another awesome display of western mountain scenery with striking long distance views. The illustration in the Biograph Bulletin gives an indication of this, and the advertisement itself boasts of the beautiful scenes taken on Mount Lookout. There would certainly be opportunity for landscape as metaphor: the spring where the Indian is rescued represents life; the top of the mountain where he dies and is buried makes a picture of death with honor and dignity. The stock character of the noble Indian who sacrifices himself is by 1911 fully established in the production repertoire and in the general culture as well. This is a story about such an Indian and was one of the first subjects the company turned to, once back in the West. It reminds me of a story told by my mother and told to her by her mother about my great-grandparents, who went out West in a covered wagon. Left alone with her babies in a sod hut on the plains while her young husband delivered mail on horseback, and with only a rifle for protection, my great-grandmother was nervous about a nearby Indian encampment and afraid of an old Indian who wandered around her hut. One day she opened her blanket chest and found a rattlesnake hissing at her. She screamed. The old Indian came running and killed the snake for her. He was no threat to her, he was only looking after her. This family story may be mythic, but the description of The Heart of an Indian echoed in my memory; doubtless, the film also had personal reference for some members of its original audiences. A critic for The New York Dramatic Mirror in 1911 noted the significance of the lack of a common language that led to misunderstandings between the settlers and the local Indians: Aside from the many excellent effects obtained in this picture by natural unfolding of events and the novel idea at the base of the story, perhaps the most noteworthy point is the fact that the settlers and the Indians failed to understand each other, and were obliged to speak in signs, which is a fact entirely ignored in the average film. By natural touches the story becomes one of the best Indian films this reviewer has ever seen. (March 8, 1911, p. 31)

A commentator in The Moving Picture World also found this to be an exceptional Indian film: The picture of the uprising, the attempted warning and the misunderstood action of the Indian, ending with his tragic death, are events in a good Indian tale. The characterization seems to be good and then there is a naturalness about the entire picture which appeals to an audience because it depicts what seems to be true human emotions. (March 18, 1911, p. 602)

Eileen Bowser

9

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

323 BIOGRAPH

CONSCIENCE Filming date: 22/30 November 1910, 19 January 1911 Location: New York Studio/Coytesville, New Jersey/Carter Canyon, California Release date: 9 March 1911 Release length: ca. 995 feet Copyright date: 10 March 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Edwin August (Howard Raymond); Stephanie Longfellow (His wife); Joseph Graybill (The hunter); Gladys Egan (Child); Dell Henderson, Alfred Paget (Hunters); Claire McDowell, Kate Toncray, Jeannie MacPherson (Maids); Guy Hedlund (Doctor); George O. Nicholls, Adolph Lestina, William J. Butler (Detectives); W.C. Robinson, Donald Crisp, Frank Evans (Policemen); Henry Lehrman (Stenographer) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Film and Television Archive, 35mm acetate negative (from 35mm nitrate positive destroyed in 1968) SHOWING THE FALLIBILITY OF CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE The most compelling influence in man is conscience. It either makes arrant cowards or brave heroes of us; it is the real foundation of all morals and ethics; it is the rock upon which the well-being of the human family is built. While the conscience plays an important part in this Biograph production there are two other points brought to light – the fallibility of circumstantial evidence, and the injustice often induced by the third degree examination. Howard Raymond with his wife and little child are spending the season at their hunting lodge. The bad coffee furnished for the first breakfast occasions a slight quarrel between Howard and his wife. Realizing he has unreasonably hurt his wife’s feelings, he playfully placates her and in a joke points his gun at her exclaiming “Better coffee, or you die!” At this point the maid and the child enter and in alarm think him in earnest in the threat, to the amusement of Mr. and Mrs. Raymond. Laughingly he starts off on his hunting trip, but he has hardly departed when the maid discovers he has forgotten his game-bag so the wife hastens after him with it, arriving at his side just as he has shot his first charge at a deer. The wife giving him the bag, turns to go back, when she is shot and killed by a bullet from the gun of a hidden hunter who has mistaken her through the brush for game. Her cry startles the hunter together with two others in another part of the woods, all of whom rush to the spot from whence the cry came. The man who fired the shot, however, lurks in the distance horrified at the result of his carelessness, for he realizes that his shot felled the woman. Hence, panic-stricken he rushes to his own lodge and hides. The other two, however, feel it a moral duty to stay and investigate, they having found one charge of Raymond’s gun discharged with the cartridge shell still warm. All this seemed strange and together with the story of his threat in the morning, as related by the maid and child, sums up circumstantial evidence which most convincingly points to the husband. In the face of this he is accused by the detective who is summoned to work on the case. Raymond, however, is adamant in his declaration of innocence and he is subjected to the

10

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

terrible ordeal of the Third Degree in order to wring a confession from him, for the facts of the case seem logically conclusive. For a long time he holds out, but at length, tortured beyond endurance, he in desperation accuses himself of the deed he did not commit. Meanwhile, conscience is preying upon the real perpetrator and unable to resist its urging longer, bursts into the midst of the inquisitors and confesses that he shot the bullet that killed Mrs. Raymond, mistaking her through the bushes for game, thus exonerating the poor heartsick husband, who now finds consolation in his child. Biograph Bulletin, No. [?], March 9, 1911

Mr. and Mrs. Howard Raymond are at breakfast in their hunting lodge when they have a small quarrel about the quality of coffee she serves. He jokingly points his gun at her and says “Better coffee, or you die!” He is overheard by their alarmed maid and child, but the married pair are laughing. Raymond forgets his game-bag and his wife runs after him with it. He has taken his first shot at a deer when she reaches him, and as she turns to go back, she is accidentally shot by another hunter. Other hunters rush to the spot, while the guilty man runs away panic-stricken. The circumstances point strongly to Raymond as the killer of his wife. The detective subjects innocent Raymond to the third degree until he admits guilt. However, the real killer, tortured by his conscience, confesses.

A graphic illustration of the possible injustice of circumstantial evidence and the chance of extorting a possible confession from an innocent man under the cruelties of the third degree. It is not particularly dramatic, but it tells a useful story clearly…. The horrors of the third degree are graphically shown. It will afford those who see it some conception of this … question of the twentieth century. (The Moving Picture World, March 25, 1911, p. 657)

Conscience was the last of the films to be released that were all or partially shot in New York in the previous November, a time lapse before its release that may reflect the difficulties Griffith had with it. The one-reel film was beginning to show its limitations. There are two distinct strands to the psychological stress portrayed in Conscience: one is the operation of a guilty conscience, while the other is the effect of the third degree used as a police tactic. There was insufficient length to develop even one of these convincingly. It explains the reservations of the sympathetic New York Dramatic Mirror critic: The strong element in this film is not the operation of conscience on the mind of the guilty man … but rather the remarkably convincing way in which the innocent man was worn down by the police third degree until in sheer exhaustion he confessed to a crime he had never committed. It is perhaps true that not enough time was shown to have elapsed from the beginning of the mental torture until the victim broke down, but this circumstance is not damaging because it is not noticeable, and it is only after thinking the story over that one realizes that the time was really short. The gradual effect of the third degree is shown in a number of scenes alternated with scene showing the effects of conscience on the other man, so that it all appears to take longer than it is actually represented to be…. [T]he film is an unusually strong one even for Biograph. (March 15, 1911, p. 31)

Two years later, when Griffith undertook his four-reel feature film, The Avenging Conscience (1914), he found a better way to do it. In that film he would create long sequences 11

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

of intricate rhythmic intercutting of details to create a gripping portrayal of the workings of a guilty conscience. Although we see two equally important themes, the critics noticed chiefly the third degree and its dangers. The “third degree”, known now to everybody who goes to the movies or reads detective stories, was an American usage that had entered the language only recently, in 1900, meaning rough treatment during interrogation. Concern with potential injustices of the method was discussed in the media, and is reflected in the words of The Moving Picture World commentator quoted above. Accustomed as we are now with images of more violent police interrogations in the movies and on television, this one looks rather mild. Again, the problem is in part the lack of time in the one-reel film for developing the pressure of the third degree. Another problem is that the modern-day spectator has become accustomed to seeing images showing degrees of violence unknown in earlier films. We begin to see Griffith’s growing expressiveness in such powerful and typical shots as the one in which the staring, guilty hunter edges forward from behind a tree and exits out right foreground into close-up. It is a terrifying image that will reappear in films yet to come, for example, in The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912). The missing intertitles in the MoMA viewing print were reconstructed by Tom Gunning and myself on the basis of the Biograph Bulletin. Eileen Bowser

12

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

324 BIOGRAPH

WAS HE A COWARD? Filming date: 23/27 January 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/El Monte, California Release date: 16 March 1911 Release length: ca. 994 feet Copyright date: 20 March 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Emmett Campbell Hall [“Hero of the Lost Dog Ranch”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Norris Hilton); Joseph Graybill (His friend); W. Chrystie Miller (The rancher); Blanche Sweet (Kate, his daughter); Dell Henderson (Foreman); Kate Toncray (Maid); Francis J. Grandon (Doctor); Guy Hedlund (Indian); William J. Butler (At train station); John T. Dillon, Grace Henderson, Alfred Paget, George O. Nicholls, Charles H. West, W.C. Robinson (At ranch) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate positive HE PROVES HIS METTLE WHERE IT COUNTED It often happens that we malign a man who hasn’t had a chance to prove himself by branding him a coward. To hold up one’s end in a quarrel, a fistic or fire-arm combat, is really not bravery, it is indifference induced by impulsiveness. The brave man is the cool-headed man who faces anger in the full appreciation of its possible result, [sic] This is nearly always the outcome of an unselfish concern for our fellowman [sic]. Norris Hilton, a young novelist, is suffering from a nervous breakdown. His friend, having had the same experience, writes advising him to try a stay out West on a ranch, promising that the rough outdoor life will surely do him a world of good; besides he might be able to pick up material for a real Western story. The suggestion appeals to Hilton and he leaves at once, arriving at a Western ranch that is in need of hands. His refined clean-cut appearance rather amuses the foreman and he is engaged more in the spirit of a joke than anything else; but when introduced to the ranchman’s family he meets the pretty daughter and it is a case of love at first sight. This upsets the foreman who is sweet on the girl himself and he induces the boys to impose on the tenderfoot hoping to drive him away or ridicule him before the girl. Hilton swallows all for he is indeed deeply infatuated with the artless little ranch girl. As this has no effect the foreman tries another plan, that of insulting him in the effort to force him to fight, but personal combat is not his idea of bravery, and he refuses to fight although the foreman goes to the extreme in his provocations. The girl, with her Western ideas, is awfully disappointed in him, and scorns him as a coward. This is elation for the foreman. However, there is the real kind of bravery and Hilton possesses that. A poor Indian is stricken with smallpox, and the gang would have thrown him into a ditch to die, had not Hilton come up and taken the poor fellow in his arms and carried him to a deserted shack, where he cares for him, he himself denied the right to step beyond the dead-line the gang has drawn and guarded. The next day the father of the girl is afflicted with the dread disease, and the boys are just as merciless with him as they were with the Indian – afraid to go near him – forcing him at the points of pitchforks and revolvers across the dead-line, where he is picked up and tenderly cared for by Hilton, who is

13

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

now himself showing symptoms of the disease. Hilton, with the assistance of a doctor who has come from the town, nurses the victims back to perfect health, but he has neglected himself in the care of them and, although cured is marked for life. The boys now realize what real bravery is and Hilton is regarded as the hero of the ranch. Of course, the girl has now no thought of scorn; she, despite his marked face, regards him as her hero. This Biograph subject was made on one of the largest and most picturesque ranches in Southern California. Biograph Bulletin, No. [?], March 16, 1911

Norris Hilton, a writer, gets a job as a ranch hand in the West in order to recover from a nervous breakdown. He falls in love with the rancher’s daughter, Kate. The jealous foreman enlists the other hands to help ridicule the tenderfoot. The foreman challenges Hilton to fight. Hilton declines, and as a result, Kate thinks him a coward. An Indian stricken with smallpox is driven away by the ranch hands at the point of pitchforks, but Hilton rescues him and carries him to a deserted shack, where he cares for the Indian but is infected himself. The ranch owner then falls ill with the same dread disease, and the merciless ranch hands force him out. Hilton takes him into his care as well. A doctor comes from town and everyone recovers, but Hilton is scarred for life. Kate now recognizes his real heroism and does not scorn his scars.

El Monte, California, where this film was made, is a “rich green island between two rivers”, according to its current website, at the end of the Santa Fe Trail. In 1907 the Pacific Electric Railroad extended its line to El Monte, making it possible to go there for filmmaking and home again at the end of the day. The landscape seen in Was He a Coward? is flat prairie, with no dramatic mountains or seashore, and yet the compositions, with their use of wide open spaces, still appeal. When Hilton is brought to the ranch in a wagon, in the background there is a beautiful curve of many horses running wildly across the corral. Such scenes added greatly to the attraction of the many Westerns now emanating from the real West. The camera keeps coming closer during 1911. In an iconic Western composition, Wilfred Lucas leans back against the side of the barn in close-up (waist shot), and a horse’s head emerges from the barn beside him. Lucas pets him. We’ll see many shots resembling that one in the decades to come. It demonstrates the cowboy’s eternal love for his horse (no matter that Hilton is a tenderfoot here). The charming young Blanche Sweet is playing one of her first leads for Biograph. The Lonedale Operator, her great triumph, was begun the week before and completed the week after Was He a Coward? She had played lesser roles in seven Biograph films in 1909. According to Linda Arvidson (p. 192), Griffith summoned Sweet (from “somewhere on the road”) to California to play ingénues when it turned out Mary Pickford had been lured away by the Imp Company just before the trip to California. Blanche Sweet may have still been an unknown quantity, according to Arvidson’s account, but she was just on the verge of becoming one of Biograph’s most active and celebrated stars. Her role in Was He a Coward? is not a very large or challenging role for her, to be sure. She has only to express her attraction to the sophisticated visitor from the East, turning away to pick flowers in a flirtatious way, then show her scorn when she doesn’t approve of him, and her hero-worship when she does. Her performance is natural and relaxed, and it is evident that the camera loves her by the way she draws the spectator’s eye in group scenes. The male lead (Wilfred Lucas as Norris Hilton) is the center of the action. He is the object of ridicule at first, the traditional tenderfoot, but Hilton declines to become a butt 14

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

of jokes. He is calmly dignified throughout. Perhaps the character might have had more depth if we would see him actually suffer embarrassment before winning everyone’s admiration for his true bravery in the face of smallpox. The action is rapid, but once again the one-reel film seems too short for the content. The Moving Picture World (April 29, 1911, p. 957) called it “one of those Biograph sermons”, in this case illustrating “that there are two varieties of bravery. One brutal and the other moral, the truest kind of bravery.” The intertitles in the MoMA viewing print are not original: they have been reconstructed by Tom Gunning and myself based on the Biograph Bulletin. Eileen Bowser

15

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

325 BIOGRAPH

TEACHING DAD TO LIKE HER Filming date: 30/31 January, 1 February 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/California (exteriors) Release date: 20 March 1911 Release length: ca. 995 feet Copyright date: 22 March 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Emmett Campbell Hall Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Joseph Graybill (Harry); Dell Henderson (His father); Vivian Prescott (Dolly); Verner Clarges (Father’s friend); Guy Hedlund (Harry’s friend); Edward Dillon (Footman); Kate Toncray, Francis J. Grandon (Servants); Alfred Paget, Charles H. West, William J. Butler, Kate Bruce, Edward Dillon, W. Chrystie Miller, John T. Dillon, Florence Lee, W.C. Robinson (Outside theater) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A PROCEDURE VERY FOOLISH ON THE BOY’S PART There is a popular English coster song that begins with the line “Never introduce your Donah to a pal,” which contains more logical advice than we at first thought would assume. The young son of a wealthy widower, who is the leading character of this Biograph comedy, now realizes this to the extreme. Harry is infatuated with Dolly, the show girl, and knowing well that a marriage with any one without Dad’s consent would jeopardize his chances of the future with him, proposes to Dolly with the understanding that he first gain the governor’s sanction to their union, reasoning that there can be no possible objections as Dolly is an exceptionally nice and pretty girl, who has won the esteem and respect of all who know her. However, it is not as plain sailing as he imagines for Dad stoutly refuses, considering the mere fact of her being a chorus girl, as marriage to his boy would mean disgrace to the family. The young couple are [sic] awfully distressed by the turn of affairs and while the boy makes several attempts to win his Dad over, Dad is adamant. In desperation the boy hits upon a scheme to win his father’s consent which seems good to both of the lovers. The plan is to have Dad meet Dolly and become impressed with her. The boy is sure that Dad will like Dolly if he meets her. Preparations are made for this chance meeting and things move smoothly. The boy induces Dad to take a stroll through the grounds around their mansion and Dolly is to happen by as if by accident. Then the introduction. All goes as it was programmed and the boy leaves Dolly and Dad together using some subterfuge to take himself away. Dad at first refuses to even speak to or look at the girl, but her pleading finally softens his manner enough to argue with her upon the impossibility of such an alliance. The more he sees of her the weaker his determination becomes until things take quite a different turn. The boy all this time is in hiding hoping that Dad will like Dolly. But Dolly, when he sees her as she leaves, is not very encouraging in her information as to Dad’s conduct, which discouragement is emphasized by Dad’s positive refusal to talk on the matter. The boy, however, notices that Dad takes on quite a different air; he is quite gay and debonair in both dress and manners. On the other hand, Dolly is less effusive and seems to have other engagements. He asks himself has she another suitor – if so, who? He discourages this thought,

16

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

with a reasoning that her actions may be affected to urge him on, so he in defiance to his Dad goes and buys the ring. His one bothersome question is, “Does Dad Like Her?” He soon finds the answer, for he calls on Dolly to find that Dad likes Dolly and Dolly likes Dad unusually – so much so that the cards will be out in a few days announcing the nuptials of Dad and Dolly. Biograph Bulletin, No. [?], March 20, 1911

Harry is infatuated with Dolly, a showgirl, and his wealthy father, a widower, does not approve. Father eavesdrops on Harry’s lengthy phone conversations with Dolly. Harry proposes marriage conditionally, that is, Dolly must first win over his father, so that he will not be disinherited. Harry is confident his father will like Dolly if only he meets her. The young lovers arrange an accidental meeting on the grounds of the estate, and Father is charmed, despite his prejudice against showgirls. Father is so charmed, in fact, that he decides to win Dolly for his own, to Harry’s great chagrin.

Teaching Dad to Like Her is a comedy constructed around old music hall stories, worldly and cynical. It does not quite fit the image of wholesome comedies now demanded by the reformers, although it is innocent enough in its expression. Flirtatious and mercenary showgirls and their helpless, wealthy old paramours were stereotypical figures that would become a staple of slapstick comedy. But this film is not quite slapstick; it is more a situation comedy. What is particularly interesting about it, however, is the telephone conversation of the young lovers. Griffith crosscuts a telephone conversation between lovers in an extraordinary series of fifteen mostly very short shots. This film comes after the telephone thrillers in which the art of crosscutting was developed to depict telephone calls linking distant spaces (and to increase suspense), but here, without the terrors, the conversation becomes a sequence more prolonged than in any of the telephone thrillers to date. One of the popular terms for the telephone in its early days was “the lover’s telegraph”, because it offered a greater degree of privacy than the earlier medium. We might conclude that Griffith found this crosscutting more fascinating than the rest of the film. The extension of the sequence does not add a lot to the story but allows the audience plenty of time to enjoy the charming scene – and the novelty of a love affair by telephone, something we take for granted but at this time was not yet available to everyone. The telephone sequence in Teaching Dad to Like Her is an allusion to the many postcards that had appeared on the subject, showing lovers at opposite corners of the frame, talking into telephones, with cupids, hearts and flowers, and scenery filling the space between them. Unlike those earlier postcard images, though, the film image of a telephone conversation no longer required the indication of distance and simultaneity with space between the callers in the same image, although some filmmakers continued to use that technique, especially in Europe. Crosscutting between the callers was now perfectly clear to all spectators. Perhaps this extended telephone conversation was what the Moving Picture World commentator meant when he remarked that “[t]he story is told with good accessories” (April 1, 1911, p. 718), although he does not mention the telephone conversation at all. Linda Arvidson, on the other hand, describing the new studio that awaited them on their arrival in California, noted: “There was even a telephone on the stage. The studio was then indeed the last word in modern equipment” (Arvidson, p. 194). Perhaps the presence of the telephone inspired the emphasis on the “lover’s telegraph” in Teaching Dad to Like Her. The intertitles in the MoMA viewing print were reconstructed by Tom Gunning and myself on the basis of the Biograph Bulletin. Eileen Bowser 17

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

326 BIOGRAPH

THE LONEDALE OPERATOR Filming date: 14/16 January, 2/4 February 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/Inglewood, California Release date: 23 March 1911; reissued by Biograph, 19 November 1915 Release length: ca. 998 feet Copyright date: 25 March 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Mack Sennett Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (Telegrapher); George O. Nicholls (Her father); Francis J. Grandon (Engineer); Wilfred Lucas (Trainman); Dell Henderson, Joseph Graybill (Tramps); Verner Clarges, Jeannie MacPherson, W.C. Robinson (In payroll office); Charles H. West (Company agent); Guy Hedlund (On train); Edward Dillon (Telegrapher); W. Chrystie Miller (In station lobby) Archival Sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate positive, (AFI/Donald Nichol Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Archives of Canada, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined); National Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate positive; Nederlands Filmmuseum, 35mm nitrate positive (Dutch titles); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) “Keep your wits about you,” at all times for they are the most valuable asset in times of danger. A cool head will win over an excitable brain as this Biograph subject will show. Lonedale hardly belied its name, for it was the most isolated spot in the western country. The principal reason for its being on the railroad map as a stopping place was the fact that it is the location of a productive mine. The station is in charge of an old operator and his daughter, who take turns at the key. Of course, as in small stations, the operator is a sort of all-round individual who attends to everything. The young engineer who makes the run between Lonedale and civilization is the sweetheart of the operator’s daughter, and upon receiving his call on this particular day he escorts her to the station, where, finding her father suffering from a nervous headache, she takes his place at the key after bidding adieu to her engineer sweetheart as he mounts into the cabin of his engine and rolls away. As her father leaves he discovers that his revolver is out of order and takes it with him to fix it, assuming that there is no danger of her having any use for it. The old operator has forgotten, however, that this is the first of the month on which a large sum of money is expressed to the station from the city office of the Lonedale Mining Company for the pay-roll. The girl is apprised of this shipment by telegraph from the express messenger where the shipment is made. The train pulls in and she receives the express bag of money. Two ugly looking tramps who are riding the rods see this delivery and assuming that the girl is in charge get off to take their chances of securing the money. The train having departed the tramps start their work. The windows all being heavily barred they make for the back door, which the girl, hearing an unusual noise, hastens to lock. They find it an easy matter to break through this, but are further handicapped by the inner doors which she has also locked and barred. After locking the doors she rushes to the

18

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

telegraph key and sends a call for help to the next station, some miles up the road, where she knows the train will stop. The operator there gets a hurry order from the train dispatcher to send the engine “With right over all trains” to Lonedale with help, and off rushes the locomotive driven by the girl’s sweetheart, he in terrific anxiety as to her apparent danger. Meanwhile, the tramps are slowly but surely making their way through the barriers to the room where the money is guarded by the girl. She is terrified with the knowledge of being unarmed. Still, she keeps her wits and when the thieves finally break into the room they find it in almost absolute darkness as the girl has thoughtfully turned out the light and by the gleam of the moonlight that penetrates the window they see the girl’s outstretched arm and hand holding a streak of dangerous looking steel directed full in their faces which forces them to cower in the corner. On, on rushes the engine until Lonedale is reached and a dash into the station is made by the engineer and fireman who find the two would-be burglars held at bay by a weak woman armed with a nickel-plated monkey wrench which the tramps in the dark mistook for a pistol. This is without doubt the most thrilling picture ever produced. The part of the engineer was played by an actor who is also a locomotive engineer. Biograph Bulletin, No. [?], March 23, 1911

A young engineer departs for the train station, stopping to see his girlfriend on the way. She is the daughter of the station operator, who goes home with a headache, leaving the heroine in charge. She receives a payroll delivery, observed by two tramps who determine to steal it. Seeing their attempts to break in, the heroine telegraphs for help; the message reaches the hero, who sets out in his engine to rescue her. She holds the tramps at bay by pretending a wrench is a pistol, and help arrives.

In the United States at least, The Lonedale Operator has become one of the warhorses of introductory film-history classes. (The long availability of 16mm rental and purchase prints in America has fostered this status.) It and The Lonely Villa must rank among the films shown most often to demonstrate last-minute-rescue crosscutting. It also has the benefit of including a clear example of an early cut-in, when a close-up of the heroine’s wrench reveals how she has kept the would-be thieves at bay. Undoubtedly the film shows off, in a clear, simple fashion, Griffith’s penchant for what Tom Gunning (1991, p. 133) has termed “a three-pronged editing pattern”, cutting among three elements. In the climactic race of the engineer to save his girlfriend from tramps bent on stealing the payroll money, The Lonedale Operator alternates for a time among the engineer, demonstrating his continued progress toward the isolated station; the operator herself, seeking ways of summoning rescue and defending herself; and the tramps, whose invasion is delayed for a time by the necessity to break through two doors and later by their belief that the heroine is pointing a pistol at them. An examination of this segment, from the point at which the hero and his partner hurriedly leave the distant station for Lonedale to their arrival and the cessation of the crosscutting, reveals a remarkably symmetrical pattern of shot groupings. Essentially, the shots clustered in each little segment set in the Lonedale station are patterned to echo each other across the train’s approach and hence shape the building of suspense. The segments showing the train’s approach, however, are quite repetitious, consisting in each case of a shot of the engine’s cab from a camera position on the coal car, followed or preceded by an extreme long shot of the train rushing through a succession of landscapes. From shot 66 (the first extreme long shot of the train, followed by shot 67, the second shot of the cab), 19

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

the number of shots in each return to the station is as follows: 1, 4, 2, 2, 4, 1. The content of these shots balances as neatly as do the numbers. The first cut back is simply a shot of the two tramps fiddling with the lock of the station’s outer door, showing that they are not yet an immediate threat to the heroine (shot 68). The second return is considerably longer, showing the tramps breaking through the door and the heroine searching for a weapon (shots 70-73). Thus, the suspense is raised a notch. The third station scene shows the tramps battering the inner door and the heroine reacting in fear (shots 76-77), while the fourth shows her finding the wrench (shots 80-81). Thus the pair of two-shot scenes at the station provides the pivotal moment of strong looming threat and the solution to the threat. The next segment at the station consists again of four shots, the main action of which is the breaking of the inner door and the heroine stopping the two men’s attack with her “pistol” (shots 84-87). The final shot in the station before the arrival of the engine outside shows the tramps trying ineffectually to rush the heroine but cowering back as she brandishes the wrench (shot 91). This single shot of the tramps making little progress and hence presenting a low-level threat parallels the earlier single shot of the tramps fiddling at the outer door. Thus, interestingly the crosscutting achieves suspense not, as we might expect, simply through an accelerating alternation between the engine and the station; instead, longer segments in the station are interspersed with the train shots, which are themselves fairly consistent in length. The slight reduction of tension after the heroine has tricked the tramps and holds them at bay perhaps prepares for the movement into a light tone in the final shots as the men realize that the “pistol” is only a wrench. The engineer and partner dissolve into laughter, while the tramps doff their hats in reluctant admiration. Whether Griffith deliberately made his shots of the station balance symmetrically in this fashion or simply intuited the optimum rhythm for the presentation of the action cannot be known. Either way, the rescue scene in The Lonedale Operator demonstrates Griffith’s mastery of this technique. The virtuosity of the rescue scene should not, however, cause us to overlook a quieter skill evidenced in the film’s early scenes. Griffith has only a brief stretch in which to establish the hero and heroine’s romance and characterize them in some fashion. He does so depending not only on the actors’ performances but also on their revealing manipulation of props. In the first shot of the heroine, she is placed against a landscape that includes both flowers and telegraph poles, creating a juxtaposition of feminine imagery and the device that will ultimately save her. Moreover, she is carrying a magazine that will figure prominently in the little love scene to come. Similarly, as the hero emerges from the gate of what is apparently his boarding house (a “furnished rooms” sign is visible at the upper left), he is wearing a work glove on his left hand and holding the right glove in his left, along with a lunch box. The gloves will become his major prop. In the next shot, he enters to greet the heroine, now wearing both gloves but whipping the right one off and taking it in his left hand as he extends his right hand to shake hers. There follows an exchange in which the hero talks earnestly to the heroine as she shyly keeps her eyes averted and smiles. The hero seems confident, but he nervously takes the right glove in his right hand and taps it against his left, then fidgets with it. The pair moves forward into medium shot and continues their conversation. He has been asking for something (probably, in light of the subsequent action, for her to accompany him on a stroll), and she now shakes her head emphatically but with a little smile, turning to face front. He speaks further, lowering the gloves out of the frame and standing with his arms at his sides, suggesting that he is gaining confidence. Just after he lowers the gloves, the heroine brings her magazine up into the frame and holds it in front of her, tapping at the edge of the pages as she listens. Finally she looks down, then smiles and nods. He immediately and enthusiastically grabs her 20

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

left elbow with his right hand. She reacts by stepping back, as if to push his hand away, and makes a little face of disapproval. He persists, and she immediately relents, moving closer to him and again smiling and toying with the magazine as they talk and exit foreground right. Thus the props have sketched the seesaw of nervousness and confidence in the exchange. A similar play with these props continues into the next shot, in which the couple strolls in from the right distance of a country landscape and walk forward to pause in the shade of a tree and talk further. As the heroine turns to the hero and stops smiling, she holds the magazine so that it faces the camera directly. Clearly it is an important prop, and we are meant to notice it. She holds it against her body, almost like a shield or barrier between them. Again he is asking for something, and she coyly pouts, smiles and shakes her head as she mouths “no”. He sighs, looks annoyed, turns to face off right front, and swings his right arm in frustration. Looking down, he takes the right glove in his right hand and slaps it into his left palm more forcefully. Seeing his scowling face, she relents and pinches his sleeve flirtatiously, and as she does so, she shifts the magazine so that she is holding it against her body under her right arm. He leans forward to kiss her, and although she reacts briefly with becoming fright at this prospect, she quickly smiles again as she grabs his ear and twists his head back. Both smile at this little byplay before she pulls out his watch and reminds him of his train’s impending departure. This brief scene has suggested much about the lead couple. Their romance is apparently in its early stages, as indicated by their nervousness, yet by now the heroine is confident enough of her beau that she can be coy with him. The exchange establishes her as plucky and not above a mild subterfuge; it shows him to have extra motivation for racing to the rescue when he learns of her danger. Later, the glove motif returns to create a parallelism. As the hero leaves his seat after the engine’s arrival at the Lonedale station, he whips off his right glove in order to pull the pistol from his pocket. He carries the right glove in his left hand throughout the rest of the film. Thus the gallantry of the earlier bantering scene returns in earnest as the hero prepares to rescue his girlfriend. Aside from its more obvious devices of crosscutting and a cut-in, the film contains one shot/reverse-shot exchange when the heroine, facing front left, looks out the station window and waves to the off-screen engineer as he departs. The following shot shows him in his engine, facing directly right and waving. Their exchange continues in a second shot of her blowing a kiss and another of him waving as his train pulls further away. As is typical in the early 1910s, shot/reverse shots are employed because the characters look at each other across a distance too great to allow them to be easily framed in a single shot. Moreover, the race of the rescuing engine tends to overshadow a wonderfully handled little piece of crosscutting as the heroine telegraphs for help and a sleepy telegraph operator at another station is slow to respond. She begins frantically, her face in a grimace of fear and her body hunched over the telegraph key; at one point she pounds her fist on the desk before resuming her tapping. The other operator’s somnolence contrasts sharply with this. As he awakens and responds, his sudden realization of the nature of the message is signalled by a shot in which he yawns and begins to cross his right leg over his left, but instead quickly lowers the leg, snatches up a pencil, and writes hurriedly. His tense posture in subsequent shots contrasts with that of the heroine. Realizing that she has reached help, she loses her terrified grimace and sits more upright, tapping with fierce concentration. Contemporary reviews of The Lonedale Operator show that last-minute rescues had become familiar by early 1911. The Moving Picture World is typical in focusing on the wrench scene, which had been made more effective in original prints by blue tinting to give an effect of night: 21

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

The distinctive feature is a girl holding the robbers at bay with a nickel-plated wrench that looks like a pistol. This scene is the most important and is managed with skill. The rush of the locomotive is exciting as it flies over the rails bearing assistance to the girl. The fact that the engineer’s part is played by an actor who is an engineer insures accuracy of detail in handling the huge machine. But such scenes have been enacted before. It is a novelty to see two men at bay before a wrench. The actress who performs this feat so acceptably deserves credit for her work. (April 8, 1911, p. 780)

This was the first film that Blanche Sweet carried largely on her own, and the favorable comment above suggests the skill that was to make her one of the Biograph’s leading players. Motography’s reviewer had two minor complaints, but his comments reveal once again in what esteem the Biograph Company was held: The monkey wrench incident in the preliminary scenes is maladroit, being too palpably preparatory. Why explain the monkey wrench beforehand anyhow? It robs the climax of an effective surprise. The hoboes’ action at the end in taking off their hats to the girl is absolutely improbable, but has its humorous value. These are little points and would not be mentioned except that Biograph has led us to expect perfection in just such places. (April 4, 1911, p. 49)

The New York Dramatic Mirror’s comment on the tinting in the final nighttime scene suggests that Biograph skimped on the use of color; it describes the climax as taking place “in scenes that really look like night. Tinted scenes in a Biograph is enough of a novelty to call for special praise anyhow” (March 29, 1911, p. 31). The 16mm Blackhawk print examined had no intertitles. Kristin Thompson

22

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

327 BIOGRAPH

THE SPANISH GYPSY Filming date: 6/8 February 1911 Location: Wentworth Hotel, Santa Monica, California Release date: 30 March 1911 Release length: ca. 996 feet Copyright date: 31 March 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Jose); Vivian Prescott (Pepita); Kate Bruce (Her mother); William J. Butler (Doctor); Jeannie MacPherson (Mariana); Claire McDowell (Paula); Dorothy West, Alfred Paget, George O. Nicholls, Kate Toncray, Florence LaBadie, Mack Sennett, W.C. Robinson (Gypsies); Alfred Paget, Dell Henderson, John T. Dillon, Francis J. Grandon, Charles H. West, Guy Hedlund, Verner Clarges (Spaniards); John T. Dillon (In distant gypsy camp) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A ROMANCE OF SUNNY ANDALUSIA If we wait long enough Fate is sure to wreak vengeance for any injustice we may suffer, but this you must confess hard logic, especially one of the implusive [sic] Latin nature. Hence, it was that Pepita was excessively anxious to avenge herself upon the perfidious Jose for the jilt she suffered. Jose is a handsome troubadour, and when he and Pepita, the pretty Gypsy maiden, meet it is a case of love at first sight. He finally declares his love for her and is accepted as a fiance [sic]. They join forces and go to the Grand Plaza, where they sing and dance with great success. Pepita loves her sweetheart with a deep sincere passion seldom found in another but the Latin type of girl. Her life is his, and though she loves with extreme ardor, she can hate just as intensely. Jose, however, was fickle natured and it needed only a pretty face and trim figure to make him forget the very existence of Pepita and fall deeply in love with the possessor of these qualities. Mariana, coquettish by nature, appreciating this lures the weak Jose from Pepita for herself, and together they go to the Plaza, Jose all unmindful of Pepita, who waits in the camp for him. Paula, the busybody seeing Jose and Mariana together on the Plaza hastens to inform Pepita. Wild with jealous rage she goes armed with a dagger to kill Jose and if possible her rival. In this she is thwarted by several bystanders who catch her before the uplifted knif[e] descends. Jose cowardly hastens to a distant camp where he feels he will be safer from Pepita’s wrath. Here, however, Fate interlopes, though ethically and while Jose is examining a pistol he is about to procure with which better to protect himself, the firearm explodes totally blinding him. In this helpless condition, Mariana cruelly deserts him, for she realizes what a burden he will be if she sticks to him, and she is not of the nature to make such a sacrifice. Cast adrift the poor fellow, feeling that he has been justly punished for his perfidy, wanders off to play and sing on the way for a livelihood. Unknowingly he returns to the old neighborhood and while playing on the highway, Paula passes and with her usual spitefulness runs off to inform Pepita of Jose’s return to the village. At last, she feels the long delayed vengeance will be wreaked. Rushing

23

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

madly through the village Pepita espies Jose alone on the road playing and singing. As she approaches with drawn dagger, he holds out his hand appealing for alms, of course not knowing who it is that has approached him. Pepita at once sees his helpless and pitiable condition and pity melts her hatred and her love for him revives. Making herself known to him, he is at once seized with the fear that she is on vengeance bent, and so resigns himself to what seems inevitable. However, she reassures him by taking his hand and kindly leading him to the safety of the camp, declaring that her love for him is fortitude enough for her to sacrifice herself to the care of him throughout his dark and cheerless life. Biograph Bulletin, No. [?], March 30, 1911

Jose, a troubadour, strolls by a seaside gypsy encampment and woos Pepita. After their engagement she dances with him in the Grand Plaza. Soon Jose transfers his attentions to Mariana, and when Pepita tries to stab him in revenge, he flees with his new lover to a distant camp. There he is accidentally blinded, and, deserted by Mariana, wanders about. Pepita encounters him, and abandons her quest for revenge to become his companion.

In an inventive period of Griffith’s career, The Spanish Gypsy seems a throwback to some of his earlier, less distinguished work. Like so many of his films, it uses the dramatic California coastal mountains as a backdrop, representing Andalusian scenery, but the story and acting are quite conventional. It is puzzling, therefore, to read the laudatory review in The New York Dramatic Mirror: Every once in a while the Biograph surpasses itself in a motion picture production, and this is one of the occasions. For artistic selection and posing of scenes, blending of action, strength of dramatic interest and romantic, as well as poetical, coloring, no picture that has ever been made can far surpass it, if indeed, it has been surpassed at all. (April 5, 1911, p. 32)

As this is tantamount to saying The Spanish Gypsy is one of the greatest films yet made, one can only compare it with Lines of White on a Sullen Sea (1909), made in a similar locale, and scratch the head in puzzlement. Motography’s reviewer concentrated on what may be the film’s most interesting aspect, its use of setting: The atmosphere of Andalusia is suggested by these scenes in a very skillful manner. The curving coast line bathed in sunshine, with gypsy figures roaming down the long perspective; the plaza with its Spanish senors and dancing girls; the artistic costumes and typical make-up, are features that help to give a convincing impression of reality. When one remembers that the actual locale was not Andalusia, but California on the other side of the earth, one marvels at the ingenuity of the illusion. (April 4, 1911, p. 48)

Indeed, Griffith has used his locations ingeniously, both to create the illusion of a Spanish setting and to link parallel scenes in order to disclose motivation. The first shot of the “Grand Plaza” where Jose and Pepita go to perform is particularly effective. Griffith has clearly found some Spanish-style architecture and framed it obliquely in such a way as to juxtapose only those portions of the area that would contribute to the illusion. The result is a pleasing composition with an arcade of square stucco pillars stretching diagonally into depth, a low wall occupying the left middle ground, a small tower-like 24

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

structure visible beyond. A parallel is created through setting when Griffith has Pepita and Jose’s early rendezvous take place against a simple wooden railing arranged diagonally into depth in front of a seascape. (This shot is filmed against a late afternoon sun that outlines the actors’ left sides.) Griffith uses the railing to govern the actors’ movements as the pair meet and finally embrace. The same setting returns in the final scene when Jose inadvertently returns to the railing and feels his way blindly along it. The earlier courtship is renewed when Pepita appears, realizes that he has become blind, and commits herself to being his guide. Throughout these seaside scenes, Griffith employs his usual practice of scattering extras throughout the backgrounds to add verisimilar and picturesque qualities. This film uses such supernumeraries particularly well, placing them in the distance along seaside paths and occasionally adding donkeys to give a Spanish flavor. Despite such care in utilizing available locations, Griffith also betrays some haste in planning how his shots will match together. The first scene establishes the gypsy camp by the sea, with the water in the background right and mountains at the left. Pepita sits dozing by a striped tent at the right, but wakes when Jose wanders in from the left, playing his mandolin. After smiling at her, he drifts out at the foreground, to the left of the camera, still playing. The next shot shows a stretch of beach, still with the ocean at the right and hills at the left, but with Jose entering from the foreground left, with his mandolin now slung over his shoulder; he turns and smiles, looking off foreground left. In fact, this shot is simply made along the same stretch of beach where the gypsy camp is (the background hills are the same), but shot with a different framing and at a different time of day. Thus, not only are the screen direction and Jose’s actions mismatched, but the setting is confusing as well. To compound this, there is a cut back to the original framing of the gypsy camp with Pepita smiling toward the foreground left at the off-screen Jose. This is a shot/reverse-shot pattern, but across the axis of action. Griffith returns to the same shot of Jose, suggesting through pantomime that he is making up his mind to do something; he then goes back out the left foreground. After a cut to the gypsy camp, Jose enters at the left foreground, again violating the axis of action. The result is a somewhat confusing scene spatially. The Spanish Gypsy has the distinction of being the last of the Biographs (in order of release) to receive a lengthy plot synopsis in the Biograph Bulletins. The intertitles in the MoMA viewing print examined were reconstructed by Tom Gunning and Eileen Bowser. Kristin Thompson

25

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

328 BIOGRAPH

THE BROKEN CROSS Filming date: 9/12 February 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/Monte Vista, California Release date: 6 April 1911 Release length: 996 feet Copyright date: 10 April 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Harriet Quimby Source: none known Camera: Percy Higginson, G.W. Bitzer Cast: Charles H. West (Tom); Florence LaBadie (Kate); Grace Henderson (Landlady); Dorothy West (Manicurist); Vivian Prescott (Slavey); John T. Dillon, Jeannie MacPherson, Henry Lehrman (Boarders); Claire McDowell (Kate’s mother); George O. Nicholls (Postman); Dell Henderson (Manicurist’s friend) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative AN EXPERIENCE OF A COUNTRY BOY IN THE CITY A country boy on leaving his little sweetheart on his departure for the city to seek his fortune plights his troth. The girl breaks in two a cross giving him one half as a love token agreeing that if either wishes to break the engagement he or she will send back the piece. In the city a manicure girl becomes impressed with him and tries to win him for herself by sending him a piece of broken cross purporting to come from his country girl sweetheart. Her scheme at first seems to be successful, but he discovers the parts do not match and so, disgusted with the falseness of city living, goes back to the country and his little sweetheart. Biograph Bulletin, April 6, 1911

Before Tom departs for the city, he becomes engaged to Kate. She gives him half of her broken pendant cross, with the agreement that either can end the engagement by sending his or her half to the other. In a city boarding house, Tom is vamped by a flirtatious manicurist who learns of the agreement and sends Tom half a cross, pretending it is from Kate. Tom realizes he has been tricked and returns to the country and his fiancée.

The Broken Cross is a charming blend of romantic sentimentality and comedy that deserves to be better known. It is the sort of thing that Griffith would later develop in his pastoral romances, especially A Romance of Happy Valley (1919). It begins unpromisingly enough, with some oddly clumsy staging. Kate and Tom stroll past the camera, into depth, and out of frame without our getting a look at their faces. They quickly return, however, and pause in medium-long shot for the business of the engagement. The cut-in to the action of Tom breaking Kate’s cross is filmed in an old-fashioned way. Although her dress front, his suit, and his hands are all visible, the shot was clearly made in a studio against a neutral background. (The same is true of the medium close-up in the final scene, when Tom’s hands rejoin the two parts of the cross.) Such neutral backgrounds had 26

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

been typical of close shots following cut-ins from years earlier, but matching the backgrounds of the close-up and the establishing shot was becoming common by 1911. The basic premise seems a bit odd. Two young and idealistic country people in the process of getting engaged would hardly plan how to go about calling it off. Their agreement nevertheless plays its part in throwing their romance into confusion and showing the deceitful ways of the big city – at least as Tom perceives them. Most of the rest of the film alternates between the faithful girl awaiting letters from her fiancé and Tom becoming the object of a flirtation by a manicurist in his boarding house. Clearly the comic business of the boarding-house milieu was what interested Griffith most, and here the film becomes more lively. Florence LaBadie has the rather thankless task of carrying the country scenes alone. Mostly these consist of conventional gazing out a window or visiting the mailbox hoping for news. She does perform two nice bits of typically Griffithian business that add some poignancy to her situation. In the first, she goes to bed after receiving the hoped-for letter from Tom. Initially she puts the letter on the pillow by her head, but slowly she scoots it toward her, and finally puts her head down on it to sleep. Later, when his apparent failure to write leads her to conclude he has forgotten her, she sobs on the same bed, pulling the spread over her head as she does so. One could easily imagine Lillian Gish drawing such comic or poignant gestures in one of the features. The broad comedy of the boarding-house scenes has drawn comment from contemporary reviewers and modern commentators alike. The New York Dramatic Mirror praised the acting: “There are two splendid bits of character work in this humanly possible story – the gum-chewing waitress and the gay and flippant but designing manicure lady” (April 12, 1911, p. 31). Similarly, Roberta Pearson uses the film as an example of Griffith’s use of bits of business to establish character type: “the residents of a boarding house include a gum-chewing, slovenly servant girl and a hip-swinging, eye-batting manicurist” (Pearson, p. 46). Scott Simmon points out the contrast in the country and city created through different styles of acting: “The ensemble at the boardinghouse meals, announced by a gum-chomping, gongswinging slavey, crowds the space with broad gestures (like Tony O’Sullivan’s misaimed forking of his food) that play for us as comedy but for the boy as city anomie. A manicurist at the boardinghouse (Dorothy West) swivels her padded shoulders and bust, striking and swinging her arms freely in a witty travesty of sexual invitation” (Simmon 1993, p. 20). Given such broad acting, it is easy to overlook the subtler strokes used to suggest that Tom retains a somewhat bumpkinish nature despite his exposure to the big city. He walks with legs somewhat bowed, and his ill-fitting suit jacket’s cuffs reach halfway down his hands. His business also makes it clear that he initially has no intention of responding to the manicurist’s overtures. During the comic bit at the breakfast table where the manicurist spears the last piece of bacon on the platter, Tom turns and converses with unseen boarders offscreen right until the manicurist resumes chattering to him. Dorothy West’s performance also makes the idea that the manicurist could ever seriously threaten the main couple’s engagement seems unlikely. The resulting light tone keeps the film from becoming melodramatic, despite the frequent cuts to Kate’s increasing worry and despair. Indeed, the predominantly humorous tone of the film is confirmed at the end. In the penultimate shot we see Kate and Tom embrace after his return from the city. The final shot, however, returns to the boarding house for a last dining-table scene with the manicurist now seated with another man to whom her affection has shifted. The intertitles in the MoMA viewing print examined were reconstructed by Tom Gunning and Eileen Bowser. Kristin Thompson

27

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

329 BIOGRAPH

THE CHIEF’S DAUGHTER Filming date: 15/16 February 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/San Fernando, California/San Gabriel, California Release date: 10 April 1911 Release length: 1048 feet Copyright date: 11 April 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Francis J. Grandon (Frank, a prospector); John T. Dillon (His friend); Stephanie Longfellow (Indian woman); Claire McDowell (Susan, Frank’s fiancée); George O. Nicholls (Indian chief); Dorothy West, Alfred Paget, Florence Lee, Kate Toncray, Jeannie MacPherson? (Indians); Dell Henderson (At settlement); Grace Henderson (Susan’s companion); Edward Dillon (Servant) Archival Sources: Library of Congress, 35mm paper print (fragment, ca. 20 feet); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative ON THE CACTUS FIELDS OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA This Biograph production tells a story of a somewhat different type of Indian vengeance. A prospector wins the love of the Indian Chief’s daughter and cruelly casts her aside, when his Eastern sweetheart arrives unexpectedly. The squaw, however, has a chance to show up his perfidy and so the fellow not only loses his Eastern fiancée, but the Indian maiden as well, she and her squaw companions driving him from the neighborhood. Biograph Bulletin, April 10, 1911

Frank, a prospector, becomes engaged to an Indian chief’s daughter. Soon, Susan, Frank’s sweetheart, arrives from the East. After lunch at the cabin of Frank and his friend Jack, Frank proposes to Susan. The Heroine sees this and confronts him in front of Susan, who rejects him. The women of the tribe chase Frank away when he tries to reconcile with the Heroine.

After the many films of this era in which an Indian proves his or her nobility by dying to save white settlers (e.g., The Sacrifice of Silver Cloud, released in March by Bison), The Chief’s Daughter offers a refreshing change of pace. The early scenes of Frank’s courtship of the Heroine are fairly perfunctory, moving between the sketchily portrayed Indian camp (shot late in the day with a large camera shadow stretching into the lower left of the frame) and a stretch of scrub desert where the lovers meet. The sense of time passing is vague. Frank and the Heroine seemingly meet and become engaged in the time it takes her father to smoke a cigarette, yet the couple’s trysts apparently become routine enough that the Heroine can sense something is wrong when her lover fails to show up, still fairly early in the plot. 28

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

As the courtship section of the film draws to a close, Frank’s partner Jack rushes from the right rear into the stretch of desert where the lovers meet to tell Frank of Susan’s arrival. At this point there begins an unusual pattern of characters facing away from the camera, typically in three-quarter rear view. Here Jack pauses perhaps a couple of feet further away from the camera than Frank, who faces the right rear as he listens to Jack’s news. Frank turns and glances worriedly toward the Heroine, standing facing front at the left foreground; he then turns away to ask Jack something before again facing the camera and moving forward to tell her he must leave. In the next shot, as Frank and Jack move into a nearby stretch of desert, Jack again turns three-quarter front to face Frank and remonstrate with him, while Frank is turned three-quarter back to the camera, listening. As Frank greets Susan and her mother in town, he is seen in three-quarter rear view as he shakes hands with the latter. In each case, our inability to see Frank’s face transfers our attention to the reaction of another character in the scene – Jack’s worry and disapproval in the desert scenes, Susan’s quick gestures of clasping her hands and smiling upon being reunited with Frank. It is as if Griffith is trying out – still with a fairly distant framing – a staging for conversation situations that will eventually develop into shot/reverse shot. Later scenes continue this use of depth. As Frank, Jack, Susan, and the mother dine at the men’s cabin, the table is arranged so that Jack has his back to the camera, largely blocking the mother from view. This not only creates a somewhat realistic space for a dining-table scene, but it also emphasizes Susan and Frank at the left of the table. Shortly thereafter, the Heroine is disappointed when Frank fails to come to their usual meeting place. Standing at the foreground left, she gives a tiny nod, clenches her fist in determination, moves toward the right rear, where Frank and Jack had exited at the end of the earlier rendezvous; now facing three-quarters away from the camera, she pauses and leans back, as if doubting her decision (this is done by the actress shifting her weight from her extended right leg onto the left leg in a dance-like movement). Finally, she tosses her head in resolve and rushes out. All this turning of backs to the camera culminates in the dramatic scene where Susan, having learned of Frank’s betrayal of the Heroine, repudiates him. The entire pantomime of the Heroine’s revelation of her supposed engagement, Frank’s attempt to pass her off as crazy, and Susan’s shocked reaction all occur in a lengthy take with shallow staging. Frank stands at the center, facing front, and the two women are balanced in profile, facing each other, at the sides. Once the Heroine despairs and dashes out, however, the staging changes considerably. Susan moves toward the door, taking up her mother’s jacket, then turns suddenly into three-quarter back view, looking accusingly at Frank over her shoulder. During this, he too has turned into three-quarter rear view, watching her anxiously. As he lifts his hand in appeal, she abruptly turns her head, facing her entire body directly away from the camera and thrusting her right arm straight out in a dramatic gesture of rejection before rushing out the door. (Claire McDowell’s bravura performance of this action continues in the exterior shot in which she freezes with her body leaning away from the door and her arm still thrust behind her toward it before bringing the arm up to curl over her bent head in anguish.) Recently, Robert Spadoni has discussed early staging diagonally into depth with one figure turned away from the camera. I do not have the space here to summarize this complex topic (see Spadoni’s article for footnotes to the relevant sources). The general point is that Vitagraph is thought to have developed this use of a sort of proto-shot/reverse-shot situation in its films of the early 1910s. Tom Gunning (1991, p. 263) has suggested that Griffith occasionally had an actor turn his or her back to the camera, primarily at peak moments of emotion. In early 1911, however, we see Griffith consistently using this technique across a single film. It may be an isolated case, since the four other films I examined for this volume 29

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

use this device only occasionally or not at all. Whether Griffith was imitating a device he had seen in Vitagraph films and subsequently dropped it, or simply experimenting with a more verisimilar staging on his own is a matter for further research. Perhaps even more notable, however, is a single close framing of the Heroine broken up into two shots by an eyeline-match cut to what she sees. The Heroine has come to Frank’s cabin and, peeping in the window, sees him with Susan. She ducks away out of frame to hide as the couple emerges from the cabin. A bit confusingly, a title follows: “SHE REALIZES THAT SHE HAS BEEN BETRAYED.” This seems to refer to Susan, seen in the previous shot, but actually the “she” is the Heroine. A cut moves us to a medium shot of the corner of the cabin, with the Heroine moving into the shot, initially in tight medium close-up – indeed, so close to the camera that she is out of focus. She backs in rightward but looking off left toward Frank and Susan. She continues backing away, moving into medium-shot framing and coming into focus; she places her right hand on the corner of the cabin. A brief eyeline match shows Frank and Susan embracing. The scene then returns to the medium shot of the Heroine, who gasps, plucks at her braid, closes her eyes, breathes heavily, and sways. Suddenly she opens her eyes and pivots herself around on the arm resting on the cabin. In doing so she swings toward the camera again – and out of focus again – and nearly out of the frame at the left. Finally, she swings back into the left center and stares off with an anguished expression. This placement of an actor so close to the camera that focus becomes an issue prefigures the famous shot in The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) when the Snapper Kid glides toward the camera; there, a rack focus keeps his face sharply visible. Here, however, the Heroine bursts into view and moves jerkily about in an expression of grief at her betrayal. This framing remains a brief and isolated device, but one that hints at Griffith’s impulse toward capturing performances based on close framings of facial expression and hand gestures rather than bodily pantomime. Despite such touches, at the time the acting was not perceived as entirely successful. Motography’s reviewer complained that there was “[t]oo much of that agitated face business and the ‘effective’ pause – two Biograph expedients that are sometimes a virtue and sometimes a vice. They are not used here with good taste.” He also found the final chase a novel situation but added that “the hero marred it, however, by his almost hysterical terror. There was no sense in his falling down so often” (May 5, 1911, p. 95). Although the exits and entrances in contiguous spaces generally respect screen direction to an unusual extent, eagleeyed Frank Woods spotted a distinct inconsistency in some of the staging around the cabin: “It cannot be seen, however, how anything was gained by the exits made by the man and the Indian maid, where they apparently went out the back door to appear the next moment around the corner of the house in front” (The New York Dramatic Mirror, April 19, 1911, p. 31). Kristin Thompson

30

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

330 BIOGRAPH

A KNIGHT OF THE ROAD Filming date: 17/18 February 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/Sierra Madre, California Release date: 20 April 1911 Release length: 996 feet Copyright date: 21 April 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Dell Henderson Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Dell Henderson (Hobo); George O. Nicholls (Rancher); Dorothy West (His daughter); John T. Dillon (Foreman); Edward Dillon (Hobo’s friend); Alfred Paget, Francis J. Grandon, Guy Hedlund, Henry Lehrman (Dishonest tramps); Kate Toncray, Kate Bruce (Servants); W.C. Robinson, ? (Rescuers); Jeannie MacPherson, Florence LaBadie (In kitchen); ? (In orchard) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative HOW HE ENJOYS THE SIMPLE LIFE This Biograph subject shows the real nature of the hobo. Being of a sentimental turn, he is impressed by the daughter of a ranch owner and in consequence becomes her and her father’s protector against the machinations of several of his type. The owner in gratitude offers him a home and job on the ranch, but work and the hobo never agree, so he steals away to remain ever a “Knight of the Road.” Biograph Bulletin, April 20, 1911

In an orange grove, a tramp overhears that the Rancher and his Daughter are going to town to pick up the payroll. On their way back, the pair encounters the Knight, a harmonica-playing loafer who gains the Daughter’s interest by returning something she drops. Later, the Knight refuses to take part in the hobo gang’s plan to rob the ranch house and instead summons the Rancher and workers in time to thwart the crime. He accepts the Rancher’s offer of a room and job, but in the morning departs back to his carefree existence.

Though A Knight of the Road is yet another last-minute-rescue story, the film gains interest in part through its setting and in part through balancing the threat of robbery with a lighthearted tone. Griffith exploits his winter sojourn in California by using an orange grove as a distinctive background to his story. Although much of the action takes place on the road or in the ranch house, a beautifully composed scene of a crowd of workers harvesting and crating oranges, filmed in considerable depth and with a strong side light, recurs at intervals through the film. Dorothy West plays the heroine-in-peril role, needing rescue from the thieves in the end. Yet from the beginning the actress imbues the part with considerable bumptious energy, leaping up and rushing to put on her coat when her father mentions he is driving to town. 31

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

The film’s light touch is particularly evident in the scene where the Knight meets the Daughter on the road. Her father’s car has broken down, and as the chauffeur and Rancher check under the hood, a cut-in moves us to a medium long shot of the Knight by the car and the Daughter seated in the back seat. (The cut is unusual for Griffith in this period, in that it simply moves the framing closer to the actors rather than showing an insert of a letter, photo, or the like; it involves a typical mismatch on position, with the Daughter standing up in the long shot and seated after the cut-in.) This shot is marvelously though simply staged. Initially, the Daughter sits tapping impatiently with a small box. The Knight strikes a match on the side of the car, drawing her attention. Though she seems about to object, she simply smiles and turns to speak to her off-screen father. At this point she drops the box, which the Knight retrieves. As she thanks him and he gallantly doffs his hat, the chauffeur and Rancher are partially visible at the edge of the frame, returning to their seats. The Daughter begins to tell her father what has happened, meanwhile pulling a rose from her bouquet and tossing it casually to the Knight. While the latter begins a series of expressions and movements indicating surprise and puzzlement, the Rancher begins to object to the Daughter’s rose-tossing. She turns to him, picks up the box from her lap, and waves it as she begins to explain what has happened. At this point the car suddenly pulls out of the frame. This abrupt departure of major characters in the middle of a significant bit of action seems unusual for a 1911 film (to the point where one wonders if the driver pulled out earlier than planned). One would have expected that another cut would return to the initial long-shot framing as the car pulls away. Instead, Griffith ends the scene on the medium long shot, thus holding on the Knight’s reaction and suggesting that the conversation in the car is continuing off screen. In the main, however, the film is notable for its editing rather than its staging. The climactic scene of the three tramps breaking into the ranch house cuts initially among three elements: the tramps’ lengthy jimmying of a window, the daughter sitting alone reading, and the Knight being held captive by one of the tramps so that he cannot foil the robbery. This situation creates a clever variant of the last-minute rescue, in that the hero is not racing to the rescue but is stationary during much of the action. Once the gang has pried open a window, however, he escapes and rushes to alert the Rancher and workers at a nearby bunkhouse. Clearly, Griffith is as much interested in the Knight’s character as in the robbery plot, and both the Biograph Bulletin’s description and the contemporary reviews focused on this aspect of the story. After the robbery is foiled, a lengthy comic segment of thirty-two shots (not counting intertitles) shows the Knight being offered a job and shown to a bedroom. After sleeping on the floor, he awakes to the summons to work and, seeing the industrious crew in the orange grove, flees out a window to rejoin his hobo pal. By way of contrast, the entire robbery sequence, from the shot where the tramps enter the ranch gate to that in which they are led out by the workers, occupies only twenty-five shots. The final segment uses the same technique of crosscutting, showing the Knight in his room, the housekeeper and maids bustling about (demonstrating the hard work expected in the Rancher’s establishment), and the industrious workers outside – but here the final escape is from bourgeois society rather than a impending crime. All this cutting led to comment in the press. The Motography reviewer praised the film as “dramatic with a capital touch of humor at the end”, but noted “[t]he climacteric scene is rushed through too fast, thereby losing effect” (May 5, 1911, p. 96). The New York Dramatic Mirror elaborated quite perceptively: This film is entirely out of the ordinary in the style of its production. One might think, on first thought, that it is a return to the old days of hurry-up in film acting, but it is hardly that,

32

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

because it is acted so well and the flitting scenes join each other so logically. The average film drama may have from a dozen to twenty-five or thirty changes of scenes: this one has at least fifty, and maybe a hundred – the reviewer couldn’t count them…. As an experiment just to show what the Biograph can do, the film is a success, but unless one watches sharp, not to miss a scene or a half dozen scenes, it may be hard for some to follow. (April 26, 1911, p. 29; this review, with its unusually explicit discussion of style, is reprinted in its entirety in George Pratt’s Spellbound in Darkness, p. 90).

This estimate of the film’s number of shots is quite perceptive. The 16mm Museum of Modern Art print I examined has eighty-two shots and thirteen intertitles. Assuming the number of reconstructed titles to be accurate, the total is nearly 100 shots. Tom Gunning (1991, p. 264) has stated that Griffith’s 1911 films contained an average of 71.4 shots, with the largest number being 122 in A Terrible Discovery, released eight months after A Knight of the Road. Whether or not this includes intertitles, A Knight of the Road is clearly far from the fastest-cut of Griffith’s films of this period. Indeed, The Lonedale Operator, released a month earlier, has ninety-nine shots (with no titles in the print I viewed). Perhaps the New York Dramatic Mirror reviewer’s comments arise from the fact that in A Knight of the Road, Griffith interweaves the robbery plot, the sunny orange-grove setting, and the lazy wandering of the Knight – in contrast to The Lonedale Operator’s fixed focus on the linear development of the attempted robbery and rescue. The latter is doubtless exciting and easy to follow, but A Knight of the Road achieves more complexity in its short narrative. Thus, Griffith’s increasing number of shots per one-reel film would perhaps, in this case, be more apparent to an experienced viewer. Kristin Thompson

33

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

331 BIOGRAPH

MADAME REX Filming date: 21/22 February 1911 Location: Wentworth Hotel and Old Mill, Santa Monica, California/Los Angeles Studio Release date: 17 April 1911 Release length: 996 feet Copyright date: 20 April 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Mary Pickford Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Edwin August, Stephanie Longfellow, John T. Dillon, Francis J. Grandon, Joseph Graybill, Edward Dillon, Henry Lehrman, W.C. Robinson, Vivian Prescott, Alfred Paget, Jeannie MacPherson, Verner Clarges NOTE: Cast identifications taken from a still reproduced in Variety (December 25, 1914, p. 6). Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A STORY OF A MOTHER’S SACRIFICE The Biograph with this production presents a subject most unique in story and type. Located in the South of France, it tells of a woman, who, after the death of her husband, is forced to assume the management of the Gambling Casino, of which he was proprietor. Her girl child she places in a convent and keeps her in ignorance of her occupation. Twelve years later the mother becomes engaged to a young nobleman. The young man, however, by accident, meets the daughter, now seventeen years old, and falls in love with her, not knowing her identity. The mother realizing the truth of the situation, sacrifices her own love for the young man for her daughter’s happiness. Biograph Bulletin, April 17, 1911

Although Madame Rex is preserved at the Museum of Modern Art, no viewing print was available when these notes were written. Some brief trade-paper reviews provide some sense of the contemporary response to this film. They also suggest more general opinions concerning the Biograph Company’s output of the period. Three are presented in their entirety below. From Motography: A stagy piece worked up with many Biograph tricks that make it fairly convincing. There is an effort to show a French period of the early nineteenth century that is not entirely successful, but commendable in that it adds a pictorial quality to the scenes. The minute Biograph actors get “costumes” on they act self-conscious – that is the principal difficulty with the film. Two girls in the role of convent misses gave an animated performance, however, that was delicious. This is the best part of the film and makes the whole worth seeing. (May 5, 1911, p. 96)

34

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

From The New York Dramatic Mirror: The work done by every member of the cast of this picture, which includes the new and pleasing ingénue, is most creditable and brings out this exceedingly well drawn and pretty romance of youth and age in a thoroughly entertaining and delightful manner. At the death of her husband Madame Rex is left a gambling casino, and realizing that it is not exactly the atmosphere for a young child to mature in, she takes her daughter to a convent. Madame Rex was guilty of the theatric [sic] trick of throwing the vile papers on the floor. As they must have been quite valuable to her, it is wondered why she did not carry them out with the child. After twelve years Madame Rex began to promise her child that she should return to her, but the return came in a way she had not looked for. Her own lover chanced to meet her daughter one day when she escaped from the convent as a lark and became fascinated. Then Madame Rex looked in her mirror and surrendered her claims to her daughter and youth. In the scene where she discovered her lover with her daughter one was not quite sure until later whether she really knew it was her daughter. (April 26, 1911, p. 29)

Who the “new and pleasing ingénue” might have been is a puzzle. All the actresses listed in the film’s cast in D.W. Griffith and the Biograph Company (Graham et al., p. 109) had acted previously with the company. Perhaps the reviewer refers to a new actress playing a small role (possibly one of the “convent misses” who so entertained the Motography reviewer). The remark concerning an unclarity in the action reminds us that some of our own problems in understanding early films’ plots do not arise entirely from our lack of a grasp of the contemporary viewing conventions of the period. Some presentations of plot simply were unclear in this period leading up to the formulation of classical narration, with its constant guiding of the spectator’s understanding. From The Moving Picture World: The principal theme in this story is a mother’s sacrifices of her own love to insure the happiness of her daughter. The mother found herself compelled to run a gambling house. She has kept her daughter in ignorance of this, and has had her educated in a convent. The man to whom the mother is engaged falls in love with the daughter without knowing the relationship. Almost the same thing was shown in a film released a day or two before. Another coincidence was that it was released by the company that is most like the Biograph. True, the incidents varied, but the main idea is the same, viz.: a mother’s sacrificing herself for her daughter’s happiness. The picture is not agreeable, though no one can successfully deny its dramatic power. (April 29, 1911, p. 958)

The reference to the earlier film with a similar storyline is puzzling. Plot synopses in The Moving Picture World reveal no such film released only days before Madame Rex. A film released on 31 March, however, does resemble it in its basic premise of a mother giving up her fiancé to her daughter. Her Mother’s Fiancé, made by the Yankee Company, happens to survive. Unlike Madame Rex, it is a modern-dress story. It also contains much action involving the mother trying to conceal her own age by persuading her daughter (who had been away at boarding school rather than a convent) to disguise herself as a little girl. When the ruse is revealed, the young man falls for the daughter. This is most likely the film referred to, even though it came out two-and-a-half weeks earlier than Madame Rex. Moreover, it was made by a relatively minor independent producer, which no one would be likely to consider “the company that is most like the Biograph”. Kristin Thompson 35

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

332 BIOGRAPH

HIS MOTHER’S SCARF Filming date: 23/28 February 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/Santa Monica, California Release date: 24 April 1911; reissued by Biograph, 20 March 1916 Release length: 994 feet Copyright date: 26 April 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Harriet Quimby Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Will); Charles H. West (Charles); Dorothy West (The woman); Alfred Paget (Messenger); Kate Bruce, W. Chrystie Miller (Among pioneers); ? (Renegades) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) HOW IT SERVED AS A PEACEMAKER The moral of this Biograph subject is the power of a mother’s love. Two brothers out in the wilds of the Western hills, meet and fall in love with a young girl, who was the sole survivor of an Indian outrage. Through jealousy one brother is about to annihilate the other when the sight of a scarf, the present from their mother, now dead, awakens his better self. The scenic beauty of this production has never been equaled. Biograph Bulletin, April 24, 1911

Two brothers, Will and Charles, live in a cabin in the wilderness as they prospect for gold. They receive a package from their mother containing a knitted scarf for each of them and, in addition, a letter informing the men of their mother’s death. Leaning against the mantel in grief, Will sets his scarf on fire. Charles hands Will his scarf to solace him. Meanwhile, a nearby wagon train is attacked by Indians. Responding to the sound of gunfire, the brothers find that all of the people with the wagon train have been massacred with the exception of one girl, whom they bring back to their cabin. Sometime later, both of the brothers are in love. About to leave the breakfast table to go off prospecting, they both intentionally leave their pipes on the table to give them an excuse to return and talk to the girl alone. Will interprets her attentions as a sign that she prefers him. The next day, after breakfast, the girl presents each brother in turn with a flower. Each brother exits, too shy to declare his love. Charles returns, however, proposes, and is accepted. When Will returns, he looks through the window of the cabin and sees Charles and the girl embracing. Furious, he takes out his gun and prepares to shoot his brother through the window. Charles accidentally knocks his mother’s scarf from the mantel, and, at the sight of it, Will lowers his gun and expresses remorse. He enters the cabin and after his brother has conveyed the news of the engagement, he takes his leave and departs.

36

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

This is one of the large class of one-reel films organized around an emblematic title object. For example, in A Wreath of Orange Blossoms (DWG Project, #308), a married woman on the verge of running away with another man discovers her wedding wreath as she is packing and has a change of heart. In A Baby’s Shoe (Edison, 1912), the discovery of his baby’s shoe in his pocket prevents a man from committing theft. The use of motifs is worked out very well in His Mother’s Scarf, due to the diversity of emblematic objects, their consistent doubling (one for each brother), and their careful circulation. The film begins with two scarves. One burns, the other is exchanged between the brothers in their grief. Then, other objects are introduced. The rivalry between the brothers is registered through the two pipes left at the breakfast table, and the two flowers given as gifts by the girl. After Will has decided not to shoot Charles and enters the cabin to take his leave, he discards the flower that the girl had placed in his buttonhole and takes the scarf. With the use of an intertitle (possibly placed too late in the print I saw): “THE POWER OF A MOTHER’S LOVE”, the film calls attention to the scarf as the item that motivated Will’s change of heart. But, unlike the other emblematic objects cited above, the scarf is also part of a larger circulation of objects. Will relinquishes the flower for the sake of what is represented by the scarf. And the initial exchange of the scarf is reciprocated, in the end, by the exchange of the girl. In the final shot of the film, as Will walks away from the camera down a canyon trail, both scarf and pipe are prominent, in a final repetition of these motifs. While many of the Griffith Biographs employ crosscutting during a final, climactic, lastminute rescue, this film employs it at the beginning to produce a fast-paced and condensed exposition. The action is distributed across shots as follows (my numbering includes related titles as shots): Shots 2–8: Delivery of the package and reaction to the news of the mother’s death Shots 9–10: The wagon train Shots 11–12: Burning of one scarf and the gift of the other Shots 13–17: Commencement of the Indian attack and delineation of the girl’s spatial position (in front of the train and thus in relative safety) Shots 18–19: The brothers react to the sounds of battle. Shots 20–22: The girl hides behind a tree and reacts to the sight of a woman on a wagon being shot. Shots 23–27: The brothers investigate and find the dead. Two cutaways to the girl, running and cowering in the brush Shots 28–30: The brothers discover the girl, sole survivor of the massacre, and bring her to their cabin. The film needs to establish both the gift of the scarf and the girl’s presence alone in the wilderness as a result of the massacre. The decision to present both events simultaneously, rather than one after the other, while perhaps less plausible, provides a much more economical mode of narration. The narration does not have to posit a gap in time between the two events nor provide an explanation of what the brothers were doing during the initiation of the attack. The crosscutting also creates a measure of suspense, which helps to make the exposition quite dynamic, engaging and distinctive for the period. Shots 23–27 include several evocative shots of the wagon train after the attack – an especially striking one shows a wagon overturned on its driver – which also carry a great deal of narrative weight, briefly but nonetheless vividly suggesting events that are only an aside to the story proper. I wonder if any of these shots call upon the traditions of Western genre painting. My set of films examined for this volume, all made during the company’s second trip to 37

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

California, contains three films in which a character peers through a window: His Mother’s Scarf, The Two Sides, and Enoch Arden (there may, of course, be other examples in addition to those assigned to me). The staging and editing of the look through the window differ slightly from one film to the next – as if Griffith is experimenting with different ways to handle it. As is typical of his style, Griffith does not seem particularly concerned with character point of view, i.e. with putting the camera in a character’s position in space, but rather, with the problem of specifying the relationship between adjacent spaces. From the exterior of the cabin, Will looks in the window. The subsequent shot is not taken from his position in space “through” the window. Rather, the interior is viewed from the same camera position as throughout the film: the camera is perpendicular to the back wall of the set, showing the window and door at the back. Logically, then, we should see Will looking in the window, which we do not (the window is curtained, and the MoMA viewing print I saw was badly cropped, so it is possible that in projection we will be able to see a face or gun poking through the curtains). One conceivable explanation of the space is that Will is supposed to be in the “back” of the cabin, looking through a window in a wall that is not visible in the interior, but this is unlikely given Griffith’s propensity for filming spaces from a single vantage point. The difficulty of placing the character looking in relation to the interior space is one that Griffith grapples with again in The Two Sides. Lea Jacobs

38

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

333 BIOGRAPH

HOW SHE TRIUMPHED Filming date: 1/4 March 1911 Location: Pasadena, California/Los Angeles Studio Release date: 27 April 1911 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 29 April 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Linda Arvidson Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (Mary); Vivian Prescott (Cousin); Joseph Graybill (Her sweetheart?) NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from a photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: none known AN ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF PHYSICAL CULTURE Fresh air and exercise are the greatest aid to beauty and health. Mary, an orphan, comes to live with her aunt. Being in rather poor health, and what some might call homely, the poor girl despairs of ever receiving any attention either from her pretty cousins or their gentlemen friends. One of the cousins, however, who is an athletic girl, takes her in hand. The first dose of medicine is a bout at boxing, then a run along the country road, followed by a cold plunge. This is kept up daily for two months, at the end of which time no one would know Mary, such a transformation having taken place. The other girls are now in fearful dread of losing their sweethearts, as they seem too well pleased with the result. Biograph Bulletin, April 27, 1911

No print of this film is known to survive. Aside from the Biograph Bulletin summary, which is reprinted in The Moving Picture World (April 29, 1911, p. 964), I have found only one other plot summary, in The New York Dramatic Mirror (May 3, 1911, p. 30): The neglected, awkward, listless cousin who hungered for attentions from the young men, but who was always passed by for her more lively relatives, is a gem in its way. She is taken in hand by the athletic girl, who takes pity on her forsaken condition, and teaches her physical culture, much against the poor little creature’s will, but to such good effect that the patient, grown bright and sparkling from her exercise, wins the love of her teacher to the latter’s disgust and dismay.

Neither the summary provided by the Biograph Bulletin nor the New York Dramatic Mirror review provides a definitive account of how the story ends. Presumably it is the athletic girl’s teacher (and sweetheart?) who becomes enamored of Mary after her exercise regimen, but the New York Dramatic Mirror review does not clearly indicate how the male character, presumably played by Joseph Graybill, enters the story. What does he teach? Is he also an athlete? Perhaps he is the athletic girl’s coach? 39

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

There are several reasons to lament the loss of this film. In terms of acting, one would like to see how Blanche Sweet and Vivian Prescott handled the physical comedy: the boxing match, the cross-country run, the plunge. In terms of genre, the plot seems to anticipate the physically active heroines of the serial queen melodrama (Singer, p. 91–129). Making allowances for gender reversal, it also seems to bear comparison to the Douglas Fairbanks comic features that concern a timid young man who faces physical challenges and undergoes a transformation (most famously The Mollycoddle of 1920, but also The Lamb and Double Trouble [both from 1915]), or that contrast the vigorous and physically active Western heroic type with the sissified Easterner (Manhattan Madness [1916]; Wild and Wooly [1917]). More generally, the film seems to evoke a turn-of-the-century type of American womanhood: the “lively girl”, or “athletic girl”, the second term being the one used in both of the plot summaries above (and perhaps in the film’s intertitles?). For another example of this usage, see Charles Dana Gibson’s well-known cartoon (Life, May 22, 1902) in which a male suitor stands befuddled while his female companion jumps across a chasm. The caption reads: “One of the Disadvantages of Being in Love with an Athletic Girl.” Writing in 1936 about Charles Dana Gibson’s drawings of women, one commentator noted: “The Goddess of the Wheel, as Gibson and many another artist now drew her, was … a pretty American girl speeding joyously along on a bicycle. On that simple machine she rode like a winged victory, women’s rights perched on the handlebars and cramping modes and manners strewn on her track,” (Fairfax Downey, cited in Banta, p.88). If the images of Blanche Sweet and her athletic counterpart boxing, running and swimming were indeed part and parcel of the same tradition as that bicyclist, then this film would seem to have represented a significant departure from the “old fashioned” or “Victorian” ideals of womanhood which are usually thought to characterize Griffith’s heroines. Lea Jacobs

40

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

334 BIOGRAPH

THE TWO SIDES Filming date: 12/13 March 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/San Gabriel, California Release date: 1 May 1911 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 3 May 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Dell Henderson (Mexican laborer); Kate Bruce (His wife); William J. Butler (Rancher); Gladys Egan (His daughter); Kate Toncray (Nurse); John T. Dillon (Foreman); Alfred Paget, Francis J. Grandon, Guy Hedlund (Laborers); ? (Child) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A VIVID CONTRAST OF THE WORLD’S PROSPEROUS AND POOR A Mexican laborer is discharged from the ranch with others, simply to reduce expenses to enhance the proprietor’s already ample profits. Deprived of his revenue, the poor Mexican is in desperation as to the recovery of his sick child. This, however, does not concern the ranch owner, whose own child is possessed of all the luxuries money can buy, so he turns a deaf ear to the poor fellow’s pleading. Through a childish caprice the ranch owner’s daughter threatens to run away from home, she resenting a mild chastisement from her father, and hides in the barn. Through the careless dropping of a cigarette by another workman outside the barn, a fire occurs, enveloping the barn and placing the child in extreme peril. The Mexican discovers the fire and not aware of the child’s presence therein, is inclined through malice to allow it to burn, when he finds the child’s purse outside the barn-door and suspects that the child is inside. At the risk of his own life he dashes in, and in an instant reappears with the child to place her safely in her father’s arms. Biograph Bulletin, May 1, 1911

A poor Mexican laborer and his wife worry over their sick baby. The owner of the ranch where the Mexican works gives his daughter Betty a little purse as a present, and then instructs his foreman to fire two of the workers. The laborer stumbles while unloading barrels from a truck. Betty witnesses this, approaches him and voices concern. He sits down to rest. The foreman enters with the rancher and fires the laborer for lounging. A second worker, chosen at random, is also fired. The laborer’s wife, worried about the baby, counsels patience and asks him to plead with his boss, but when he attempts this he is ordered off by the foreman. Trying to find a trinket for her doll, Betty breaks a piece of crockery. Her father reproaches her and when she talks back, he gives her a spanking and orders her out of the room. The little girl decides to run away and leaves a note for her father. After she has gone a little way, she has second thoughts and returns home. Looking through a window, she sees her father laughing, and his apparent unconcern (he has not, in fact, found the note) strengthens her resolve. She retraces her steps, stops in front of a vacant barn and, 41

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

crying, throws away her purse. She enters the barn, settles down to rest on a bale of hay and eventually sleeps. The second worker to be dismissed passes the barn carrying a bedroll and tosses his cigarette on a small pile of hay outside the barn as he departs. The rancher and nurse find Betty’s note and initiate a search for the missing girl. The sick baby’s father, passing by the barn, finds Betty’s purse. He notices the smoking straw and fetches a bucket of water to put out the fire, then decides to let it burn. When fire has spread to the barn interior, the girl wakes and calls for help. The laborer, hiding behind a bush, overhears the rancher and nurse searching for Betty. After they depart, he realizes the girl must be in the barn and rescues her. While others work to douse the flames, he tells the rancher about his own child’s illness. Back in the laborer’s cottage, the rancher chastises the foreman who asks the laborer’s pardon. The parents kneel in thanks by their baby’s cradle.

The subtitle, “A Vivid Contrast of the World’s Prosperous and Poor”, suggests a movie that uses crosscutting to contrast the fates of the rich and the poor and is thus a film of the same order as The Song of the Shirt, The Usurer, A Corner in Wheat and Gold is Not All (Gunning, 1991, p. 134 and also see For His Son, DWG Project, #384). Although the film does begin with such a contrast between the sick baby in the laborer’s cottage and the rancher’s indulged daughter, this kind of editing does not dominate the film. The first half of the film introduces the various plot elements by presenting events in sequence. The foreman is ordered to fire the men. He encounters the men working and makes his choice about who is to go (although Betty’s presence in an early portion of this scene does help to integrate her story and that of the laborer). The mother of the sick child persuades her husband to talk to his boss, who orders him away. Betty is punished and runs away (there is one cut away to the laborer in despair in this segment). Crosscutting in the sense of interpolating simultaneous actions does not really begin until shot 39, after Betty has looked in the window and renewed her decision to run away. She throws away her purse in anger. Cut back to the laborer’s wife and sick child. Betty enters the barn. The departing worker tosses his cigarette outside the barn. Betty settles down to rest. Betty’s father tells the nurse to summon the girl, and she begins to look for her. The laborer finds the purse and sees the smoke. The nurse finds the note and shows it to the rancher. The laborer decides not to douse the flames. Betty sits up and calls for help. The rancher and nurse initiate the search. Cut back to Betty in peril. The laborer hides and overhears the rancher and the nurse. Cut back to Betty. The laborer points to the purse and then to Betty in the barn. His rescue of Betty is further interpolated with shots of the girl calling for help and her father and nurse coming to the scene of the fire. This final rescue is brief; it takes but nine shots in a film of seventysix shots, including titles. Thus, it is not the rescue as such, but rather the interconnections between disparate plot threads – including some elements like the sick baby and the second dismissed laborer shown but once – which provide the substance of the montage. Like many of the other Biographs, the crosscutting here works primarily to create suspense, and the progression of the fire as it builds in force is very carefully staged. Nonetheless, like the contrast movies listed above, there is also a moral logic to the crosscutting. This lies in the nature of causal links between plot elements: the dismissal of the workers leads to the fire that threatens the rancher’s own child. No doubt the story could have been told with only one man fired. The father of the sick baby is shown smoking and it could just as easily have been his cigarette that started the blaze. Having two men fired emphasizes the arbitrariness of the boss’s actions – the foreman is clearly told to simply pick two – and has the added advantage of emphasizing the arbitrary and providential nature of the outcome (providential in the sense that the fire is deserved by the rancher if not by Betty 42

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

herself). Precisely because the two dismissed employees do not scheme together, or even meet, it is only the editing that shows us the connection between them and makes the moral economy of the plot apparent. In this sense, the film does bear comparison with the other moral contrast films although it is certainly not as radical an experiment as A Corner in Wheat, which eschews suspense and, indeed, all causal linkages between the scenes except for those established through crosscutting and titles. The Two Sides is the second of the three films in my set reviewed for this volume that has a character look in a window. In shot 34 we see Betty on the front porch. This is a transitional space shown in this framing every time characters enter or exit the house. Shot 35 is a new view of the porch, presumably around the corner of a wraparound porch, with the camera axis parallel to the house, windows to the right and stairs no longer visible. Betty enters from the rear and looks in the window. There is a 90-degree cut to the interior of the study, in the same framing as earlier in the film (shot 5), with the camera perpendicular to the back wall of the set and the father seated at a desk front left. The child is visible looking in the rear right window. The father laughs at something he is reading. Cut back to Betty, framed as in shot 35, who shakes her head and cries. Unlike His Mother’s Scarf, the film does not cut repeatedly between the character in the exterior and the interior scene. Indeed, there is no dramatic development here and really no necessity for this scene. It merely confirms the girl in the course she has already taken. It does not even function to build suspense as would a retardation device, which forestalls the discovery and rescue once the fire has started in the second half of the film. I wonder if Griffith included this scene here simply because he was experimenting with how to set it up. In this instance, the editing specifies the relationship between exterior and interior unambiguously (though without recourse to point-of-view cutting) and, in this sense, can be seen as an “improvement” over His Mother’s Scarf. Lea Jacobs

43

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

335 BIOGRAPH

IN THE DAYS OF ’49 Filming date: 6/16 March 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/Eaton Canyon, California Release date: 8 May 1911 Release length: 995 feet Copyright date: 10 May 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Harriet Quimby Source: “Brown of Calaveras”, the story by Bret Harte Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: George O. Nicholls (Bill Weston); Claire McDowell (Edith, his wife); Dell Henderson (Handsome Jack); Dorothy West (Edith’s friend); Guy Hedlund, John T. Dillon, W. Chrystie Miller (In bar); Alfred Paget (Jack’s friend); Wilfred Lucas, Kate Bruce (At stage station); Charles H. West (Fiddler); William J. Butler (Bartender); Frank Opperman, John T. Dillon, Francis J. Grandon (Outside bar) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative AN EPISODE IN THE TIMES OF THE GOLD FEVER During that exciting period men were wont to rush from place to place in their mad lust for gold, and Bill Weston was one of these, who, after locating with his wife in one settlement, goes off to another where the chances seem better, intending to send for her if he strikes luck. He hits it fairly well and so sends a letter telling his wife to take the first coach out, which she does. On the way she meets handsome Jack, the gambler, who, riding on the same coach, deeply impresses her with his attentions. When she meets her husband, who is but a plain honest fellow, she compares the two, and Jack finds it easy to induce her to meet him later and go away. Bill feels his wife’s coolness towards him and is grief stricken, telling the boys of the camp that his wife does not love him. Jack sees his plight and realizes what a great wrong he is working so he goes away leaving a note advising the wife, “Don’t be a fool. Appreciate a good man’s love while you have it. Go back to your husband who loves you with a better love.” The wife at this is also awakened. Biograph Bulletin, May 8, 1911

In a rough mining camp, Bill has a good strike and sends for his wife, Edith. Jack the Gambler, a friend of Bill’s, meets Edith traveling on the stage and decides to follow her. They flirt as they travel together on the stage. Bill receives Edith when the stage arrives at the mining camp, and Jack realizes that they are married, but decides to pursue her anyway. Edith is cold to Bill when she gets to his room and complains of a headache, going off to walk alone. She meets Jack and he takes her walking beside a stream outside of camp. He convinces her to meet him in the same place later that day so that they can run away. On her return to her husband’s room, she refuses his kisses. Stung by Edith’s rejection, Bill goes off drinking and then knocks on Jack’s door. Jack is packing his saddlebags, but he lets Bill in. Bill complains that his wife does not love him, embraces Jack and sinks into a drunken stupor, resting his head on the table. Jack picks up Edith’s handkerchief, which Bill has been 44

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

fondling. Then he deals a card to Bill and another to himself. Bill’s queen of hearts trumps his five. Jack leaves a note for Edith with another miner, telling her that Bill’s love is more worthy than his and rides off. Edith goes to the trysting place, discovers the note and returns to Bill’s room where she is reconciled to her husband.

The geography of the camp is never made clear. There is a central bar/gathering place with Bill’s room seemingly (if improbably) directly off to the right. But, it is hard to place Jack’s room in relation to the others. We see Bill on a street when he is drinking, and presumably he approaches Jack’s room via this street, but it is hard to understand how this street relates to the space of the bar. Nor can we place any of the interiors in relation to the trysting place by the stream. This would seem to be important since much of the story involves two of the three characters meeting in secret while the third waits in ignorance of the encounter. The exteriors shot in Eaton Canyon are more compelling, especially all of the work with the stagecoach. See, for example, shot 16, in which the stage moves laterally in very long shot, follows a curve of the road out of view, and re-emerges moving toward the camera on the left side of the frame. The film is adapted from the Bret Harte story, “Brown of Calaveras”, and it may have inspired Griffith to resort to a filmic device that is unusual for him. In the story, the gambler Jack Hamlin has been riding up front beside the stagecoach driver. Remounting to his seat after a rest stop, he catches a glimpse of the heroine, called Kate Brown in the story, and impulsively changes places with another passenger to get a place inside the stage beside her. In the film rendering of this immediate and decisive attraction, Jack rides his horse up to a bar on the trail and dismounts (shot 15). The stage moves in along the camera axis and pulls up to camera front left (shot 17). Edith opens the door and Jack tips his hat. Shot 18 is an axial cut-in to a medium long shot of the two them with a match on action. The gambler introduces himself and helps her out of the stage. She walks off into the background. Dell Henderson (Jack) makes a thinking gesture, with raised hand, as he watches her. In the subsequent three shots, 19 through 21, she approaches a stream, he looks off apparently in her direction, and she puts a dampened handkerchief to her brow. Both the cut-in and the emphasis on Jack looking in shots 19-21 (although not eyeline matches in the strict sense) help to explain the character’s motivations and clearly anticipate the title in shot 22, which informs us that Jack, attracted to Edith, decides to take the stage back to camp. The acting in the film is a strange amalgam of highly conventionalized gestures, in some cases even with asides, and stage business apparently unrelated to the dramatic situation and simply there to evoke the atmosphere of the frontier. In shot 31, for example, as the passengers dismount from the stage and Bill greets Edith, the gambler stands mid-center, watches them and mouths the words: “Oh, I’ve got to be careful”, as he gestures in the direction of the husband and wife. In shot 50, the meeting between Jack and Edith in the trysting place, the actors make elaborate preparations for their exits in a manner that strikes me as quite theatrical. Claire McDowell moves behind Dell Henderson to exit mid-center right. She turns and looks back at him as he looks her, raising his arms and shoulders in a farewell gesture. After she leaves, he looks at his watch, laughs in triumph and exits in the foreground right. Dell Henderson makes a similarly elaborate exit in shot 72 after he has decided to abandon his plan to elope with Edith and he leaves his room with Bill still asleep at the table. These scenes are perhaps what the reviewer for The New York Dramatic Mirror (May 17, 1911, p. 30) was referring to when he wrote that, “Several exits of the actors seemed unexplainable”. In contrast with this style of acting, which aims to bring out the dramatic situation as clearly as possible (and, in this case, too broadly) through poses, gestures and asides, one 45

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

finds several scenes in which extras are used to evoke the frontier atmosphere without much connection to the unfolding drama. The film opens in a saloon. There is a bar at the rear of the set, a table foreground left and a pot bellied stove midground right. A fiddler sits in a chair midground, resting his feet on the stove. Extras stand in front of the stove, near the bar at the rear, and at the table in the foreground writing. Some of the men dance, doing a turn to the fiddler’s music in the open midground section of the set. Such an emphasis on extraneous activity is perhaps to be expected in the film’s opening. However, when the film returns to this set later, after Edith’s arrival, there continues to be attention to the extras, even while the principals engage in a highly conventionalized gestural technique. In shot 36, Bill enters foreground right to fetch Edith’s trunk, which has been deposited front center. The gambler stands front left, playing with some coins in his hand. Bill gestures with his thumb in the direction of his room, and his wife, as if to brag “Ain’t she great?” The gambler nods and continues playing with the coins. Shot 37 shows Bill dragging the trunk into his room where Edith waits. In shot 38, the gambler throws his coins to the floor of the saloon, presumably as a tip. The fiddler immediately scrambles to pick them up. The gambler moves off left front, putting fingers to face in a “thinking” pose. The fiddler walks to the right to resume his post by the stove. Dell Henderson’s broad gestures in this and similar scenes seem to me to be at odds with the emphasis on the fiddler and the autonomous life of the saloon. It is of the same order as the extra who, holding the gambler’s farewell note to Edith, spits out his chewing tobacco as she approaches. Lea Jacobs

46

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

336 BIOGRAPH

ENOCH ARDEN – PART ONE Filming date: 24/28 March 1911 Location: Santa Monica, California/Los Angeles Studio (not noted) Release date: 12 June 1911; reissued by Biograph, 29 August 1916, with Enoch Arden – Part Two, as a two-reeler Release length: one reel Copyright date: 13 June 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: “Enoch Arden”, the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Enoch Arden); Linda Arvidson (Annie Lee); Francis J. Grandon (Philip Ray); George O. Nicholls (Captain); Alfred Paget, Jeannie MacPherson, Florence Lee, Blanche Sweet (On beach); Alfred Paget, Joseph Graybill (Shipwrecked sailors); ? (Children) Archival Sources: George Eastman House, 28mm diacetate positive; The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (version undetermined, print inv. TA6995-170I); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) AN ADAPTATION OF LORD TENNYSON’S POEM (IN TWO PARTS) – PART ONE There is small need to describe this subject as the poem of Lord Tennyson is so well known, so suffice it is to say that this Biograph subject is an unusually faithful portrayal of that beautiful romance of Enoch Arden, Annie Lee and Philip Ray taken in scenes of rare beauty. This first part tells of the betrothal of Enoch and Annie, the despair of Enoch at his inability to cope with the demands of his increasing family obligations, and his sailing away to recoup his fortunes on a vessel bound for China. A storm is encountered, the vessel wrecked and Enoch and two companions are washed upon a tropical island, where they are forced to stay. Annie, all the while is ever hopeful of his return, while Philip, though an unsuccessful rival, shows a kindly interest in the little grief stricken family. Biograph Bulletin, June 12, 1911

Enoch Arden, a humble fisherman, and the more wealthy Philip Ray are both in love with Annie Lee. The rivals quarrel, but she reconciles them. She chooses to marry Enoch. They have two children and a small baby when Enoch decides to sign on as a sailor on a schooner to make more money to support his family. Annie is distraught when he leaves and gives him a token, a curl of the baby’s hair in a locket. Annie and the children watch on the beach as Enoch departs; Philip observes them but does not approach them. Later, Annie and the children wait vainly on the beach for Enoch’s return. A storm at sea wrecks Enoch’s vessel, but along with two comrades, he manages to swim to a desert island. Annie, dozing off while sitting and looking out to sea, has a premonition of his misfortune.

47

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Enoch Arden is Griffith’s second two-reeler. Like his first (His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled), the film was released in two parts. All the members of the Motion Picture Patents Company had regular release days spaced throughout the week. In this period, Biograph was releasing two reels a weeks. Presumably, Enoch Arden counted for one week’s worth of film, the reels going into release within three days of each other: one on 12 June, the other 15 June. Given the pressures on first-run exhibitors to show the newest films as quickly as possible, it is likely that in the best theaters the two parts were shown separately. Exhibitors that delayed showing Part One until 16 June ran the risk that neighboring nickelodeons would “scoop” them by showing it first. Nonetheless, the trade press heralded the release of Enoch Arden as a great event and at least The Moving Picture World recommended showing the two parts together. The New York Dramatic Mirror (June 21, 1911, p. 30) enthused: “a pictorial masterpiece, worthy in a remarkable degree of the subject on which it is based. The picture in its two parts more nearly represents the higher ideals of motion picture construction than any previous picture play production that this reviewer has ever been fortunate enough to see.” The Moving Picture World (June 17, 1911, pp. 1358–59) ran a two-page spread entitled “‘Enoch Arden’. A Fine Two-Reel Visualization of Tennyson’s Beautiful Poem”. The article complained that the second reel was not available until three days after the first and concluded: “The Moving Picture World earnestly advises exhibitors to show both reels at the same performance, and to use in connection with them the lecture, which will be published for the use of exhibitors most probably in the next issue of this paper.” (For the text of the lecture, largely excerpted from Tennyson’s poem, see “Lectures on Notable Reels”, The Moving Picture World, June 24, 1911, p. 1430.) I have seen no evidence to support Robert Henderson’s claim that exhibitors showed Part One on Monday and Part Two on Tuesday (Henderson, p. 119). But the film is part of a general trend toward longer “prestige” subjects, which were seen to merit new exhibition strategies. The Moving Picture World writes: “We urge upon the exhibitor to demand all two and three reel subjects together…. It is utter profligacy for the exhibitor to treat many of the photoplays now being issued as daily changes” (The Moving Picture World, June 17, 1911, p. 1359). Certainly by the end of 1911 it was possible for Motion Picture Patents Company producers to release multiple reels on the same day: the first Vitagraph two-reeler released on the same day (7 November 1911) was Auld Lange Syne, and in December the company released a three-reeler, Vanity Fair, on a single day. But Biograph seems to have been reluctant to follow this policy. Unlike His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled, which had different titles for each part, each of which could stand alone, Enoch Arden is more unified. The 16mm MoMA viewing print is without the main title for Part Two, and the two reels appear in continuity. However, the reel break is clear. After the tempest, Enoch and his companions swim to the deserted island and fall to their knees in prayer. There is a cut to Annie and the children waiting on the beach and what looks like an original fade. The next shot also begins on the beach, but the children are older (although not the full-grown children played by Bobby Harron and Florence LaBadie later in Part Two) indicating a time lapse. The fade comes at 394 feet in the 16mm print, which would be 985 feet in 35mm. The gap in time between reels seems to elide the death of the baby whose cradle is prominent in Part One and whose curl, emphasized by a cut-in to medium shot when Annie gives Enoch the locket, continues to play an important role as a token throughout Part Two. Enoch wears the locket prominently on the desert island and is shown looking at it there, as well as on board ship on his way home. He holds it up when he explains who he is to the landlady at the tavern at the end of Part Two. Nonetheless, Enoch’s baby does not appear 48

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

in Part Two. In the poem, Tennyson recounts the baby’s death quite soon after Enoch’s departure, and it may be that the present-day print is missing a title that would have recounted this event. The crosscutting between Annie and Enoch, which structures all of Part Two, actually begins at the end of Part One. Shot 46 is a title announcing the storm. Shot 47 shows the shipwrecked men struggling in the waves, while shot 48 returns to a previous framing of Annie, back to camera, sitting and waiting on the beach. Shot 49 again shows the shipwrecked men. Shot 50 is a frontal view of Annie (a 180-degree cut from the previous framing). She is sitting with eyes closed, but suddenly wakes, cries out and lifts her arms. Her children come to join her. The next two shots show Enoch and his companions washed ashore and falling to their knees. Shot 53 shows Annie, again from behind, in the company of her children. While Annie’s vision of Enoch’s misfortune might be said to provide a loose sense of closure to the first part, it also initiates the pattern of alternation between Annie and Enoch in their different spaces, which will be continued throughout the second part. Thus, it is very difficult for present-day viewers (including this one) to discuss this as a distinct film. Lea Jacobs

49

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

337 BIOGRAPH

ENOCH ARDEN – PART TWO Filming date: 24/28 March 1911 Location: Santa Monica, California/Los Angeles Studio (not noted) Release date: 15 June 1911; reissued by Biograph, 29 August 1916, with Enoch Arden – Part One, as a two-reeler Release length: one reel Copyright date: 17 June 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: “Enoch Arden”, the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Enoch Arden); Linda Arvidson (Annie Lee); Francis J. Grandon (Philip Ray); Robert Harron, Florence LaBadie (Children as teenagers); Joseph Graybill (Dead shipmate); Dell Henderson, Edward Dillon, W.C. Robinson, (Rescuers); Guy Hedlund, Henry Lehrman (On rescue ship); Jeannie MacPherson (Servant); Grace Henderson (Gossip); William J. Butler, Charles H. West, ? (In bar) Archival Sources: George Eastman House, 28mm diacetate positive; The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (version undetermined, print inv. TA6995-170I); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) AN ADAPTATION OF LORD TENNYSON’S POEM (IN TWO PARTS) – PART TWO This is the second part of the subject, the first showing the marriage of Enoch and Annie, and his sailing off to recoup his fortunes. The vessel is wrecked, he and two companions are stranded on an isle, where they are forced to remain. Meanwhile, Annie is ever hopeful of his return. This part begins several years later, and while Philip sues for the hand of Annie she refuses, still faithful to her hope of Enoch’s return. Finally she accepts for the sake of her children, and when her new baby came – Philip’s child – she is Philip’s all in all. Meanwhile a ship in quest of water puts in at the island and Enoch now alone, his comrades having died, is rescued. His homecoming is sad indeed and he welcomes the death that keeps Annie in happy ignorance. Biograph Bulletin, June 15, 1911

Some years after Enoch’s departure, Annie waits faithfully for her husband and rejects Philip’s proposals of marriage. Philip befriends the children. The last of Enoch’s comrades dies, leaving him alone on the desert isle. Enoch’s children are now grown, and Philip continues his suit, but Annie still refuses. However, the children prevail upon her and she reluctantly agrees to be Philip’s wife. The family moves from the fisherman’s cottage to Philip’s more substantial house. On the desert isle, Enoch is rescued by a passing ship. As he travels toward England on board this schooner, Annie, dozing by a window, has another dream vision of him and calls out his name. But, after her new baby comes, she devotes herself to Philip and the child. Enoch arrives in his village and runs to his cottage only to 50

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

discover that it has become a tavern and inn. The landlady tells him about Annie and her new baby. He runs to Philip’s house and looks in the window at the happy family. He resolves not to tell Annie of his return and goes back to the inn, where he sickens and dies.

Griffith’s second two-reeler is not only culturally ambitious, but also a kind of summary film, which refers back to many of his own previous works. The film is a remake of After Many Years (1908; DWG Project, #62), an Enoch Arden story that ends happily with the reunion of the sailor and his wife. The earlier film is more discussed, and perhaps historically the more important, since it is, according to Tom Gunning (1991, p. 110), the first film to use crosscutting without a last-minute rescue. In addition to After Many Years, Enoch Arden recalls a number of other Biograph seafaring stories in which women wait for the return of their men. In its compositions, especially the shots of Annie and her children watching the departure of the schooner, Enoch Arden recapitulates Lines of White on a Sullen Sea, as aptly described by Tom Gunning (1991, pp. 232–6). The two-reeler also benefits from the stylistic advances apparent in the Griffith Biographs of 1911. There is an increasing number of axial cut-ins in the films of this year (one example may be found in my discussion of In the Days of ’49). There are two cut-ins in Enoch Arden, used to great effect. In the first, already noted in Part One, the film cuts to medium shot to show Annie placing the baby’s curl in the locket. The second example is not a direct cut-in, since several other shots intervene between the long shot and the medium shot. Enoch looks in the window of Philip’s house in standard long-shot framing. The film then cuts to Philip’s family in the interior space before returning to Enoch, now shown in closer view. These two examples are clearly the fruit of Griffith’s experimentation with closer framings for the purpose of creating dramatic emphasis and conveying psychological aspects of character as opposed to the more common insert of an object or letter. A couple of points made in the literature should be recapitulated here. First is the sheer extent of the crosscutting between Annie and Enoch, which is not at all evident from my summary above. For example, the scene in the fisherman’s hut, after the children are grown and Philip renews his suit, consists of four shots. In shot 62, Annie sits front left sewing, her children enter and sit to speak with her. In shot 63, Enoch looks off front right, touches the locket and sighs. In shot 64, Philip enters the cottage between Annie and the kids. He appeals to her, then draws apart, right, to sit and talk with the children. Annie stops sewing and gazes off left. In shot 65, Enoch sits and looks off right. He looks at the locket. As Tom Gunning (1991, pp. 233–6) has discussed at length in relation to After Many Years, this kind of cutting, re-enforced by the device of the locket, serves to join the two characters who are spatially separated. Jacques Aumont (pp. 57-60) has suggested that the use of such glances off frame in Enoch Arden (and, in my example, the physical placement of Annie and Enoch in the frame) makes it seem as if these characters can “see” one another – the narration, through crosscutting, providing the equivalent of Annie’s visions. Enoch Arden thus does not represent a “new” use of crosscutting, but rather, a highly refined variant of a technique that Griffith had been experimenting with since 1908. The film is also the third of my set of titles reviewed for this volume to experiment with staging and editing a scene in which a character looks in the window. Like His Mother’s Scarf, this film offers sustained cutting between the character looking and the interior space, and uses this cutting as an opportunity to articulate a performance: each cut back to the actor looking allows him to assume a new pose or facial expression in response to what he sees. Unlike His Mother’s Scarf, however, there is an unambiguous relationship between interior and exterior space. The solution adopted in The Two Sides, of showing the character look51

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

ing in the window as well as the interior space is not the one adopted here. Rather, Griffith goes to great lengths to specify that the window through which Enoch looks is to the left of the sitting room in which the family gathers, and thus, that Enoch occupies an adjacent space to the interior room. The sitting room is always shown in the same framing, with the camera perpendicular to the back wall, a chest of drawers rear left and a curtain rear right. The placement of the furniture, in particular the chair in which Annie dozes, varies from scene to scene. The family’s initial entrance into the house allows us to specify that the entryway is off right. Several shots indicate the placement of the window off left. In shot 88, after Annie has moved into the house, she and Philip are shown in the exterior of the house, near a creeper-covered wall, with a window on the right. In shot 90, of the interior of the drawing room, Annie’s chair has been moved to the left, and a window swung open is visible behind the chair. Philip enters and stands to her right. Cut to Enoch, on board the schooner, headed for home. In shot 92, as in shot 90, Annie has her second vision and calls out for Enoch. The placement of the window is thus made clear, and in addition, due to the crosscutting, it serves metaphorically as a point of connection between Annie and Enoch. In shot 103, we see Enoch in the exterior approach the window in the same framing as Annie and Philip had previously in shot 88 (Roberta Pearson [p. 74] describes this shot as if Annie and Philip are visible from the exterior framed in the window, but this is not the case in my admittedly cropped print). In shot 104, of the interior, Annie and Philip stand front left, looking out the window (the chair has been moved). They close the window and turn to look right as the daughter enters right with the baby. Because the window is visible swung open into the interior in one scene, and also because we see the window being closed in another, the placement of Enoch in relation to what he sees is unmistakable. Note that Griffith achieves this without abandoning his predilection for framing the interior from a single fixed vantage point throughout the film. This is not a point-of-view shot “through” the window as later classical cinema would construct it. Nonetheless, given the repetitions, which prepare the way for shots 103 and 104, it is the most complex articulation of the space, and, I think, dramatically the most compelling use of a window in the three examples from mid1911 I have seen for this volume. Roberta Pearson has made an extensive analysis of differences in acting style in After Many Years and Enoch Arden. She argues that the actors can adopt a more restrained style in the later film because much of the signifying weight of the scenes is carried through editing. Thus, in contrast with After Many Years, in which the returning sailor is shown in a single shot, overlooking Philip with his wife and daughter and broadly gesturing in despair, in Enoch Arden the window at Philip’s house is used to separate the characters, and editing to articulate the performance. Here, the use of cut-ins and off-screen glances allow for a much more restrained and subtly modulated style. It is certainly the case that film acting becomes more restrained in the years between 1908 and 1911. However, the example of His Mother’s Scarf does complicate the argument, since Wilfred Lucas’s use of gesture and facial expression as he looks in on his brother and the girl seem to me much broader, and given to much more dramatic alteration from shot to shot, than the same actor employs in the role of Enoch. This may in part be a function of differences in dramatic situation. In His Mother’s Scarf, Lucas must portray a character undergoing decisive changes in emotional state, from shock to murderous jealousy to remorse, whereas Enoch’s emotions are more of a piece: sorrow and love leading to a resolution to protect Annie’s happiness by keeping her in ignorance. Moreover, as Tennyson’s poem and the actor’s gestures make clear, Enoch is motivated by the desire to keep silent so as to remain undiscovered, and this may also contribute to the smallness of Lucas’s gestures and the general restraint of his performance. Lea Jacobs 52

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

338 BIOGRAPH

THE NEW DRESS Filming date: 17/29 March 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/San Gabriel, California Release date: 15 May 1911 Release length: 998 Copyright date: 17 May 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Grace Henderson [“A Silk Dress”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Jose); Dorothy West (Marta); W. Chrystie Miller (Father); Vivian Prescott (The “painted woman”); William J. Butler (Priest); Guy Hedlund, John T. Dillon, W.C. Robinson, Florence LaBadie, Charles H. West, Kate Toncray, Joseph Graybill, Jeannie MacPherson, Blanche Sweet, Alfred Paget (At wedding); William J. Butler, Blanche Sweet, Kate Toncray, W.C. Robinson, Joseph Graybill, Jeannie MacPherson (At market); Charles H. West, W.C. Robinson, Joseph Graybill (At café); Francis J. Grandon (Doctor); Alfred Paget (Fieldhand); Henry Lehrman (Drinking companion); Kate Bruce (Friend) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A STORY OF MODERN MEXICO Jose weds Marta, the little Mexican girl, and later when she accompanies him and her father to the market-place, whither they go to sell the products of their farm, she sees and is fascinated by a pretty dress. Jose promises to buy it for her out of the proceeds of his sales, and so she returns home with her father delighted in the anticipation of Jose’s bringing the dress with him. He gets the dress, but stopping at the wayside inn he gives it away while under the influence of wine. He tells Marta he has lost it, but she sees the dress later on another woman. The shock unbalances her mind, in which condition she remains until the advent of a little one, which restores her reason and quite blots out the thought of the dress. Biograph Bulletin, May 15, 1911

Jose courts Marta and, with the consent of her father, the two are married. The family goes to market to sell their goods, and Marta asks Jose to buy her a dress she sees there. He agrees to do so after disposing of the family’s goods. Marta and her father return home, the girl waiting expectantly for her husband and her dress. After selling his goods, Jose buys the dress. On the way home, he meets a friend and they go into a saloon for a drink, where they are joined by a barmaid. This woman asks for the dress, and initially Jose refuses. Later, obviously drunk, he gives her the dress as he departs. On arriving home, he tells Marta that he has lost the dress. In the company of her father, she retraces Jose’s steps, looking for it. When he realizes they have gone, Jose sets out after them. In front of the saloon, Marta encounters the barmaid showing off her new dress to a friend. Jose catches up to Marta at this juncture. When the wife comprehends how she really lost the dress, she collapses and is carried off by her father and Jose. She is rendered mad and repeatedly asks Jose, and others, for the dress. The doctor cannot help her and Jose despairs. Later, the doctor cautions 53

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Jose to remain outside the house, and enters with a midwife. When Jose finally enters the house, Marta is brought forth and seated in a chair. She asks Jose for the dress. Then the midwife enters with the baby. Marta holds it and then shows it off to Jose, her sanity restored.

The New York Dramatic Mirror (May 24, 1911, p. 30) noted the consistency of the atmosphere and the “typical” characters, which I take to mean the film was seen as a story of Mexican life and one which exploited the local color available to the Biograph company during their second trip to California. The story is largely made up of characters going to and fro on the road. Jose fetches Marta at their house. At the stable, the father loads up the burros. They proceed down a road to market (all characters move toward camera). Once Jose has agreed to buy the dress, Marta and her father are shown proceeding in the opposite direction (away from camera) on the same section of the market road and then, in another shot, walking laterally left to right alongside a fence. After giving away the dress, Jose is shown at the stables, unhitching a burro. Marta appears at this location again, a few shots later, when she tells her father that she is going to look for the dress and he follows her, leading one of the burros. They are shown again on the market road, moving toward camera, and then again, this time walking laterally right to left, along the road with the fence. When Jose starts out after Marta and her father, he, too, is shown on the market road. The film seems rather plodding in its iteration of these spaces, which are never energized with the excitement of a chase or last-minute rescue and which never come to have the emotional resonance of a repeated location like the bridge in The Painted Lady (1912), where the heroine is courted and where she returns after betrayal by the same young man who has driven her to madness. Dorothy West’s mad scenes seem rather perfunctory, restricted too exclusively to the repeated gesture of requesting the dress. They, too, suffer in comparison with Blanche Sweet’s mad scenes in The Painted Lady. Although Sweet also uses mime, especially in the repeated gestures which suggest that she does not make up her face, the primary way of structuring these scenes is through her address to an imaginary interlocutor (the absent, now dead, lover). This device allows her greater freedom in the development and iteration of poses and gestures, and results in a performance much more unsettling to behold. The most interesting acting in The New Dress may be found in the work of the ensemble in the scene in which Marta comes upon the barmaid wearing her dress. The barmaid and her friend stand on the street outside the saloon. Marta comes forward, right, and stops when she sees the dress. Jose catches up with her and stands to Marta’s right as the barmaid’s friend moves off to the rear. Marta’s father is also visible in the rear, behind his daughter. The barmaid gestures to Jose, showing off the dress. Marta objects that it is her dress. The barmaid indicates that Jose gave it to her. The barmaid glares at Jose while Marta looks at him reproachfully. There is a slight pause. Jose admits what happened and apologizes. Marta makes a fist. There is another slight pause and then she collapses in her father’s arms. The old man and Jose carry her off, right. The situation of a respectable woman finding her dress, promised to her by her husband, on a barmaid is striking – both horrible and, given another handling, almost comic. Indeed, Dorothy West almost does a double take when she sees the dress. Griffith stages it in a single take, which requires that the actors, working in turn, handle the various stages of the discovery: the wife’s initial surprise; the barmaid’s pleasure in her finery addressed to Jose; the dispute between the women; the mutual suspicion directed to Jose; and finally, the confession that produces the heroine’s collapse. In contrast, in the case of a later film like The Painted Lady, the discovery that dri54

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

ves the heroine mad is presented in a series of shots largely, but not entirely, structured through editing and the use of titles (Brewster and Jacobs, pp. 129-131). It is as if Griffith had not yet found a way to use editing to develop and extend what is surely the best situation in his film. Lea Jacobs

55

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

339 BIOGRAPH

THE WHITE ROSE OF THE WILDS Filming date: 31 March, 8 April 1911 Location: Rubia Canyon, California Release date: 25 May 1911; reissued by Biograph, 16 October 1916 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 27 May 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (White Rose); Robert Harron (Her brother); W. Chrystie Miller (Her father); Wilfred Lucas (Transformed outlaw), Joseph Graybill (Outlaw) NOTE: Cast taken from The Moving Picture World (October 21, 1916, p. 441). Archival Sources: none known A STORY OF THE HILLS OF THE WEST An unsuccessful old gold-miner is stricken down and dies, leaving three young children to take care of themselves. They are a boy of seventeen, a girl of sixteen and a girl of eleven. The boy, inheriting his father’s determination, insists that they remain for he is sure there is gold to be found. Later his efforts are rewarded, and he rushes off to the agent to file his claim. While he is away a trio of thugs break into the cabin, but the pure, innocent girl so impresses one of them that he drives the other two off. To him she is as a white, unsullied rose blooming here in the wildness. Her clear eye of innocence awakens his better self and he goes, asking if he may return when he has proven himself worthy. Biograph Bulletin, May 25, 1911

As no print of The White Rose of the Wilds is known to survive, all we know about the film is drawn from contemporary reviews. The Biograph Bulletin indicates that this film’s premise was typical of the period’s sensational melodramas in which young women are trapped alone in domestic spaces and threatened by violent, rapacious men. Its resolution, however, depends not on a “lastminute” rescue but on the sentimental device of a “moral awakening” in which a “bad man” is transformed simply by the presence and behavior of a pure, innocent young woman. Precisely how that “moral awakening” is set up dramatically remains unclear, however, because descriptions of the film differ: in The New York Dramatic Mirror (May 31, 1911, p. 31), the outlaw deals with his companions after the young woman has so impressed him; in both The Moving Picture World (June 10, 1911, p. 1313) and Motography (June 1911, pp. 146-147), he disposes of his rivals for her prior to the transformation. Trade press reviews also offer strikingly different perspectives of appreciation and judgment. The anonymous reviewer in Billboard (June 10, 1911, p. 54), for instance, found its “old story” plausible and interesting largely because of the convincing acting done by Blanche Sweet. The reviewer in The Moving Picture World agreed that the acting of “The 56

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Rose” was “natural and very pleasing”, but also praised the film’s story construction. The reviewer in Motography predicted that the unconventional ending, drawn from Owen Moody’s well-known play, The Great Divide, would be as widely copied as the one from The Girl of the Golden West, in which the heroine gambles with a sheriff for her lover’s freedom. The “experienced eye” of the reviewer for The New York Dramatic Mirror, by contrast, saw the film as a model of “perfection in the technique of picture directing”. Specifically, that meant the “mechanical precision with which each scene is timed” – as in “well oiled clockwork” – so that, in the joining of scenes, exits and entrances create a sense of seamless movement by the actors. One potentially interesting feature of the film’s production is that some of it was shot on location in Rubia Canyon on the last day of March and the rest, in the same location more than one week later, during the filming of The Crooked Road. Richard Abel

57

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

340 BIOGRAPH

A ROMANY TRAGEDY Filming date: 11/12 April 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/Lookout Mountain, California Release date: 29 May 1911 Release length: 996 feet Copyright date: 1 June 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Stanner E.V. Taylor [“A Romany Vengeance”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Claire McDowell (Elder Sister); Gladys Egan (Younger sister); Joseph Graybill? (Eugene, the lover); William J. Butler (Carlos’ father); W. Christy Cabanne? (Carlos, the slain brother) Archival Sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate positive (AFI/New Zealand Film Archive Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative AN EPISODE AMONG THE CORSICAN GYPSIES To allow the slaying of one of the family to go unavenged meant dishonor among the Corsican Gypsies, and a feud existed until such satisfaction was attained. Carlos returns, after a long journey, to his father and two sisters. His sister has fallen in love with Eugene, Carlos’ bitter enemy. A quarrel ensues between the two boys and ends with a duel in which Carlos falls a victim. When his lifeless body is brought into their tent the family take the oath of the vendetta which is pledged by a kiss, the fingers in the form of a cross. The father being a cripple, it is incumbent upon the girl to avenge her brother’s death, so taking up a dagger she starts out, ignorant of the identity of her brother’s slayer. Judge her horror when she discovers it is her lover. In the terrible struggle between the two fires she cannot carry out her mission, and so her father thinking the knife too terrible suggests the poisoned cup. In this scheme she endeavors to sacrifice herself by shifting the cups, but her young sister seeing her actions, changes the cups back again to their former position and the lover pays the penalty. Biograph Bulletin, May 29, 1911

A young man is welcomed home by his gypsy father and two sisters in the mountains of Corsica and presents the older sister with a necklace and scarf. After he has gone off to a neighboring campsite, the older sister meets her lover who persuades her, even though he is from a family of enemies, to give him the scarf as a token of their love. When the lover, too, goes to the campsite, the brother notices the scarf, angrily challenges him to a knife fight – and at length is killed. Over his son’s body, the father vows revenge but cannot fulfill the ritual “kissing of the crossed fingers” because of a crippled right arm. Taking up a dagger, the older sister agrees to act for him; however, when her father takes her to see the killer, she is stunned and listens to the latter’s entreaties, but refuses to go through with the revenge. The father then sends the younger sister to invite the lover to their tent, intending to kill him with a poisoned cup of wine. The older sister rearranges the cups, thinking to sacrifice herself, but the little girl notices and repositions them so that, to the young woman’s shock and added grief, the lover falls dead across the family table. 58

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

A Romany Tragedy tells a conventional, even stereotypical story of honor and revenge involving a family of gypsies, but with several unusual plot twists provoked by the opposing actions of the sisters. It is told in a relatively clear, if unoriginal manner, using just four locations – the interior of the family tent, the neighboring gypsy campsite, the road where the lovers meet, and the lover’s wagon – none of which seem all that distant from the others. Moreover, three of these have important adjacent spaces: the tent exterior, where the family members initially interact or later go off individually to another location; the open area near the campsite, where the two men circle and thrust their knives at one another; and the space near the lover’s wagon, where the older sister first reveals her hesitation to fulfill the required revenge. The characters move easily (often in matched exits and entrances) between these spaces, and brief moments of crosscutting occasionally either suspend one line of action while another is being worked out or else set up an anticipated action: e.g., the father and older sister pause sadly outside their tent (and the father reveals his useless right arm) while the brother greets friends at the campsite; the little girl sits brooding over the body of her dead brother, surrounded by candles, in the tent interior while her father and older sister are at the lover’s wagon. Other crosscuttings depend on a sound cue (a device Pathé films had used as long as five years before) or serve to defuse the violence of a scene: when the lover calls from the road, the older sister reacts in the tent interior and soon leaves to meet him; instead of showing the fatal knife thrust in the fight, two men at the campsite seem to react to it off screen – and in the next shot, the brother falls dead. The film is somewhat unusual in its use of relatively long-take tableau scenes that focus attention on a character’s behavior or on the characters’ interactions, a strategy perhaps dictated by the desire to tell an “Old World” story in the “Old World” style (sometimes wrongly) associated with film d’art. Most of these involve the older sister in one “tragic” situation after another: grieving over her dead brother, she stares maddened at the blood on her own hand; as she confronts her lover, she ever so slowly yields to his quiet entreaties and open, vulnerable embrace; after anxiously keeping both her father and lover occupied as she rearranges the poisoned cup at the end, she crosses herself before drinking and does not at first notice that her lover is collapsing beside her. Otherwise, two other brief moments of framing or acting are worth noting: as the two men exit the campsite to fight, they pass out of the frame almost in medium close-up; even more interestingly, when the younger sister invites the lover to the family tent, she nips at his hand with her teeth and stares up at him like a nasty little animal – a look that is repeated as she gloats over his dead face hanging down from the table in the right foreground of the final tableau. The trade press reviews of A Romany Tragedy are surprisingly unanimous in calling it a “very fine film” and praising it highly. They differ only in their appraisal of the older sister, the center of the film’s “exceptional dramatic situation”. Whereas the reviewers for Billboard (June 10, 1911, pp. 14, 54) and The Moving Picture World (June 10, 1911, p. 1316) find her quite credible, the New York Dramatic Mirror reviewer faults the actress (Claire McDowell) for not being subtle enough, for overemphasizing the role, “therefore making it not as natural or convincing as it might have been” (June 7, 1911, p. 30). Perhaps the most significant comment in this review discourse comes from Billboard: the film originally was “shaded dark green, which shading add[ed] greatly to the atmosphere of the story”. This is a rare reference to the kind of toning that apparently made Biograph films so attractive to audiences during this period. In another sense, however, the unanimity of the trade press is not surprising. After all, A Romany Tragedy is doubly othered: it tells a “Corsican story” but also a story of gypsies – 59

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

or “those people”, as one reviewer bluntly put it. That makes the story excessively “foreign”, with a “foreign” sense of honor in which the smallest signs of disloyalty (the circulating scarf) lead to eruptions of violence and revenge. While that violence is directed against men, its more “degenerating” effect is to turn women into either tragic victims or dangerous beasts. Within the context of United States culture, and given the language of the period, the film thus serves to mark off a “civilized” society from others that are “primitive” or, more specifically, an American “civilization” from an “Old World” European one. Richard Abel

60

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

341 BIOGRAPH

THE CROOKED ROAD Filming date: 4/13 April 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/Lumber company in California Release date: 22 May 1911 Release length: 997 feet Copyright date: 25 May 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Dell Henderson (Husband); Stephanie Longfellow (Wife); ? (Their child); Joseph Graybill, Charles H. West (Evil companions); Alfred Paget, John T. Dillon (In bar); W.C. Robinson (On street); Kate Toncray, Claire McDowell, Kate Bruce (Neighbors); John T. Dillon, Guy Hedlund, W. Chrystie Miller (In second bar); Gladys Egan, Baden Powell (Children); ? (In lumberyard); Grace Henderson (Landlady); William J. Butler (Pawnbroker); Jeannie MacPherson (In pawnshop) NOTE: The “lumber company” in California is not specified in the production records at the Museum of Modern Art. Bitzer identifies Baden Powell as a child in this film. Archival Sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate negative (AFI/MoMA Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A ROAD THAT LEADS TO POVERTY AND WOE Lack of determination is the real cause of most of the sorrow in this world, and this Biograph subject goes far to prove this fact. The husband, falling in with evil companions, neglects his wife and child and finally leaves them, as he assumes, to the tender mercies of public charities. About to indulge in a crime of the worst order, that of burglary, his conscience pricks him, and he resolves to do better. Fate attends him and he gets a job in a lumber-yard, but is unable to find his wife, as she has moved from the old neighborhood. The wife taken sick, as a last resort, sends her child to the pawnshop with her wedding-ring. The husband happens to be there superintending some alterations when the child arrives and through this painful episode a reunion is effected. Biograph Bulletin, May 22, 1911

Within a year of a couple’s marriage, they are living in near poverty with a new baby, their only source of income the washing the wife takes in. She refuses to let her unemployed husband pawn her wedding ring, and he deserts her and the baby after being persuaded in the local bar to join a group of burglars. Distressed by the neighbor’s gossip about her, the wife moves to a new neighborhood and continues to do laundry, while the husband at the last moment decides not to take part in a robbery and determines instead to seek employment at a lumberyard. Three years later, the woman and her son are no better off than before, and now she falls ill and asks the boy to pawn her wedding ring. Meanwhile, the husband has become a successful foreman and is sent to supervise renovations at the very pawnshop 61

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

to which the boy has been sent. He recognizes the ring and has the boy take him home to his mother – and the family is reunited.

Little at first may seem remarkable about this story of tenement life in the city, in which a young family seems destined for poverty, breakup, and even worse until good fortune and the husband’s recovery of good character put them on the “right road”. Yet The Crooked Road tells that story very clearly and efficiently. An initial tableau establishes the newly married couple as shy and awkward together, perhaps signaling how briefly each has known the other or how little each knows of the other. A second tableau depicts their inability one year later to cope with poverty and with one another’s despair. Thereafter, the story is structured in nicely balanced segments. First, the film focuses on the husband’s desertion of his wife and baby, and his temptation to get some quick money through crime; then it follows the wife’s unsuccessful search for him (she arrives at the bar after he has left with the burglars). At the same time, smooth match-cuts on a character exiting one shot and entering another establish a series of contiguous spaces beyond the couple’s tenement flat, and crosscuts between the flat and the bar begin to point up the diverging paths of wife and husband. That crosscutting culminates in scenes where the wife and husband, separately but almost simultaneously, reach crucial decisions: she moves out of the flat with the baby (but does not throw herself on “the tender mercies of public charities”), and he refuses to pocket a gun the burglars have given him in the back room of the bar. It also accentuates not only the parallel moments of his appearance at the lumberyard and her arrival at the new flat but the moments that prompt those actions: after failing to find her husband, the wife returns to the old flat to weep beside her baby; after refusing to pocket the gun, the husband goes walking and pauses, somewhat guiltily, to greet two little girls playing beside a sidewalk fence (the image chosen for illustration in the Biograph Bulletin). The last part of the film then uses crosscutting to contrast the husband’s prosperity and the wife’s continuing misery as well as to set up the encounter between the husband and boy at the pawnshop. And a cut-in closeup of the ring in his hand accentuates the dramatic climax of the husband’s recognition. All that remains is the final tableau, echoing the second tableau at the beginning (with a difference), where at first the husband admonishes his wife (apparently for trying to pawn the ring) but then, noting her silence and realizing her illness, kneels (center frame) to beg her forgiveness. The trade press reviews of The Crooked Road differ, as might be expected, but in surprising ways. All of them, to be sure, applauded the acting, giving particular praise to the two leads, Dell Henderson and Stephanie Longfellow (the latter of whom appeared in few Griffith films). Interestingly, The New York Dramatic Mirror (May 31, 1911, p. 30) eschewed its usual remarks (at the time) about Biograph’s technical perfection and instead stressed the theme of the husband’s moral regeneration, apparently taking to heart the film’s title and the Bulletin’s insistence on the moral intent of its story. As if anticipating a later article written by Louis Reeves Harrison on “settings” (The Moving Picture World, June 17, 1911), Motography (June 1911, pp. 145-146) took note of how the director created a sense of convincing “atmosphere” through the selection and placement of objects or figures, and the “trick”, this reviewer suggested, “might be used more extensively, particularly by other makers”. A good example was the “sleeping ‘bum’ on the doorstep of the tenement” whom the wife passes in her vain search for the husband: such a figure “bring[s] to a focus all the squalor and degradation of the surroundings”. The reviewer in Billboard (June 3, 1911, p. 13), by contrast, called the film “by far one of the poorest the Biograph Company has ever offered”. The story was impossible, full of inconsistencies, and even uninteresting; more62

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

over, it was “a sad story without a moral”. This judgment may seem puzzling, given the ease with which other reviews accepted the Bulletin’s explicit moralizing, but then this reviewer seemed unable to fathom why “the father first scolds the mother” in the final tableau. More plausible was C.H. Claudy’s objection, in a column published in The Moving Picture World (June 3, 1911, p. 1259), to the conclusion of the last scene, where the “insane desire for ‘happy endings’” had the couple both “grin[ning] like Cheshire cats”. Viewed almost ninety years after its initial release, several other things do seem relatively striking about this film. One derives from the remarks in Motography the conciseness with which Griffith represents a milieu, whether in studio interiors (the tenement flats and hallways, the bar and back room, the pawnshop) or in locations (the lumberyard, the tenement entrance). This is not only evident in background figures like the sleeping bum or the lumberyard workmen, but also in everyday objects like the wash bucket and laundry in the first flat and the washtub in the second – and the actors’ “natural” behavior in relation to those. At the same time, this conciseness sometimes depends on and perpetuates stereotypes like the “Jewish” features of the pawnbroker. Another thing is that, as in many of Griffith’s films before 1912, this is a man’s story, a story of the husband’s moral regeneration. Yet the wife’s story, however subordinated and sentimentally resolved, does allude to the grim social conditions that would have severely limited the options of an abandoned working-class woman with a child in 1911. Along with her refusal to take public charity, the wife’s final silence, resistance, and quiet entreaty can be read now (and perhaps could be read then) as an implicit admonishment of the film’s story and director for slighting the plight of the “woman’s part”. Richard Abel

63

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

342 BIOGRAPH

A SMILE OF A CHILD Filming date: 17/18 April 1911 Location: Wentworth Hotel, Santa Monica, California/Los Angeles Studio Release date: 5 June 1911 Release length: 997 feet Copyright date: 7 June 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Harriet Quimby Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (Peasant woman); Baden Powell (Child); ? (Prince) NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from a photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Bitzer identifies Baden Powell as the child in this film. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative The innocent smile of a child has more influence than any other power in the world. It can change the cloudy into sunshine as will be seen in this Biograph subject. An ill-tempered Prince is met by a little child who is wandering through his grounds, and his entire nature is changed into one of excessive good nature. Later, while out on a lark, he meets for the first time a very pretty peasant woman, to whom he, by virtue of his rank, makes sinister advances. It happens that she is the mother of the same child and it enters in time to arouse the Prince to his better self with its sunny smile and saucy wink, which wink [sic] is really infectious of good nature. Biograph Bulletin, June 5, 1911

At the time of this writing, no viewing print of A Smile of a Child is available; thus, all we know about the film is drawn from contemporary reviews. The Biograph Bulletin simplifies this film’s story into a “three-hander” in which a baby peasant girl twice charms and disarms a feudal prince, dissuading him from either ignoring or brutalizing his subjects. What it leaves for an exhibitor and spectator to discover is the unexpected suspense of whether or not a fourth character, the husband, will kill or injure the prince in trying to protect his wife – and what consequences he might suffer. Together with trade press descriptions, the Bulletin strongly suggests that the film was divided into two more or less equal halves, with the first dramatic situation repeated but with heightened tension in the second, and the happy resolution to both provoked by the baby girl’s smile. Several descriptions also indicate that the film ended with a close shot of the baby girl not only smiling but also winking at the camera. Trade press reviews again differed in their perspective on and assessment of the film. The anonymous reviewer in Billboard (June 17, 1911, p. 15) praised “the acting of the child and the peasant mother”, which helped make the film’s “very good story”, although “a little bit over-costumed”, “highly pleasing throughout”. The reviewer in The New York Dramatic Mirror (June 14, 1911, p. 30) described it as “another example of that fine preci64

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

sion in joining scenes that has become a new point of excellence in Biograph productions”, but also found the “story of special strength and appealing interest”, enhanced by the little girl’s performance. In sharp contrast, the reviewer in Motography (June 1911, pp. 148-149) criticized the company for choosing such an unpleasant situation and dubious theme, one that “for a long time ... has been tabooed by common consent”. However morally indignant he was at the film’s representation of threatened rape, this reviewer still thought of it only as “a principal stock in trade of the plot-maker [in] the old days”; moreover, he was obviously pleased by the skill with which Biograph made the subject plausible and dramatic, and he himself could not deny the charm of the baby actress’s smile – although he found the ending wink “unnatural” and a sign of “grown-up tampering”. A Smile of a Child was one of the few Biograph films, besides Enoch Arden, that was reviewed in the British trade press during this period: the reviewer in Bioscope (July 6, 1911, p. 17), for instance, not only was enchanted with the child actor playing the central role, but lauded the American actor who played the prince “with all that dash and magnetic charm which has made the name of the creator of the ‘Pimpernel’ a household word amongst us”. In the trade press advertisements announcing Griffith’s independence from Biograph, in early December 1913, A Smile of a Child was the only title other than Enoch Arden listed as one of his credited films from a two-month period of production between the middle of March and the middle of May 1911. Richard Abel

65

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

343 BIOGRAPH

THE PRIMAL CALL Filming date: 19/21 April 1911 Location: Redondo, California/Los Angeles Studio Release date: 22 June 1911 Release length: 997 feet Copyright date: 24 June 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Emmett Campbell Hall Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Fisherman); Claire McDowell (Woman); Grace Henderson (Her mother); Dell Henderson (Creditor); Joseph Graybill (Millionaire); John T. Dillon (His friend); Vivian Prescott (His jilted lover); Alfred Paget, Francis J. Grandon, Marguerite Marsh? (At party); Frank Opperman, Florence LaBadie (Servants); Kate Toncray (Woman’s maid); Alfred Paget (On beach); W. Chrystie Miller (Minister); W.C. Robinson, Alfred Paget, John T. Dillon, Francis J. Grandon (At club); George O. Nicholls, Frank Opperman, W.C. Robinson, Robert Harron (On ship) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative SHOWING THE COMPELLING POWER OF LOVE A society mother, whose creditors are becoming insistent, and wishing to keep up her ostentation, sees relief in her daughter marrying a low charactered, pusillanimous millionaire. Hence, she persuades her daughter to accept his proposal arguing that they must have money. The girl goes to the seashore to rest before the wedding, and there meets the mate of a tramp schooner anchored in the bay. This man appeals to her as being so different from others – a primal type of man. She indulges in that dangerous pastime of flirting with this sincere fellow and when her fiancee [sic] visits her, the seaman realizes he has been made the dupe, so he seizes the girl and is carrying her off by force. However, he suddenly reasons that she isn’t worth it and recoils from her, but she now realizes that she truly loves him and begs him to take her away, so grabbing her up in one arm, and a minister who is passing by, in the other, he hustles aboard his boat where the marriage is performed. Biograph Bulletin, June 22, 1911

A society mother desperate for money to pay off creditors engages her daughter to a millionaire of dubious morals even though the daughter doesn’t love him and will be just one more conquest on his path to achieving social status. Vacationing at the seashore with her mother and friends, the young woman meets a rough, robust sailor and flirts with him enough to kindle his grudging interest in her. The millionaire shows up with a friend and takes the young woman walking along the beach, where the sailor confronts them and easily disarms, then knocks down the man when he pulls a gun. The sailor considers carrying off the young woman but quickly abandons the idea until she suddenly declares her love for him, and the new couple rows off, with a parson in tow, and is married on the sailor’s tramp schooner anchored in the bay. 66

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

As the tone of the Bulletin’s description suggests, The Primal Call begins quite seriously and then becomes increasingly light-hearted and somewhat satirical once the sailor is introduced. The opening shots establishing the mother’s need for money and her planned solution of marrying off her daughter are conventional, to say the least. The scene of an elaborate garden party at which she convinces her daughter to accept the millionaire’s proposal, however, is handled quite differently. A high-angle long shot describes the main space of the party, with couples drinking, conversing, and dancing in the background as the principal characters occupy the foreground. The mother takes her daughter off to the right, and a match-cut American shot frames them entering to stand before a stone bench where the daughter reluctantly agrees with her mother’s argument. The high-angle long shot of the party returns, and the millionaire and a friend exit left, followed by a woman who has been watching them in the background. Another match-cut American shot frames a very different encounter, after the friend moves off, as the woman (a jilted lover, according to an intertitle) confronts the millionaire and threatens to shoot herself until he disarms her – and smiles haughtily once she leaves dejected. Mother and daughter then return to the party and the millionaire joins them; he and the daughter leave to sit on the bench; the mother watches anxiously; the daughter accepts the man’s proposal but refuses his embrace; and they return to the party, to the mother’s obvious pleasure. This whole scene, therefore, is played out rather schematically in three contiguous spaces, one of which serves as an anchoring public occasion for two very different private encounters, the one repeated as the millionaire takes the place of the mother in proposing to the daughter. The scenes at the seashore involve different patterns of framing and editing. Once the characters are established at a beach house and on the beach, a sketchy form of crosscutting brings the millionaire from a drinking party with friends to the beach house. Most of the attention, however, is given to a series of encounters between the daughter and the sailor, first at some stairs near the house leading down to the beach, then on the beach itself as the sailor works at a cart, and finally, in a rocky outcropping where the two share some lunch. Rather obvious signs create a commercial subtext to their encounter on the beach: the sailor is loading the cart with sacks of Hills Brothers Coffee, and the Santa Monica pier (just then one of several resorts being boosted as tourist sites) is often prominent in the background. More germane to the encounters are several bits of comedy: the young woman first flirts with the sailor by asking him to clean one of her shoes; she offers him a finger sandwich, but he pulls out a big one of his own and then orders her to gather some firewood; she surprises herself by kissing him lightly and runs off in fright; the parson is first seen wandering around in the background of the beach and then sneaks in, after the couple has left, to gobble several abandoned sandwiches. Perhaps what is most unusual for Griffith is the sustained use of eyeline matches between the sailor and the young woman. The first suggests their mutual surprise at the stairs; the second (actually a point-of-view shot) reveals his interest in her after she leaves him by the cart, and he makes the move to join her; the third serves as the climactic resolution, after the sailor has bested the millionaire, seized the young woman, then dropped her and gone to a rowboat at the water’s edge. Across four eyelinematched American shots, they call to one another, with the young woman finally mouthing “I love you” and running into his arms. Still relatively rare in American films by July 1911, this technique may have worked to override the unexpectedly quick shifts (made explicit in intertitles) in the two characters’ attitudes toward one another. The final high-angle long shot of the impromptu wedding ceremony aboard the ship constitutes a sharp contrast to the earlier garden party scene of forced betrothal. 67

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Trade press reviews of The Primal Call are surprisingly ambivalent but not about the subject. The reviewer in Billboard (July 6, 1911, p. 11), for instance, simply describes it as “not [so] different from a great many photoplays” but “finely produced” and “because of its nature will, no doubt, meet with favor”. The reviewer in The New York Dramatic Mirror (June 28, 1911, p. 32) found the opening scenes rather bland: the acting “unexpressive”, with “much going and coming that means nothing”. Once the sailor appears, however, “we see human nature and red blood presented with a master hand”, and “every scene and movement is then harmonious in conveying the true meaning of the story”. All this is quite revealing about eugenic ideas widely accepted at the time: a red-blooded masculinity was needed to restore vigor to an American society – that is, middle-class and upper-class whites – which was becoming dangerously “over-civilized”. The film’s premise is similar to that of the third film in Feuillade’s Scènes de la vie telle qu’elle est series, which was made about the same time but released in the USA as A Society Mother one month later than The Primal Call. Whereas the French film offers no escape for the young woman, and, in fact, has the mother order her daughter to return to her new husband after he has been revealed as “a beast”, Griffith’s film introduces a “primitive” American male who can not only secure a happy ending but has the potential to reinvigorate an entire class or “race” threatened by decadence. Moreover, he can accomplish that with humor. Two weeks prior to the film’s release, in The Moving Picture World (June 10, 1911, p. 1296), Emmett Campbell Hall published an article, entitled “With Accompanying Noises”, advocating the restrained use of sound effects, or none at all, with moving pictures. Richard Abel

68

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

344 BIOGRAPH

THE JEALOUS HUSBAND Filming date: 22/24 April 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/Santa Monica, California Release date: 10 July 1911 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 12 July 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith?/Mack Sennett? Author: Isobel M. Reynolds Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: John T. Dillon (Hubby); Vivian Prescott (Wifey); Dell Henderson (Doctor) NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from a photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A TRUANT HUBBY GETS HIS JUST DESERTS An over-domesticated husband leaves for the office, and while there several friends try to persuade him to go on a fishing trip, but he answers “No, boys, my wife won’t let me.” They say, “We’ll fix that.” So taking him to a doctor friend they form a plan. The doctor tells him to go home and pretend he is seized with a nervous affliction, and his wife is sure to telephone for him. The scheme works great and the doctor upon arriving insists that the husband must go away at once, attended only by a nurse he will select. Peace and quiet are what he needs. The nurse is one of the fishing party, and away they go on a wild ride for the beach. The husband is now at the shore having the time of his life, while at home his mother has been taken very ill. Wifey goes for the doctor, but he happens to be away in the country, so she hastens there in an auto to get him. On the return trip they pass the spot where hubby is enjoying “peace and quiet.” They don’t see hubby, but hubby sees them, and maybe he doesn’t get excited. Well, the chase after that auto baffles description; and the arrival home – no more “peace and quiet” for hubby for some time. Biograph Bulletin, July 10, 1911

No viewing print of The Jealous Husband is currently available. All we know about the film is drawn from contemporary sources. The description of this farcical comedy in the Biograph Bulletin is unusual in using bits of dialogue and comic phrases, which may suggest their presence in the film’s original intertitles – and a further source of its comedy. Biograph comedies were quite popular with audiences at the time, and The Jealous Husband probably was no exception. The reviewer in The New York Dramatic Mirror (July 19, 1911, p. 22) justified its appeal by describing it as “a well drawn farce that apparently springs into existence out of the eccentricities of the characters involved”. The reviewer in Billboard (July 22, 1911, p. 50), by contrast, found it “the most improbable, impossible story ever put on by the Biograph Company”, but highly amusing, splendidly performed, and boasting “one of the most realistic and exciting chases ever photographed”. Given the latter review, there remains the possibility that Mack Sennett was the director. Richard Abel 69

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

345 BIOGRAPH

THE INDIAN BROTHERS Filming date: 28/29 April 1911 Location: Lookout Mountain, California Release date: 17 July 1911 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 20 July 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Frank Opperman (Chief); Wilfred Lucas (His brother); Guy Hedlund (The renegade); Blanche Sweet, Kate Toncray, Francis J. Grandon (Indians); Alfred Paget, W.C. Robinson (In second tribe); Charles H. West, Alfred Paget, John T. Dillon (At funeral) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) THE STORY OF AN INDIAN’S HONOR A renegade Indian seeks admission into the tribe, and the chief in scorn offers him a squaw’s dress, which means at the same time an insult and a denial of his request. The renegade for revenge slays the chief, who, through illness, is unable to defend himself. The renegade escapes and some of the tribe signal distress to the brother of the slain chief, who is out on a hunting trip. The brother returning to the camp, swears over the body of the chief to bring the perpetrator of this crime back and to justice. On his way the renegade steals a horse, and for this is pursued by another tribe of redmen, who catch him just as the brother comes up. The chief’s brother claims the culprit, and offers to fight for him. He wins and the renegade misconstruing his act, is profuse in his thanks for his rescue, but it is not long before he realizes why he has been rescued, for when taken back to the funeral pile of the chief, he pays the penalty. Biograph Bulletin, July 17, 1911

A renegade Indian kills a chief who has insulted him. The chief’s brother swears vengeance and pursues the renegade, overtaking him just in time to rescue him from another tribe, which is angry with him for stealing a horse. The renegade is grateful for his rescue – until he realizes why the chief’s brother has rescued him.

Although Griffith’s yearly trips to California opened up new possibilities in the production of Westerns, he did not exploit those possibilities in every film. The Indian Brothers was shot on Lookout Mountain, near Laurel Canyon in Hollywood, but there’s little to distinguish it from an East Coast Western like The Mended Lute, produced nearly two years earlier in Cuddebackville, New York. Both films are staged on a relatively intimate scale; both feature all-“Indian” casts and a moderate quota of action; and neither presents great, dramatic vistas of scenery. If anything, The Mended Lute makes more of its scenery than does the later 70

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

film, and, furthermore, makes some claim to authenticity by including at least glimpses of a couple of authentic Native Americans. In short, The Indian Brothers is solid and workmanlike but breaks no new ground. In large measure it stands or falls on its casting; one’s reaction to it will depend largely on one’s ability to accept members of Griffith’s stock company as “Indians”. Generally speaking, they respond to this acting challenge with a stoic lack of emotion – the major exception being Wilfred Lucas, whose taciturn countenance in the early scenes contrasts wildly with his rabid grimacing when he sets out on his mission of vengeance. Guy Hedlund as the renegade underlines his “outsider” status with an awkward, stiff-legged walk, almost a limp, and an appearance that suggests something vaguely unhealthy. His acting is perhaps the best in the film; after his rejection by the chief, he betrays a brief flicker of emotion, which suggests that he really has been deeply hurt by the insult. Roughly half the footage of The Indian Brothers is devoted to a chase, one which is cleverly constructed to build in pace and excitement. It begins slowly, with Hedlund trying to escape on foot and Lucas tracking him. Griffith leisurely intercuts between the two; then, as Lucas closes the gap, both actors are shown in the same shot to indicate their proximity. When Hedlund steals the horse, the action shifts gears to become an all-out chase. (Lucas, needing a horse of his own for the pursuit, acquires one instantly without any formalities that might slow down the momentum of the chase.) And Griffith’s editing skill has other uses, too: he uses it to mask the difficulty his actors are having with some of their business, as when Lucas has initial problems gaining control of the horse, or when the camera discreetly avoids lingering on the actors struggling with a heavy blanket, trying to send smoke signals. As befits an action film, The Indian Brothers has only four intertitles – as we see it today. However, as with other Biographs of this period, the original titles were not preserved, and those we see today are reconstructions from the 1970s. It would be interesting to know whether the original release contained additional titles – for example, one to explain that Frank Opperman as the chief is insulting Hedlund by offering him a woman’s garment. This is a pivotal event in the story and seems unclear in the film as it stands today, without explanation. J.B. Kaufman

71

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

346 BIOGRAPH

HER SACRIFICE Filming date: 4/5 May 1911 Location: Wentworth Hotel, Santa Monica, California Release date: 26 June 1911; reissued by Biograph, 11 December 1916 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 28 June 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Vivian Prescott (Barmaid); Grace Henderson (Widow); Charles H. West (Her son); Florence LaBadie (His sweetheart) NOTE: Cast taken from The Moving Picture World (December 9, 1916, p. 1543), except Grace Henderson, who is identified from the Biograph Bulletin photograph. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative THE EXTREME TO WHICH LOVE DIRECTED Never condemn, even though appearances may be convincing. The young son of a wealthy Mexican house returns home from school. He is the only son of a widowed mother, whose heart beats only for him. He becomes fascinated by a pretty but low barmaid, who really returns his love, he being the first person she has truly loved. The mother finding the efforts to break his attachment for the girl futile, appeals to her, showing that by such an alliance the boy would lose his name, his high honor, trying to prove that if she really loved him she would give him up. The girl realizes the situation, and swears to do as the mother wishes, and so pretends a deception with an old-time suitor. It has its effect, for the young man goes away disgusted but almost heartbroken. No sooner has he gone than she casts aside this lover with repulsion. This man sees that her heart is the young man’s alone and goes after him with sinister mien. She, fearing for this lover’s mad jealousy, follows, and as he fires throws herself between the two, receiving the fatal shot. Her only recompense was her dying in his arms, he now knowing the extent of her love for him. Biograph Bulletin, June 26, 1911

On the basis of secondary evidence, this film looks like a variation on familiar material. The device of a parent intervening in a son’s romance, privately asking an “unworthy” woman to give up the young man for the sake of his social status, invites immediate associations with Camille. Griffith himself had used the device at least once before, in The Fascinating Mrs. Francis (1909), in which the appealing but (for some reason) disdained Marion Leonard is made to agonize over the loss of the insipid Herbert Yost. In a day when class distinctions were taken very seriously, such situations were more plausible than they seem today. The difference in Her Sacrifice is that the stakes are higher. Vivian Prescott doesn’t get off with mere heartbreak and humiliation, but pays with her life for her presumption. One suspects that the deadly passions that drive Her Sacrifice have something to do with the 72

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

story’s Mexican setting. Scott Simmon has already suggested (see The Vaquero’s Vow, DWG Project, #50) that Mexican characters had proliferated in Griffith’s early films partly to justify the florid acting style, established practice in 1908, as a representation of the hot-blooded temperament associated with Mexican stereotypes. By 1911, Griffith had introduced a far more subtle, restrained style of acting in his films (though the flamboyant old school was by no means completely banished), so there was no need to “justify” acting styles. But startling, dramatic story material was always welcome, and the Mexican characters in Her Sacrifice may have been seen as an excuse to retool an old story with a more dramatic ending, the heroine not only pining away but actually dying. The film was produced in two days, late in the Biograph troupe’s 1911 California trip, and no scenario credit was recorded in the Biograph Scenario Register; the story was probably improvised on the spot to capitalize on the picturesque Santa Monica scenery. Griffith’s casting choices can tell us something about the film, too. The leading man was Charles West, who would have made a sympathetic if possibly weak hero. Vivacious Vivian Prescott, as the tragic barmaid, apparently carried the main dramatic weight of the story. She was singled out by the anonymous reviewer for The New York Dramatic Mirror (July 5, 1911, p. 20), who commented that her acting was “especially good”. Luckily, her performance has not been lost. As with some other 1911 Biographs, although viewing prints of Her Sacrifice do not exist at the time of this writing, the film has survived and preliminary preservation work has been done. J.B. Kaufman

73

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

347 BIOGRAPH

THE THIEF AND THE GIRL Filming date: 1/6 May 1911 Location: Los Angeles Studio/Pasadena, California Release date: 6 July 1911 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 8 July 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Thief); Florence LaBadie (The girl); Baden Powell (Child) NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from a photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Bitzer identifies Baden Powell as the child in this film. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative HOW SHE UNWITTINGLY CONVERTED HIM A gentleman thief has for a sweetheart and accomplice a maid, whose plan it is to get employment in a house and tip him off as to the lay of the land. While waiting for her in an adjoining park, he meets a pretty little girl and is deeply impressed by her innocence and candor. Her purity and honesty almost make him loathe himself. The night of the job arrives and the thief and his assistant wait outside for the maid’s signal, which comes immediately as she has seized a favorable opportunity when all the folks are out. An entrance is effected, but a slight noise arouses the daughter, who is still at home. She tells the butler, who has just returned, her fears, and he manages to surprise the assistant, the real burglar being behind a screen. You may imagine the thief’s amazement when he discovers that the daughter is the girl he met in the park. Through a clever move he manages to drive his assistant off and leave the house himself in a better frame of mind. Upon reaching the park where his sweetheart, the maid, is waiting, he tells her he is through with that life for good and intends to take the better road, which she is delighted to hear. Biograph Bulletin, July 6, 1911

Even when one of the Griffith Biographs is unavailable for viewing, one can sometimes gain a sense of it from the written word: the contemporary published synopses and reviews. In the case of The Thief and the Girl, we have a familiar Biograph situation – a thief reformed by love of a girl whose house he has entered – but while some entries like The Purgation (1910) had used this situation as a springboard for intense dramatics, The Thief and the Girl was apparently light-hearted. One reviewer compared Wilfred Lucas’s thief character with Raffles, the charming gentleman burglar introduced to popular fiction a decade earlier. Some of the reviewers’ comments are tantalizing: The Moving Picture World (July 15, 1911, p. 39) commented that “[t]he backgrounds are unusually beautiful”, while The New York Dramatic Mirror (July 12, 1911, p. 22) offered this opinion: “The truth is that the picture looks more plausible on the screen than it does in print – a tribute to Biograph acting.” 74

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Without the evidence in hand, one might quibble with some of Griffith’s casting choices. In this case the beefy, imposing Wilfred Lucas might seem an odd choice for the part of a charming “gentleman thief”. On the other hand, as Russell Merritt has pointed out to me, by 1911 Lucas had made a specialty of playing thieves with a conscience who go straight. Earlier in the year he had been unconvincing as the sickly young author in the opening scenes of Was He a Coward?, but had been perfectly acceptable as the redeemed hero in the closing scenes. Perhaps in this film, as in that one, Griffith simply sacrificed conviction at the beginning for a satisfying effect at the end. J.B. Kaufman

75

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

348 BIOGRAPH

THE BLIND PRINCESS AND THE POET Filming date: 8/9 May 1911 Location: Hollywood, California Release date: 17 August 1911; reissued by Biograph, 24 April 1916 Release length: 1000 feet Copyright date: 19 August 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Harriet Quimby [“The Happy Princess”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (Princess); Charles H. West (Poet); Grace Henderson, Guy Hedlund, Jeannie MacPherson, Charles Gorman NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from a photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate positive A BIOGRAPH FANTASY IN THE LAND OF FLOWERS The blind princess upon consulting the soothsayer is told that upon the first kiss of unselfish love she receives she will see. All the great lords assemble to pay her court and bestow kisses in hopes of restoring her sight. There are Lords Gold, Selfish, Folly, Presumption and their ilk, but their attentions are in vain. A poor Poet has humbly loved the Princess, but considers himself unworthy until the Child Equality argues differently. Lord Gold in rage kills the Child Equality and the Poet loses hope. However, when the Princess sleeps the poor Poet steals a kiss. The Princess sees, and [sic] through the Poet’s kiss. Lord Selfish would kill the Poet but he is thwarted by Justice, as the Poet goes singing to his apparent death. Justice takes him to the Princess’ side. Biograph Bulletin, August 17, 1911

A blind princess is informed that her sight can be restored by the first kiss of unselfish love she receives. Courted by Lords Gold, Selfish, Folly and Presumption, she remains blind until a humble poet steals a kiss. Her sight restored and the poet rescued from his jealous rivals, princess and poet are united.

Another excursion into allegorical territory – not the generic “old days” of such earlier films as The Cloister’s Touch (1910), but an even more vaguely defined allegorical Never-Never Land. (The guards’ uniforms do bear the letters “ER” [Elizabeth Regina], implying a setting in Elizabethan England, but no one could mistake this film for a realistic historical romance. The most likely explanation is that those were the only costumes available to Griffith.) Griffith had ventured into such allegorical material before, as in The Way of the World or The Two Paths (both 1910), but the clear standard of comparison for The Blind Princess and the Poet was Pippa Passes (1909). At least one reviewer compared the two pictures, and 76

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Griffith seemed to invite the comparison by opening and closing The Blind Princess and the Poet with the same long, slow fades he had used in the earlier film. But this is no Pippa Passes. The 1909 film could claim some measure of thematic substance, in keeping with its literary pedigree: a play and a poem by Robert Browning. The Blind Princess and the Poet is, rather, a homemade fairy tale. Like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, the Blind Princess can be “awakened” (that is, her sight restored) only by a kiss of unselfish love. To add weight to this slight premise, Griffith telegraphs his serious intentions to the audience by directing his cast at a ponderous, deliberate pace. Even the startling scene of little Gladys Egan being beaten to death is conveyed in a kind of symbolic shorthand, not the relative realism Griffith might have used elsewhere. However, as we look at these films through the eyes of our own time, it’s always important to remember that Griffith was crafting them for the sensibilities of his time. And on those terms he succeeded brilliantly. The Blind Princess and the Poet was welcomed with open arms in 1911 by an industry yearning for respectability. Reviewers, already enthusiastic about the general run of Biographs, were delirious over The Blind Princess and the Poet. The Moving Picture World (August 12, 1911, p. 358) devoted nearly a full page to it and declared: “To place this picture on the screen along with the ordinary products seems wrong; something more is due to it.” And the Biograph Scenario Register reveals that Harriet Quimby, the author of the story, was paid $35 for it at a time when the standard Biograph scenario fee was $25. The present notes are based on an unassembled workprint of the film at the Museum of Modern Art, containing Griffith’s raw takes in jumbled order. Seeing the film in this form gives us a precious glimpse into Griffith’s working method. Working on a tight schedule and with a severe budget, Griffith seems to avoid multiple takes, but several takes with false starts suggest that he anticipated a problem, immediately stopped the camera, and started over. In at least one instance he seems to change his mind about direction of a scene in the middle of a take, stops the camera, starts it again, and simply keeps on going with a slight shift in mood. And the economies of film usage apparently do not preclude long drawn-out shots of Blanche Sweet’s entourage of attendants, following her past the camera at such length that one is reminded of the rigorous all-inclusiveness of pre-1908 chase films. It’s not hard to imagine Griffith playing it safe by filming those long processions to guarantee adequate coverage, but surely not all that footage was used in the finished film. (In one shot, Charles West, as the poet, gazes in adoration at Blanche – then is obliged to maintain his adoring gaze while that interminable parade files past the camera!) Even in the film’s unedited form, one can assess the actors’ performances. Unfortunately, the format of the print viewed allows for little in the way of real performances. West plays his humility and sensitivity so insistently that they become a little irritating. Blanche Sweet, for her part, does inject some moments of humanity into her role. In the simple shorthand of this story she conveys blindness simply by keeping her eyes shut, but the scene in which she regains her sight is touching and effective. And she has a nice moment at the end, when West has been vindicated and a throne hastily improvised for him. As he stands protesting his unworthiness to sit next to her, Sweet raises a hand to silence his objections, then points meaningfully at the chair. In all likelihood, the real raison d’être of this film can be found in its setting: the lush gardens and estate of Paul de Longpre, where Love Among the Roses had been filmed the previous year. Internationally recognized as a floral painter, de Longpre had settled in Hollywood in 1901, and his studio and lavish gardens had soon become one of the area’s first tourist attractions. It’s hardly surprising that the Griffith company, searching for picturesque locations, should have sought out this famous showplace. The gardens are strikingly beauti77

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

ful and make for an ideal fantasy setting, and in this film the exterior of de Longpre’s own home stands in nicely enough for the Princess’ palace. On Blanche Sweet herself, the experience of filming in these lush surroundings made a lasting impression. Many years later, living in New York, she acquired a de Longpre floral painting that reminded her of her 1911 experience, and which remained on display in her apartment until the end of her life. J.B. Kaufman

78

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

349 BIOGRAPH

FIGHTING BLOOD Filming date: 11/17 May 1911 Location: San Fernando, California/Lookout Mountain, California/Los Angeles Studio (not noted) Release date: 29 June 1911; reissued by Biograph, 25 June 1915 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 1 July 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: George O. Nicholls (Old soldier); Kate Bruce (His wife); Robert Harron (His son); Gladys Egan, ? (Children); Florence LaBadie (Son’s friend); Kate Toncray, Francis J. Grandon (Her parents); William J. Butler, W.C. Robinson (Settlers); Alfred Paget, Dell Henderson (Soldiers); Edward Dillon (Wagon driver); Alfred Paget (Among Indians) Archival Sources: George Eastman House, 35mm nitrate negative (Paul Killiam Collection); 28mm diacetate positive; 16mm acetate positive (William K. Everson Collection/New York University); Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate positive (AFI/National Screen and Sound Archive–ScreenSound Australia Collection, sound reissue with voice-over) THE SPIRIT OF PATRIOTISM INSTILLED IN YOUTH The value of instilling the spirit of patrotism [sic] in children is clearly shown in this Biograph subject, which for spectacular thrill has never been excelled, if ever equaled. An old soldier on the frontier, the father of a dozen children, a staunch patriot himself, brings these children up with rigid military training. He conducts his household as a garrison with strict discipline, drills, etc. On the evening of the day the picture opens, the oldest boy wishes to go out to make a call on his sweetheart, but the old soldier commands the boy to stay at home. This command the boy is loath to obey, but his father, himself brought up under rigid military rule, rails at this insubordination of the boy, and threatens that if the boy goes out he goes for good. The boy does go, however, and returning finds sure enough the door barred against him. Sad and homeless he wanders, but it is fortunate he does for the next morning he views from a distance a tribe of Indians starting out on the war-path. With this lead, he with valiant effort, secures the aid of a troop of patrolling soldiers who rescue the boy’s family and sweetheart just in time. The military training imbued by the old soldier stood in good, as it was the means of holding the Indians at bay until help arrived. Biograph Bulletin, June 29, 1911

On the frontier, a young man defies his strict father and goes to see his sweetheart. The father, a military disciplinarian, bars the son from returning home. Next day, the wandering young man sees a hostile Indian tribe approaching and is able to summon help to the settlement. The white settlers are thus prepared to defend themselves in the terrific battle that follows.

79

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

If it were necessary to demonstrate the tremendous variety in Griffith’s Biograph films, one would need look no further than his Western subjects. Westerns were, of course, a small part of Griffith’s output, and yet he managed to display a wide range of approaches, styles and moods in this genre alone. Some of his Westerns were simple, small-scale dramas of frontier life, others were social commentaries on behalf of marginalized peoples. In contrast, Fighting Blood is built primarily for entertainment value, with a plot hinging on strong family conflict, a healthy dose of comic relief, and an extended climax of slam-bang action. In this picture, then, Griffith is helping to define the popular Western film. In Fighting Blood it’s easy to see one model for the exciting, action-oriented Westerns that will proliferate for decades to come. Unfortunately, we see it at a disadvantage today. The one available viewing print, at the time of this writing, is a reissue version peppered with gratuitous art titles and missing much of the climactic battle scene. That climax was clearly the centerpiece of the film, and its loss is a handicap that deprives us of the excitement the film created in 1911, along with formal achievements – such as a creatively staged shot of the approaching posse, cleverly suggesting more riders than are actually shown, which the late William K. Everson described eloquently on more than one occasion (Everson 1978, pp. 5253, and Everson 1973, p. 65). To judge by reviews, the battle made full use of Griffith’s patented intercutting between the besieged family in the cabin and the posse riding to their rescue. Even with this major omission we can be thankful for what’s left, tantalizing though it is. Griffith was a wise enough showman to undergird his action content with strong characters and performances; here George Nicholls, as the crusty old soldier who runs his home as a military outpost, manages to make his character endearing even after locking his son out of the house. And it’s good to see Bobby Harron, after years of playing messenger boys and other thankless walk-ons, tackling a role of real substance as the rebellious son. He displays a range of emotions, rides and shoots with youthful enthusiasm, and in one scene, appears to mouth some censorable epithets. (For the record, the art titles, apparently tacked on long after the fact, give Nicholls’ character name as “Ezra Tuttle” and Harron’s as “Richard”, names which appear nowhere in the 1911 publicity or reviews.) One aspect of this film, and of countless others that followed, would prove disturbing to generations of latter-day viewers. The Indians in Fighting Blood are not personalized, individual characters but simply a horde of faceless killers. This fits the popular stereotype of the Hollywood Western, a stereotype which some modern commentators may be all too willing to lay at Griffith’s doorstep. In fact, however, this kind of portrayal is atypical of Griffith. Far more characteristic are films depicting the American Indian as the moral equal, or more likely the moral superior, of the white settlers. Some latter-day scholars, eager to blame Griffith for all racism in early film, have debated this point by insisting that his seeming charity was merely patronizing. The fact remains, however, that Griffith, unlike some of his contemporaries, frequently did go out of his way to portray Native Americans sympathetically when such an effort was not strictly necessary. His fourth directorial endeavor, The Redman and the Child (1908), had featured a Native American hero who saved a white child from white villains. By 1911 he had followed this with The Redman’s View, an impassioned plea on behalf of tribes displaced by boorish whites; “all-Indian” stories like the recent The Indian Brothers in which both heroes and villains were Indians; and films like A Mohawk’s Way, in which Indians attacked whites, but only after being thoughtlessly or unscrupulously goaded. The future held more sophisticated efforts like A Temporary Truce (1912), with its complex interplay of good and bad whites, Mexicans and Indians, which would muddy the moral 80

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

waters still further. Perhaps, having established his main characters and situation in Fighting Blood and wanting to save footage in an already tightly packed single reel, Griffith simply decided to get on with the action as quickly as possible (if, in fact, the missing footage doesn’t contain some action to explain or justify the Indian attack after all). That Fighting Blood pointed the way of the future must have been immediately apparent from its success in 1911. Reviewers greeted it with superlatives; The Moving Picture World (July 8, 1911, p. 1573) devoted a full page to it and suggested that it offered a way to enjoy a safe Fourth of July, without the danger of fireworks but with no loss of excitement. In 1915, following the success of The Birth of a Nation, Biograph reissued the film (again in time for Independence Day) to another warm reception – and, judging by the tampering evident in the viewed print, it must have enjoyed further reincarnations as well. J.B. Kaufman

81

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

350 BIOGRAPH

THE LAST DROP OF WATER Filming date: 14/20 May 1911 Location: San Fernando, California/Lookout Mountain, California Release date: 27 July 1911; reissued by Biograph, 13 August 1915 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 29 July 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (Mary); Joseph Graybill (John); Charles H. West (Jim); Alfred Paget (Indian); Francis J. Grandon (John’s Friend); Frank Opperman, Kate Bruce, Guy Hedlund, W.C. Robinson, Kate Toncray, Francis J. Grandon, Gladys Egan, Jeannie MacPherson, Alfred Paget, Robert Harron (In wagon train); John T. Dillon (Cavalry soldier) NOTE: Source supplied by intertitle – “SUGGESTED BY THE LINES TO SIR PHILIP SYDNEY WHO, UPON THE FIELD OF BLOOD, DYING, GAVE THE DROP OF WATER FOR THE SAKE OF BROTHERHOOD”

– may be from the reissue print.

Archival Sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate positive (AFI/Dorothy Tayler Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate positive (incomplete); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) A STORY OF THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT This subject was suggested by the lines to Sir Philip Sydney, who, upon the field of blood, dying, gave the drop of water for the sake of brotherhood. Jim and John, long time friends, are the suitors for the hand of Mary. Jim is a chap of exemplary qualities, while John is a weakling and given to drink. Fate has it so that Mary accepts John. After their marriage they start off across the plains for more promising lands, Jim going along as one of the party. On the way over the Great Desert, they are beset by hostile Indians. The fate of the party of tourists hangs in the balance for a long time as they are enclosed in a stockade formed by the wagons, repelling the Indians until the supply of water gives out and death from thirst seems inevitable. A call for volunteers to get water is made. Jim and John both go in its quest. Jim has given his last drop to a feeble old man as he leaves the stockade, while John, meeting Jim perishing with thirst on the desert, gives up to him the last drop between life and death. This draught renews the strength of Jim, who finally succeeds in finding water, while John drops in the sand, a victim of his sacrifice. Meanwhile the troops have been notified and the party is rescued from the besieging redskins. Biograph Bulletin, July 27, 1911

Mary accepts the marriage proposal of John, her bold suitor, though the quiet Jim also loves her. By the time all three join a wagon train heading West, John’s nature as an alcoholic lout has been revealed. The train is attacked by Indians, and during the attack the party’s water 82

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

supply runs low. Jim and John both set out to find more water. In a final redeeming act, John sacrifices his life to give his last bit of water to Jim, who rallies and completes his mission, saving the rest of the party.

By 1911 the Western had become not only a staple of the American film industry, but also one of its most popular commodities. Biograph had not pioneered the genre, but they could hardly afford to ignore it. Griffith, of course, had no objection to directing Westerns; he was well suited to them, and their popularity meant that he could spend more money on them without alarming the conservative Biograph management. Accordingly, in this film he introduces a new level of spectacle. Produced concurrently with Fighting Blood (although released nearly a month later), The Last Drop of Water combines the high action content of that film with an epic scale new to Biograph (as well as a more serious tone). Equally impressively, this new grandeur does not come at the expense of Griffith’s first principles of character development and dramatic content. In this film, not only is the subtle emotional interplay among the three leading characters expressively conveyed, remarkably enough it never gets lost in the midst of the large-scale, furiously paced scenes of the Indian attack and rescue. This juxtaposition of intimate human detail against the larger panorama of history or action will become a characteristic of Griffith’s later epic features. Today, of course, we see the film through hindsight. From today’s perspective The Last Drop of Water plays like a rough sketch for Griffith’s better-remembered epic Westerns of the following years, The Massacre (1912) and The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913). Some of the same elements that would distinguish those films can be seen in The Last Drop of Water in scaled-down form: we get introductions to the major characters, but no extended history; we get generous crowds of extras in the wagon train and attack scenes, but no high overhead shots to show the sweeping vistas of action. Of course, The Massacre and The Battle at Elderbush Gulch were both two-reel films, while The Last Drop of Water is packed into a single reel; considering that, it’s a very full reel. In light of the attention that has (rightly) been given to the technical innovations in Griffith’s early films, it’s worth noting that some of those ideas had been seamlessly absorbed into his technique by 1911. In the climactic scene of The Last Drop of Water Joseph Graybill, as the alcoholic ne’er-do-well, is dying of thirst in the desert and is about to drink the last of his water supply when the similarly stricken Charles West begs for it. Graybill laughs derisively, then looks back in the direction of the distant wagon train – and there’s a sudden cutaway to the other pioneers, patiently waiting though they too are suffering from thirst. Graybill’s attack of conscience and his redemptive sacrifice are, in effect, triggered by that eloquent cutaway. Griffith’s similar moment in After Many Years (1908) fully deserves the attention it has received, but this effective example should be mentioned too. (Contemporary reviewers, of course, missed such refinements altogether. The Moving Picture World reviewer, expounding at length [July 29, 1911, p. 193] on Graybill’s dilemma in this scene and the emotions he must register, neglected to mention the director’s contribution!) The acting in this film, notably Graybill’s, is worthy of comment. Graybill registers as a thoroughly obnoxious character, so unpleasant that Blanche Sweet’s initial attraction to him is hard to understand. Yet there’s something pitiably sympathetic about the character, too. He clearly loves his wife and regrets his mistreatment of her, but his clumsy attempts at reconciliation are so inept that he gives up in despair. Character is conveyed through telling detail: during the shootout with the Indians, Sweet approaches both Graybill and then West from behind. Both continue to concentrate on their shooting, but Graybill roughly pushes her aside, while West carefully steers her out of harm’s way. Sweet herself effectively under83

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

plays her role throughout, quietly registering unhappiness or grief without flailing her arms or indulging in blatant histrionics. Once again, as in Fighting Blood, the Indians in this film are portrayed as a band of merciless killers who simply appear out of nowhere and open fire. It has been observed, notably by both Russell Merritt and Scott Simmon, that this new hostility on the part of Griffith’s Indians coincides with his West Coast location trips. (The Redman’s View and other important good-Indians/bad-whites pictures had been produced in the East.) Here again, the film’s one-reel length may also be a factor. Both The Massacre and The Battle at Elderbush Gulch feature Indian attacks too, but both those two-reelers take time to show the whites as responsible for starting the conflict – through a tragic misunderstanding in one case, and an outright unprovoked attack on the Indians in the other. J.B. Kaufman

84

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

351 BIOGRAPH

BOBBY, THE COWARD Filming date: 1/5/9 June 1911 Location: Lower East Side, New York City?/Fort Lee, New Jersey?/New York Studio Release date: 13 July 1911 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 15 July 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Dell Henderson [“The Coward”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Robert Harron (Bobby); W. Chrystie Miller (Grandfather); Gladys Egan (Sister); Florence LaBadie (The girl next door); William J. Butler (Her father); Joseph Graybill, Guy Hedlund (Thugs); Verner Clarges, Grace Henderson (Rich couple); Francis J. Grandon, Alfred Paget, John T. Dillon (Policemen); Edward Dillon, Edna Foster, Kate Toncray, Jeannie MacPherson, William J. Butler, J. Jiquel Lanoe, W.C. Robinson (On street) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A STORY OF THE STREETS OF NEW YORK A little family, consisting of the old grandfather, Bobby and his sister, are in dire straits. Bobby has for some time been the little father of the family, but now being out of the work, he daily scans the newspaper in search of a clue of some employment. On this particular morning he starts out, but as has been the case many times before, is unsuccessful. Coming home he is insulted by a couple of street thugs and fails to resent the insult, which occurrence his sweetheart witnesses and brands him a despicable coward. This is rather a heavy blow to Bobby at such a time when the whole world seems set against him, but on another occasion, when with renewed determination he starts out again to look for work, he finds a lady’s purse containing a large amount of money. The temptation is great to keep the find, but Bobby’s honest nature repels this temptation and he seeks out and returns to the lady her loss, receiving a note of a large denomination as a reward. The thugs see this and their cupidity is aroused. They follow Bobby a roundabout way home, making up their minds to return in the evening and secure the money. This they do, but Bobby may have let the insult go by, still, when it came to the protection of his family he became lion-hearted, knocking the two thugs out and handing them over to the police, proving to his sweetheart that he was not such a coward after all. Biograph Bulletin, July 13, 1911

Bobby, an inhabitant of the slums of New York City, is the sole supporter of his elderly grandfather and younger sister, but he is out of work. Searching for a job, he encounters some slum toughs who insult him in front of Bobby’s girlfriend. Feeling Bobby is a coward because he does not fight the tough, his girlfriend scorns him. A middle-aged, well-to-do couple is touring the slums when the lady drops her purse, unaware of its loss. Bobby finds the purse stuffed with cash, and initially exults over his good fortune, but then decides to return it to its rightful owner. The well-to-do couple reward Bobby with a large bill. However, this is observed by the toughs who pursue Bobby, intent on robbing him. Determined 85

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

to protect what is his, Bobby fights them off when they invade his apartment that night. This is seen by his girlfriend and she kisses Bobby in reconciliation as his family brags to neighbors about Bobby’s heroism.

Few films display Griffith’s mastery of a classically concise and coherent narrative style as perfectly as Bobby, the Coward. In a single reel Griffith tells a story with a clearly structured narrative anchored in a sympathetic character with a psychological conflict, whose resolution will provide closure, as well as a moral – or at least ideological – lesson in manliness. The first six shots set up the key characters and the atmosphere of the slums. In them Griffith creates an opposition between the somewhat cramped (yet intimate) space of the interior of the tenement apartment in which the little family lives and the gradually more public and chaotic spaces of tenement stairwell and city streets. In the street Griffith stages the first conflict: the unanswered insult from the tough which brands Bobby as a coward and creates the rift with his girlfriend (supplying economical double plotting, as the conflict with the tough also triggers trouble in the romance plot). The street also provides the good fortune of the finding of the purse, while the consequent good deed of returning it firmly establishes Bobby’s moral credentials, and the eventual circumstances for the reversal of his previous cowardice. Bobby’s decision to fight the toughs in order to retain his money provides an early sketch of a plot line typical of classical American action films: the villain delivering a threat to the protagonist’s masculinity and sense of social order (private property and family threatened by the rule of brute strength), which the hero responds to finally by demonstrating masculinity and restoring social order through his own (limited, but very effective) participation in violence when sufficiently provoked. In Bobby, the Coward, Bobby’s temporary adoption of violence protects his family, maintains his property and guarantees his masculinity, thereby regaining his girlfriend’s affection. Careful dramatic structure intertwines with and shapes ideological assumptions to provide the sort of moral lesson that Griffith (and other filmmakers of this time) used to round out an apparently natural and satisfying narrative closure. One might point out that the economic situation of unemployment that originally faces the little family becomes displaced into issues of private morality and protection of private property, rather than resolved (although the reaction of the rich man to Bobby’s honesty may indicate a job in the offing). Interesting, the Moving Picture World review (July 29, 1911, p. 209) assumed that Bobby’s initial cowardice was due to his hunger and that his later heroism came simply from having a good meal in his belly – a nicely materialist analysis! Such a wedding of narrative structure and ideological assumptions to produce a self-contained narrative would certainly be found in the sources that most likely provided Griffith’s model: the short stories carried in the many mass circulation magazines of the day. By 1911 Griffith had translated the short story form of coherence and sympathetic psychology into filmic means, demonstrating a well-established mastery as he expertly re-worked a series of editing and compositional figures he had honed to easy viewer comprehension through his previous years at Biograph. After an extended suspense sequence of the toughs breaking into Bobby’s apartment (intercutting Bobby and his sister first wondering, then convinced, that they hear suspicious noises – a pattern introduced with the burglary in The Lonely Villa [1909]), the climactic fight of Bobby with the toughs is articulated through a familiar rushto-the-rescue parallel editing pattern as Bobby’s little sister runs in her nightgown to get the police. There is a dash of innovation here, however, since the police rescue is unneeded, Bobby having subdued the villains by the time they arrive. The parallel editing serves less as suspense than as a way to accent the all-important fight, articulating Bobby overcoming his cowardice into stages. 86

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Likewise, when Bobby decides to return the purse to the rich lady, Griffith uses a familiar editing pattern also introduced in 1909 and which I have termed a “reference shot”. We see Bobby alone in his room examining the purse, nearly hysterical as he counts the money, leaning against the wall in excitement, making obvious his intense need and desire for the wad of dough. Griffith then cuts to the rich couple discovering the loss of the purse and beginning to search for it. Griffith cuts back to Bobby almost caressing the bills and beginning to slip them into his pocket. On this gesture, Griffith cuts to the couple again as they stop passersby on the street and ask them if they have seen the lost purse. When we return to Bobby (an intertitle informs of his decision before we see it in this print, but this may not be true in the original release), he has had a change of heart and decides to return the purse after all. His hand pulls the bills from his pocket and he crumples them as he replaces them in the purse, then rushes out the door of his apartment. As in all previous examples of the reference shot pattern, the interpolated shot plays an ambiguous role. On the one hand, it indicates what Bobby is thinking about: the couple to whom the purse rightfully belongs. However, it doesn’t function simply as his mental image, but simultaneously acts as a parallel edit to the couple at this moment as they search the streets (the fact that there are two cuts to the couple underscores this). Although the content of the interpolated shot is important and relates directly to Bobby’s decision, its interruption of our focus on Bobby allows his change of mind to be articulated – that is, heightened in importance – by the interruption and at the same time naturalized, directly showing us its motivation. Such integration of formal editing devices into narrative roles, which Griffith now accomplishes so effortlessly, allows his film story to seem to unwind naturally, while highlighting every moment of narrative and ideological importance through formal devices. This extends to staging within the shot as well. In an early Griffith film, The Greaser’s Gauntlet (1908), the key narrative action of the theft of a cowboy’s purse by a Chinese waiter (and the waiter then planting the empty bag on innocent Jose) takes place in one long shot and is easy to miss, since Griffith had not then figured out how to make an action simultaneously unnoticed by characters and dramatic for the audience. But by 1911, when Grace Henderson as the slum-touring Lady Bountiful drops her purse, we notice it, and yet at the same time believe that she would not, the action taking place in the foreground while Henderson speaks to her husband and then quickly moves out of the frame. Griffith subtly directs our sympathy (or to use Murray Smith’s phrase, our engagement) with Bobby. Not only do we recognize Bobby as the featured character, we are introduced to him among his family and realize that he plays the role of premature father. His by-play with his motherly little sister, promising to bring her a bottle of milk, and the kiss he steals from his girlfriend in a gesture simultaneously bold and shy, win him our interest and sympathy. In a number of his early Biograph films, Griffith foregrounded tragic or bereft characters, unhappy in love and often taken advantage of by more powerful villains, relying on the audience’s sentimental sympathy for defeated or persecuted characters. Later in his career, his lead characters more often resemble Bobby: possessing weaknesses and enduring tragic moments, but ultimately overcoming their problems and triumphing – a model that becomes dominant for the more up-beat protagonists of classical American cinema. But Griffith still understands the essential role that moments of emotional defeat or anxiety play in making a character engaging. Thus when Bobby has been rejected by his girl, Griffith has him move off alone to express his grief, slumping against the wall of his bedroom in grief. Griffith had discovered the power of an intimate and isolated sharing of emotion with an audience in creating alignment and sympathy early in his Biograph career. However, in the following shot, Bobby slips into the kitchen and is comforted by his little sister, cementing our sense of the essential family role he must play in the film and making 87

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

it an additional basis for sympathy. Likewise when Bobby is being followed by the toughs, he turns the corner of a building, entering into the frame in a closer than usual framing, guaranteeing that we feel his anxiety (a few shots later, the two toughs turn the same corner, slowly, glowering in Bobby’s direction, a clear rehearsal for the sequence Griffith will direct the following year of the gangsters in The Musketeers of Pig Alley [1912] – but transformed in the later film into a masterpiece of sinister cinematography through a much closer framing.) Part of the power of this concise and sympathetic storytelling lies in the way it does not call attention to itself; the viewer can take it for granted. But anyone who has seen this film may well remember the portrayal of the slum environment in which the film takes place after the simple storyline has slipped from memory. The review in The Moving Picture World remarked: “Real street scenes with slum crowds passing unconsciously were used as a background; nothing could be more realistic” (July 29, 1911, p. 209). Here again Griffith uses techniques he had been exploring for nearly the full length of his Biograph career. Many commentators on the Biograph films have noted Griffith’s fascination with the city streets, a location which lay in part right outside the Biograph 14th St. studio, while the vital and jam-packed sidewalks of the Lower East Side were just a short trolley ride away. (However, I should note that the Biograph Camera Register entry for this film indicates its location for shooting as Fort Lee, New Jersey. Nonetheless, I believe there can be no doubt that the key street scenes, especially with the peddlers’ carts, were shot in the Lower East Side. The Biograph Camera Register simply does not, as a rule, note such neighborhood excursions.) Griffith’s first street scenes appeared in films from late 1908, such as The Christmas Burglars and Romance of a Jewess, and played a key role in many of Griffith’s New York films before Bobby, the Coward. But one could claim that Bobby, the Coward represents the climax of Griffith sidewalk stories (the subtitle for the film is “A Story of the Streets of New York”) – at least to this point in his career (The Musketeers of Pig Alley provides even more perfect realizations of the situations Griffith sketches here, nearly a re-make of Bobby, the Coward). To watch Bobby, the Coward is to seem to see the turn-of-the-century street photographs of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine come to life, to seem to enter their world. But this is not a labor of historical re-creation of the sort we might encounter in the Lower East Side sequences of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974). We are not watching a lovingly detailed period piece, but rather a capturing of a contemporary reality. In nearly every street scene, we are torn between watching the action of the major characters and surveying the carefully arranged/composed patterns of city life: women and children sitting on the stoops; peddlers at their pushcarts and unfurled umbrellas, old men lounging in kitchen chairs placed on the sidewalk; adolescent girls gossiping, young boys swinging from the awning of a shop. Everywhere people are gesticulating, crowding in, rubbernecking, gawking: everybody immersed in everybody else’s business, all bodies in close proximity, a new vital urban space whose crowded gestures, postures and body language Griffith captures in his compact medium shots, an environment so vivid it almost effaces the classically constructed storyline that threads its way through it. Perhaps the most detailed and thoughtful treatment of Griffith’s urban landscapes has been provided by Jean Mottet in his recent book L’invention de la scène américaine: cinéma et paysage. Carefully placing Griffith’s urban Biograph films within a contemporary American tradition that includes the works of the Ash Can school of painters and the photography of Jacob Riis, Mottet argues that representing the new urban environment posed a challenge to American artists when it caused them to overturn principles of traditional pictorial representation in order to create a new vision of city space. Griffith fits into this tradition, or rather anti-tradition, with a unique approach to urban space. Perhaps Mottet’s most impor88

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

tant insight into Griffith’s portrayal of the city lies in pointing out Griffith’s lack of interest in presenting a broad panorama of the buildings that form New York (such panoramic views could be found in earlier Biograph films such as The Skyscrapers of New York from 1906 – although their integration into that early film’s narrative remained only partial). Griffith’s New York is a New York of sidewalks, a city constructed on the scale of the human body, rather than massive architecture. As Mottet eloquently puts it: What takes place in these short films is the encounter between the universe of the city and the everyday, the invention of notions of urbanity and everyday life, insolubly linked. Store windows, cafes, blind alleys, sidewalks, stalls, crowds of gawkers of the Lower East Side, in partial views, fragments of the urban landscape reduced by Griffith to a few square meters... (Mottet, p. 125, my translation)

The sidewalk rules Griffith’s anthropocentric image of the city. As Mottet points out, the streets themselves are rarely seen and Griffith’s viewpoint never includes even the second story of the buildings that edge the sidewalk. The framing here is compact – even claustrophobic. One might speculate that Griffith and Bitzer are simply importing the confined playing space of the Biograph studio into their exterior shots, an example of artistic inertia rather than creativity. However, even if this were true, the effect the crowded street shots has by no means recalls the interior studio-shot scenes. Rather, these exterior views seem to be glimpsed through a vice that squeezes life to its most compressed and intense state – precisely the feel of a person making their way down the jam-packed, narrow sidewalks of the Lower East Side. Griffith in his memoirs (p. 56) referred to his excitement seeing the Lower East Side’s Rivington Street in his youthful days: “Here were Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, Arabs, Egyptians, all hustling for a living. Emotional, tempestuous, harrowing Rivington Street was perpetually a streaming bubbling pot of varied human flesh.” Griffith’s compact sidewalk framing in Bobby, the Coward and his other New York slum films captures this sense of a space boiling over with human activity. The amazing degree of nearly documentary detail in these shots reveals an era in which filmmaking was part of the everyday activity of the city streets; not yet a cloistered process restricted to studio recreations, or carefully commandeered location shooting, but still able to capture urban life on the fly, to move through this carnival of motion, not as something alien, but as one of its many forms. This is not to claim that Griffith did not construct his images; the sidewalk shots show Griffith/Bitzer’s eye for composition and Griffith’s naturalist staging, drawing on models from the Ash Can school and the photographs of Riis, as well as the staging practices of Belasco. But Griffith took his material directly from the environment that confronted him. Nowhere is this clearer than in the relation between Biograph actors and the “extras” that fill the backgrounds, the foregrounds and the edges of the screen. In some of Griffith’s first Biograph sidewalk scenes, the Biograph actors in their make-up and stylized paces stand out from the “real people” they move among and one suspects the camera was hidden and the shots filmed surreptitiously (see, for instance, the sidewalk scenes in Romance of a Jewess [1908]). However, progressively (and clearly evident by A Child of the Ghetto [1910]), Griffith makes his actors blend in with the crowd, eliminating extreme make-up and over-legible gestures, accenting ordinary behavior. And, in fact, from Bobby, the Coward on, Griffith uses Biograph players in the backgrounds of shots as well, blending in so effortlessly with the actual slum dwellers that it is hard to tell them apart (by the time of The Musketeers of Pig Alley, it seems that most of the background players were actually directed by Griffith, not simply caught by the camera). A number of shots exemplify the energy and spontaneity of urban space that Griffith 89

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

derives from his framing, this location and the people who fill it. The fourth shot of the film (as Mottet [p. 131] also stresses) beautifully reveals the sort of push/pull in this film between the fascination with the actual environment (what we might call the documentary pole of the film), and the drive of the narrative embodied in the character Bobby. The previous shot showed Bobby emerging from his tenement, buying a paper from a newsboy (or possibly a newsgirl) and exiting from the frame, presumably on his way to look for work. But rather than opening with the action of Bobby entering the frame, this fourth shot opens with a view of the sidewalk, shot from a slightly high height and slightly high angle (one suspects the camera might have been mounted in the back of a wagon as Bitzer claimed he sometimes placed it to get a candid shot of the street life). A constant passage of people moves in both directions, toward and away from the camera’s viewpoint, threading their way along the narrow space wedged between the men lounging on the stoops and the vendors with their stalls and weights and crates of goods at the edge of the street. A little girl edges her way into the foreground and stares toward the camera as she bites her thumb. This little girl occupies our attention initially even more than Bobby, who eventually does appear in the background of the shot and moves toward the camera and exits right. Bobby clearly emerges from the anonymous crowd only as he exits, initially craning his neck away from us to watch some sort of scuffle that breaks out in the background of the shot. Although Mottet raises doubts, I still think that Griffith may have staged this fight in order to attract attention away from the camera. But it attracts Bobby’s attention, as well, and works thematically in portraying the constant conflicts and danger the crowded city streets engender, such as the one Bobby himself will be involved in a few shots later. This integration of a somewhat extraneous element into the diegesis of the film exemplifies Griffith’s growing classicism and coherence, increasingly making details reflect on the world of the fiction. But the push/pull between the fascination of the street and the trajectory of the drama remains, even if Griffith is increasingly able to use such documentary atmosphere as a “reality effect” endowing his story with a believable and detailed environment. Part of Griffith’s unique signature as a filmmaker lies precisely in his interplay between what we could call centrifugal and centripetal forces within both his compositions and his narrative style. By this I mean that Griffith sometimes directs the viewer’s attention directly to the main storyline, carefully arranging the key points of narrative development and significance so that they are immediately visible and comprehensible, creating a classical storyline. His control of suspense represents the tightening of this attention, its absolute centering on outcome, based on a concentration of the viewer’s attention and concern. But if Griffith is a master of suspense, he is also a master of digression, nonessential detail, even intrusive atmosphere (compare him, say, to a contemporaneous master of economical visual storytelling like Louis Feuillade, whose compositions rarely include nonessential or distracting elements). Griffith’s frames are overstuffed with detail and, just as important, with a flurry of activity; our eye is solicited (as in the sidewalk shots of Bobby, the Coward) on several planes and levels. We must scan the frame to experience its richness, as if Griffith were loath to give up the visual cacophony that early actuality filmmaking on the street had offered, pulling the viewer’s attention in many directions with all the attractions of modern life and activity. The urban setting especially inspired Griffith to such crowded, condensed images, constantly in motion. Yet, as I maintained from the start, Bobby, the Coward does not lose its hold on narrative clarity; it balances its variety with a clear line of action. In the street, Griffith develops a particularly ingenious manner of dealing with the tension between the unstoppable diffusion of life and the drama’s need for concentration. During key scenes that take place on the street Griffith manages to rehearse and carefully block the action of his bystanders 90

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

(hence the need in these scenes for actor-extras, rather than simply unstaged candid shots capturing real passersby) in order to stress the transition from everyday actions to moments of dramatic conflict. Thus, when Bobby is jostled deliberately and insulted by the street thugs, Griffith carefully tightens the flow of the street into a sudden knot of action. The thugs enter from left, seeing Bobby’s approach from off screen, and assume a posture of defiance as they bump into him. This confrontation doesn’t only stop the toughs and Bobby, but the passersby pause and immediately give it their attention. This includes not only major characters like Bobby’s sweetheart and her sister who are shocked by Bobby’s lack of reaction and denounce him as a coward, but also a variety of children, men watching from the stoop and even a couple who stop only briefly then walk on. Thus, rather than disappearing, the members of the crowd become reflectors of the action, an intra-scene audience of commentators, as the passage of life on the sidewalk becomes a momentary knot of drama. As the toughs and the girls walk off, both groups expressing disgust with Bobby, Bobby is left to confront the sneers of the men on the stoop and the children in the doorway. Similarly, when Bobby returns the purse to the rich couple, Griffith arranges not only the couple, a cop and Bobby in the foreground, but also a clump of half-a-dozen onlookers, crowding in to see the exchange, commenting on it and reacting to it. The sidewalk stages a theater of urban drama, with Griffith’s framing simultaneously highlighting the drama while planting it deep in the life of the street. Thus, Bobby, the Coward displays an essential split in Griffith’s style, his mastery of classical narrative form, his ability to tighten suspense, and audience identification – but also his centrifugal interest in the non-centered detail, in the world that surges around the drama, enters the frame and exits from it, often drawing our attention along with it. Although the densely packed frames of urban landscape are the most dramatic examples of this in Bobby, the Coward, I want to close my consideration of this film with a shot inside Bobby’s apartment, which reveals this relaxed, digressive side of Griffith’s filmmaking. W. Chrystie Miller plays Bobby’s grandfather in this film modestly yet elegantly (as he does so many old men in Griffith films, usually as a background characters): part of Bobby’s family and responsibility, but clearly secondary to the main story, often dozing in his chair in the kitchen as Bobby takes center stage. However, after Bobby’s reward money has purchased a good meal for the little family, Griffith devotes a shot to the grandfather alone. Miller rises from the kitchen table and leaves Bobby and his sister. Then in the following shot, the only one which shows him alone, he enters the bedroom, yawns, sits down in his rocking chair, picks up the newspaper and, putting his feet on the bed, leans back to read it. There is no essential narrative role for this shot. But in some ways I would claim it to be the most essentially Griffithian moment in the film. For Griffith if there isn’t time, even in a one-reel film, to show an old man relaxing, then there would be no point to making films or telling stories. Tom Gunning

91

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

352 BIOGRAPH

A COUNTRY CUPID Filming date: 5/10 June 1911 Location: New York Studio/Westfield, New Jersey Release date: 24 July 1911 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 29 July 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (Edith); Edwin August (Jack); Edna Foster (Billy); Joseph Graybill (The half-wit); Robert Harron, Edward Dillon, Marie Newton (Among students); Kate Bruce (Edith’s mother); Claire McDowell (Half-wit’s mother); Frank Evans (Jack’s father); Alfred Paget (Farmer) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) THE ROMANCE OF A PRETTY LITTLE SCHOOLMARM Edith, the little school teacher, and her sweetheart, Jack, have a quarrel, and as she is beloved by all the scholars, they extend their sympathy. Little Billy in particular is deeply grieved, and when she writes a letter to her sweetheart calling him back, but which her pride makes her ashamed to mail, Billy gets hold of the note and sees that it reaches the proper party. Jack hastens to Edith, and we find that Billy’s act does more than effect a reconciliation, for it saves Edith from the terrible advances of a half-witted country boy, hitherto considered harmless, who also loved the little teacher, overstepping the boundary line of rationality in threatening death to both if she did not reciprocate his affection. The girl, however, knowing the half-wit’s weakness for flowers, soothes him with a bouquet until Jack enters and releases her from her terrible ordeal. Biograph Bulletin, July 24, 1911

Edith teaches in a one-room country schoolhouse and is beloved by all her students with a number of the male scholars having crushes on her, especially Little Billy. However, she has a fiancé, Jack, a local farmer. Little Billy observes a quarrel they have that leads Edith to breaks off their engagement. Soon after he also sees Edith write Jack a note forgiving him and asking him to come to see her, but which, on second thought, she throws in the school wastepaper basket. Performing the role of cupid in spite of his own love for Edith, Billy retrieves the note and mails it to Jack. Meanwhile, the town idiot, prone to violence but easily soothed by flowers, has discovered a pistol. He barges in on Edith at school as she grades papers, and threatens her with the gun. Even when Edith exchanges the gun for flowers, he still presses his case, seeming to force Edith to kill him or submit to his lovemaking. At this moment, however, Jack arrives, believing Edith’s note had summoned him. He subdues the half-wit and saves the situation. However, Edith is baffled since she had thrown away the note asking Jack to come. Billy finally confesses his role as love’s messenger and the three embrace. 92

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

One-room schoolhouses not only provided an image of immediate nostalgia for early twentieth-century America – evoking, simultaneously, childhood and rural simplicity – they were a staple location for both vaudeville routines and genteel fiction. Griffith made a country schoolhouse film almost every year during his tenure at Biograph, beginning with The Little Teacher (1909), followed by Examination Day at School (1910), and, after A Country Cupid, The School Teacher and the Waif (1912). Although all of them derive broad humor from their almost grotesque student population (in A Country Cupid it is almost hard to distinguish Eddie Dillon’s posy bearing student from the town idiot, except that the latter is more threatening), Griffith obviously sees the formula more as an exercise in the evocation of country ways and simpler days (the Biograph Bulletin for Examination Day at School describes it as “A Biograph pastoral”). The opening shot showing the country scholars on their way to school, most of the girls barefoot, kicking up the dust along the country road, immediately establishes the simple charm of this film. The film also demonstrates the blend of humor and pathos, security and danger, reassurance and threat from which Griffith fashions nearly every one of his 1911 films. This variety of tones, especially the mixture of a character-based comedy with danger-based climaxes also differentiates these films (described as “dramas” in the schedule of Biograph releases) from the comedies and farces that Biograph’s second unit (helmed in 1911 primarily by Mack Sennett) were turning out, which alternated with the dramas Griffith directed in Biograph’s weekly release schedule. In this one-reel film Griffith manages not only to guide his audience through diametrically opposed emotions, but also to boldly sketch at least four sharply individuated characters and their rather complex interrelations. While Edith and Jack as the main couple of the film form the central drama (based around their quarrel and reconciliation), they are flanked by two other more complex male characters whose passion for Edith can never be fulfilled: the dangerous half-wit and Little Billy. Although Joseph Graybill’s performance as the village idiot lacks subtlety, the conception of the character interestingly embodies polar elements: his love of flowers and his frantic violence. The half-wit’s violence can to some degree be counteracted by the flowers (as in the scene with Dillon who gives him his bouquet and thus gets him to put down the cudgel he is flailing – anticipating the later scene with Edith and the pistol), but Griffith also blends the opposing energies, as in the striking image in which he violently flails a field of daisies – a disturbing image, ambivalent in its mixed associations, and anticipating the similar image of Lillian Gish beating her roses after the death of her child in The Mothering Heart (1913). Billy, as well, is a surprisingly complex character, too young to really serve as Edith’s lover, he becomes her cupid, restoring her broken engagement and unexpectedly saving her from the half-wit’s attentions. Edna Foster’s performance combines with a carefully arranged story to underscore the poignancy of his unrequited love, especially when Billy undertakes to mail Edith’s letter of reconciliation and then is scolded by her when this act of self-sacrifice makes him late for class. Griffith takes seriously the crush of a pre-adolescent student and allows it to project more than a bit of pain, a small but significant entry into the Griffithian archetype of the desiring male who can never fulfill his love, but rather aids others (from Jose in The Greaser’s Gauntlet [1908] to Danton in Orphans of the Storm [1921]). The particular freshness of A Country Cupid comes undoubtedly from Griffith’s ability to manage the transition from rural comedy (with its sense of simplicity and nostalgia) to a very real and rather disturbing threat. In structure, A Country Cupid resembles other films Griffith made around the time, such as The Ruling Passion. The opening half of the film is primarily comic in tone, sketching characters and place, while the final third of the film sup93

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

plies a parallel edited suspense climax, placing characters in danger and then rescuing them from it. In A Country Cupid, Griffith does not so much transcend this formula as endow it with detail, liveliness and surprising complexity. Thus, in the opening, Griffith lovingly recreates the school and its students, rendering its rural setting and unhurried way of life as thoroughly as Bobby, the Coward captures the urban bustle of the Lower East Side. Griffith has worked on the costuming and characterization of each of the students. In the opening shots, as they enter one by one or in pairs passing through the frame, Griffith seems to expect the audience to react to each of these country caricatures, noting either their cuteness or silliness: toting their book satchels, lunch buckets, slates, wearing sunbonnets, clodhopper shoes or bare tootsies, suspender-hitched trousers for the boys and print dresses for the girls. The shots of the entrance to the schoolhouse (beautifully composed by Bitzer with the schoolhouse porch and doorway on the right, a backlit tree dividing the frame in midground, and a countryside vista visible far into the distance in the left background), swarm with the energy of little bodies, but with a sun-drenched casualness and relaxation very different from the New York City sidewalks of Bobby, the Coward: the little girl’s stretched-out bare legs on the foreground right setting up an intimate and balmy country atmosphere; kids in the background romp, playing ring-around-the-rosie or catch; two girls perched on the school’s wood bin draw together on a slate, while Billy gives Edith an apple. This is Griffith/Bitzer’s image-making at its best, a feast for the eyes, pulled in all directions by the richness of the scene, yet comprehensible in its totality as a happy image of youthful energy and vitality. Inside the school Griffith squeezes the adult-sized frame of Eddie Dillon into a child’s desk next to petite Edna Foster as Billy (who seems too small for her desk). As Billy enters the school room, he ostentatiously ignores the obvious flirtation offered by the little girl in the front row (a really lovely Biograph child actress who played Foster’s sister in The Ruling Passion and whom the Graham et al. filmography identifies in that film as Marie Newton, but doesn’t indicate her in as being in this film) and then accidentally-on-purpose kicks her, as he puts away his slate. The school room is filled with carefully observed responses as well: the overanxious bouncing of the kids as they respond to their names as Edith calls the roll; the boys each tipping their hats to her as they leave when school is let out; the girls shaking their fingers as they “shame” Edith’s boyfriend Jack waiting outside. But if all of this adds up to a bucolic and nostalgic pastoral vision, Griffith veers from this gentle comedy to its lurking danger in the lunatic who is portrayed as an overgrown and uncontrollable child. Graybill here does not at all recall the purposeful urban mannerism of the street tough he played when he threatened Bobby in Bobby, the Coward. Clothing and gestures give his half-wit character a certain country innocence that is nonetheless threatening. As I indicated earlier, he offers a large-scale unrestrained version of the unfulfilled desire of all Edith’s male students, and this sense of him as simply an exaggeration of their childish exuberance and desire, a not unfamiliar Id waiting to burst out from their innocent faces, makes this character, in spite of its one-dimensional behavior, surprisingly compelling in its antithetical associations. Unlike many of Griffith’s melodramas, the threat in A Country Cupid comes not from a stranger (although certainly Graybill portrays an “other”), but from a character who is well known in the community and who is part of this country world. Nowhere is this clash between the bucolic freshness of the film and its subterranean threat more perfectly expressed than in the film’s parallel editing climax. Although this climax basically follows the well-worn Griffithian pattern of a suspenseful intercutting of a protagonist in danger with oncoming rescuers, Griffith here endows it with several interesting twists. The most important of these is a sharp contrast in tone between the two intercut strands. Jack on his way to see Edith is unaware of her danger and, in fact, believes he is heading to a lover’s reconciliation. Therefore, he ambles rather than rushes and expresses 94

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

delight rather than anxiety. Jack gathers children to accompany him as he walks along, beaming with expectation, to his rendezvous. The atmosphere of these shots, set in the bright country landscape of flowery fields and rail fences (but also in locations in which previously we saw the half-wit’s violence demonstrated), contrasts not only in action but in mood with their interpolated shots of Edith hysterically frightened by her mad tormentor in the darker and confined school room. Griffith’s editing here is extremely precise, especially the cut which initiates the alternation with Graybill raising his pistol as he aims at Edith – directly cut against the mailman, arm similarly outstretched, handing Edith’s letter to Jack. The cuts come on dramatic gestures by Graybill, such as placing the gun to his temple, and later, his pointing the gun toward Edith is immediately and ironically echoed in the next shot as Jack points off screen (apparently at the schoolhouse). As I already mentioned, the suspense here gains a certain novelty through the rescue party being unaware of Edith’s danger. Further, as in The Lonedale Operator, Blanche Sweet’s Edith takes the initiative in protecting herself, disarming Graybill with the exchange of flowers for pistol. The review in The Moving Picture World especially praised this innovation as avoiding “the old trite way” and added, “Good for the scenario writer!” (August 29, 1911, p. 375) However, the madman is not appeased and his demand to be killed by the object of his affection gives the ending a further tone of darkness, dispelled when Jack and then another farmer arrive on the scene. Rescue and lovers’ reconciliation are accomplished in one brief scene, and even Billy’s dilemma seems resolved by a final embrace, although Griffith perhaps wisely does not give us time to speculate on the outcome of this premature ménage à trois. Tom Gunning

95

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

353 BIOGRAPH

OUT FROM THE SHADOW Filming date: 15/20 June 1911 Location: New York Studio/Bayonne, New Jersey Release date: 3 August 1911 Release length: 998 reel Copyright date: 5 August 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Emmett Campbell Hall Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (Mrs. Vane); Edwin August (Mr. Vane); Jeannie MacPherson (Young widow [?]); Marion Sunshine, John T. Dillon, Donald Crisp, Alfred Paget, Charles Hill Mailes, Charles H. West (At dance) NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from a photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative THE RESULT OF GIVING WAY TO EXCESSIVE GRIEF Since the death of their only child, Mrs. Vane gives herself up to morbid grief, to the neglect of her husband, herself and household duties. She sits continually weeping over the child’s little garments, and despite her husband’s efforts to cheers her, she persists in indulging in this moroseness. Her husband, therefore, is forced to seek more agreeable companionship outside his own home, and in time the wife appreciates his indifference. She complains to her mother, who tells her she alone is to blame, and if she doesn’t change she will lose his love altogether. The wife realizes the strength of this advice, and determines to win her husband back. However, the awakening has come too late for her husband has formed an attachment for a vivacious young widow. More subtle plans must be formed, and she succeeds in fascinating him at a dance they both attend, by arousing his jealousy. Biograph Bulletin, August 3, 1911

No viewing print of this film was available at the time of writing. However, the Museum of Modern Art does possess a negative and a fine grain master, so restoration is possible and hopefully on its way. Our best evidence of the film comes from the Biograph Bulletin and its accompanying still from the film. The cast as indicated by the still poses a curious problem. There can be little doubt that Edwin August, who, as Linda Arvidson said, looked so handsome in costume, plays the male lead, the neglectful Mr. Vane. Blanche Sweet plays Mrs. Vane, in a performance The Moving Picture World singled out and compared to the famous stage actress Maud Adams. But who plays the rival for the husband’s affection, the “vivacious young widow”? The still shows Jeannie MacPherson in foreground and behind her Marion Sunshine. The Graham et al. filmography assumes MacPherson plays the young widow, but I wonder. Marion Sunshine is more likely, I think, to take this leading character who is, as the Moving Picture World reviewer described her, “emancipated, but very 96

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

attractive”. MacPherson, I believe, plays the hostess of the ball in which the film’s climax occurs. The awaited restoration of the film will, of course, settle all this speculation. Biograph was well known for society costume pictures, although there are few of them that I would rank in the forefront of Griffith’s work. But the plot of this and the possibility of matching Sunshine and Sweet in one film make for a strong possibility that this would be one of Griffith’s best society comedies. The review for The Moving Picture World praises its acting and direction, in spite of misgivings that turn primarily on the reviewer’s sense of social protocol, leading to a rather convoluted and contradictory structural criticism: It is the freshly charming acting and the perfect photography of pretty scenes and costumes that make this society drama acceptable. The story would be pleasing, too, if it hung together, but it most certainly does not. The producer’s failure to make the story hang together doesn’t keep it from being convincing as a whole. The skill he has shown in selecting players to represent the different characters and the sincere acting of these players only serve to make a glaring spectacle of the picture’s great shortcoming. The man’s wife is moping for her dead baby and it happens that he meets another young woman, emancipated, but very attractive. Her growing power over him is understandable. The wife wakes up to the situation when it seems too late. The climax comes at the dance (a beautiful scene) and it is here that the story falls down. The hostess that gives the dance knows the situation. The wife comes and is received. The husband comes with the other woman and is admitted – just think of it. Of course this reviewer can not affirm that they would be turned away, but he doesn’t think that the hostess would hold out her hand to them. In coming together, the two showed more brass than fate usually gives to two individuals. The acting of the whole picture, with no break, is very fine indeed. The young wife is the “little school teacher” of a former picture [undoubtedly The Country Cupid]; one might call her the Maud Adams of the photoplay screen. Very commendable is the acting of the interloper also, and the girl friend of the wife’s. In the scene where she stands smiling at the worried interloper her work is very commendable. In fact, the whole film in [sic] full of such fine details as that little play; it shows in the producer the eye of a master scene maker. (August 19, 1911, p. 462)

On a final note, The Moving Picture World lists this film alternately as Out of the Shadow and Out from the Shadow. Tom Gunning

97

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

354 BIOGRAPH

THE SORROWFUL EXAMPLE Filming date: 23/24 June 1911 Location: New York Studio/Fort Lee, New Jersey Release date: 14 August 1911 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 15 August 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Husband); Claire McDowell (Wife) NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from a photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative WHEN THE INNOCENT MUST SUFFER WITH THE GUILTY The little family of husband, wife and infant child are just existing, the wife toiling to make ends meet while the husband is a worthless scamp. The wife manages to set aside a little of her meager earnings to save for the child’s future, which is her sole thought. The husband has tried to get this money but the wife guards it carefully. He has become infatuated with a little Italian girl, who, not knowing him to be married, accepts his attentions. They plan to elope, and he finally manages to steal his wife’s savings with which he intends to leave for another town. They miss the train, however, and start back to the village to await to the next one. On the way back, he finds his wife’s blood-stained apron. This is indeed a shock. The wife has missed the money and following in pursuit falls over a cliff onto the rocks below, receiving injuries that prove fatal, she having just strength enough left to crawl back and fall dead at the baby’s crib, where the husband finds her. He is also repulsed by the girl, when she learns the horrible truth. Biograph Bulletin, August 14, 1911

No viewing copy of this film is available at the present time. However, it is not a lost film, the Museum of Modern Art holds both a negative and a fine grain master, so the film could be – and hopefully will be – restored. The brief Biograph Bulletin indicates it is a grim story in which a man abandons his wife for a younger woman, stealing her savings and leading to her semi-accidental death in a fall over a cliff. This is grim stuff for Biograph from this period and one would love to see how Griffith handled it. Earlier Biograph films frequently dealt with such material and it represented what I have described as a grim naturalistic aspect of Griffith’s storytelling, something trade journals like The Moving Picture World did not encourage, as they were promoting the American happy ending as the best way to end a film (as their review of The Sorrowful Example demonstrates). The still illustrating the Biograph Bulletin seems to indicate Wilfred Lucas played the no-good husband, a contrast to his more frequent heroic and sympathetic roles (such as the heroes in The Rose of Kentucky or Swords 98

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

and Hearts, both released a few weeks after The Sorrowful Example), demonstrating Griffith’s desire to balance his usual type casting with a few roles cast against type. The suffering wife seems to have been played by Claire McDowell, one of Griffith’s most versatile actresses, playing everything from old maids (The Sunbeam) to emancipated women searching for a he-man lover (The Primal Call). In the publicity still, she looks suitably unglamorous. We will have to wait for restoration to find out who plays the young woman Lucas left his wife for (that she is described as Italian makes me wonder – hope? – if this might be another role for brunette Marion Sunshine). The review for the film in The Moving Picture World (August 26, 1911, p. 540) was not pleased by this grim naturalistic story (and also shows the way they would lift phrases from the film’s publicity): Perhaps such films as this teach important truths, but they are not pleasant and so far as furnishing entertainment is concerned are nil. It is the story of a drunken husband who steals his wife’s saving to elope with a girl. They miss the train and on the way back to wait for the next one find the wife’s bloody apron and discover that she has fallen over a cliff. Just strength enough is left her to crawl back to the baby’s crib where she falls dead beside it. The girl then spurns him and he is left to meditate upon his own worthlessness. The audience will wonder what becomes of the child now the mother is dead.

The discovery of the apron might provide an interesting example of Griffith’s use of significant objects, and I wonder if it received a close-up. I don’t mind not having to see Wilfred Lucas meditating on his own worthlessness, though. Tom Gunning

99

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

355 BIOGRAPH

THE RULING PASSION Filming date: 10/23 June, 10 July 1911 Location: Bayonne, New Jersey/New York Studio Release date: 7 August 1911 Release length: 997 feet Copyright date: 8 August 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Wilfred Lucas Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer, Percy Higginson Cast: Edna Foster (Billy); Wilfred Lucas (His father); Claire McDowell (His mother); Marie Newton, ? (His siblings); Kate Bruce, Kate Toncray, ? (Servants); Gladys Egan, ? (Children); John T. Dillon, W.C. Robinson, Frank Evans, Jeannie MacPherson, Guy Hedlund (At dock); George O. Nicholls (Extra) NOTE: Although announced for reissue in The Biograph (June 19, 1915), this film apparently did not have a second release. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative THE RESULT OF A YOUNGSTER’S VISIT TO THE THEATRE Little Billy has been taken to the theatre by his parents and as a result becomes stage-struck. At a children’s party Billy plays stage manager and drills the children in some of the scenes he has witnessed. Later in the day while playing on the lawn the idea strikes him to play the drama with realism, so they go down to the shore and use a rowboat for a pirate ship, seizing his sister and placing her aboard. This is considered great, until the boat breaks from its mooring and little brother and sister are carried by the rough sea far out from the shore. As his parents are away on a visit to the city, it is some time before Billy can secure aid. Upon their return, Papa, after an exciting sail in a motor boat rescues them. Biograph Bulletin, August 7, 1911

When his parents are away on a visit to the city, Billy and his sister and brother put on a melodramatic performance of a pirate drama to entertain the neighborhood kids. After their audience leaves, Billy leads his siblings outside to restage their drama in more realistic settings. As brother and sister struggle in an old rowboat, it becomes unmoored from the dock and drifts away as Billy watches helplessly. He rushes for help, and when his parents return, his father persuades the owner of a motor launch to set out to rescue the children. Meanwhile, the rowboat begins to leak and is on the verge of sinking when the rescue party arrives just in time to pluck the children from the water. At home, Billy receives a spanking from his mother, but also, in the end, a forgiving good night kiss.

A staple of the later nickelodeon era – which survived as a short film form into the sound era (i.e., the “Our Gang” series) – was the “kid picture”, which featured young actors as the 100

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

lead characters. All the major American production companies of the nickelodeon era had resident child actors who mainly played supporting roles in adult dramas, but also starred in films tailored especially for them and targeted primarily at the nickelodeon’s largest audience (at least according to many accounts) – children, but undoubtedly popular with adults as well. The Ruling Passion is a rather rare attempt by Griffith in this genre. The Moving Picture World found this focus on children unusual, so this might be considered a pioneer in the form. In terms of the transformation and increased gentility of American cinema (courting the family and middle-class audience), we could contrast The Ruling Passion with the “mischievous boy” films, which had been common a few years before (and certainly persisted into 1911 in the output of some studios – although not at Biograph). In contrast to most of these rather anarchistic gag-driven films, the mischievous Billy of this film is clearly portrayed as middle to upper class (a seaside home with a nanny, fancy clothes and a taste for the theater). Further, rather than carrying out a series of practical jokes primarily aimed at upsetting the order of an adult world, Billy’s mischief is unintentional in its dire results, the product of a rudimentary character psychology (his love of histrionics, the “ruling passion” of the title). Rather than hilarity it is suspense and actual danger that ultimately rules this narrative, as Billy’s pretend pirate melodrama teeters into Griffith’s realistic suspense melodrama. Nothing shows so clearly the evolution of this film out of – but also away from – the earlier “mischievous boy” comedies than its ending. Although there are exceptions, the mischief comedies generally ended with the punishment of the bad boy, usually a spanking or other form of physical humiliation (Noël Burch even refers to “the punitive ending” as one of early cinema’s major forms of closure), undoubtedly satisfying the audience’s sadomasochistic urges. Griffith supplies this scene as well, but only as a penultimate scene. The final scene reassuringly shows little Billy tucked in bed along with his brother, receiving a goodnight kiss from Mama. By 1911, middle-class security, family unity and sentimentality have mitigated broad physical humor and slapstick sadism, at least in Griffith’s films. Furthermore, unlike the earlier films, The Ruling Passion argues for stability and good behavior. As an article in The Moving Picture World on the film claimed: “It encourages the development of the good in the boy and rebukes the bad, and will prove helpful in suggesting the control of a ‘ruling passion’” (September 9, 1911, p. 695). What are we to make of Edna Foster whose performance as Billy dominates this film? We know from Bitzer’s identification that she was obviously a female actor who played a number of little-boy roles in Biograph films mainly in 1911, quite frequently playing a featured or leading role (A Country Cupid, The Adventures of Billy, The Baby and the Stork, The Transformation of Mike, Billy’s Stratagem, A Terrible Discovery), often a character named Billy (although the recurring name does not indicate a recurring character, since the Billies have different families and circumstances in each films). But other than her name and these performances we know nothing else. I suspect from Foster’s physiognomy and performance style that she may also be considerably older than she looks (a suspicion Jay Leyda first raised for me). Foster’s hyper energy, bizarre expressions (the grimaces she gives as the villainous pirate in this film verge on the truly grotesque – if not the physically pathological), clear self-consciousness and often perfect timing of an over-the-top gestures recall to me Feuillade’s child star Bébé (Clément Mary), whose career as a more exclusively (and more talented) comic actor is almost contemporaneous. Graham et al. in their filmography identify Foster as appearing in a handful of Biograph films after 1911, only one of which Griffith directed, and mainly in small roles. This eclipse after the semi-stardom of 1911 is hard to explain. I have come across no other references to Foster as an actor before or after this brief spate of featured films in 1911, and if any reader can supply more information, it would be appreciated. 101

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

The Biograph Bulletin for this film indicates that Billy’s passion has been ignited by a recent trip to the theater, and the film’s subtitle “The Result of a Youngster’s Visit to the Theatre” may well have served as an opening intertitle on the screen. Interestingly, however, this theater visit is not portrayed in the film. In the opening scene, Wilfred Lucas, as Billy’s father, reproaches him for the magazine he is reading, so Billy might be inspired as much by reading dime novel, “blood and thunder” fiction, an ancestor of such mischievous boy figures from earlier cinema as (Pre-Griffith) Biograph’s Terrible Ted the Grizzly King (1907). But again in contrast to the earlier film, The Ruling Passion does not directly present the absurd and violent fantasy of a nearly feral child, but emphasizes his more civilized and middle-class (although unintentionally still dangerous) attempt to realize them as performances. I feel it can be misleading to find personal connections between Griffith’s biography and the plots of his Biograph films (since the plots are generally typical of the fare from other companies of the time, reflecting widely shared social fascination rather than the director’s individuality), but it is hard to resist seeing some personal investment in this story by Griffith, a Kentucky farm boy whose “ruling passion” for the theater brought him to New York City in the first place. But Griffith’s individuality appears in the Biograph films less in the stories he tells (one might note in passing that the story for this film was actually written by the actor who plays Billy’s father, Wilfred Lucas) than in the way he tells them. As an example of a genre, The Ruling Passion exemplifies one sort of plot Griffith felt most comfortable with: a melodrama with a thrill ending which allowed a use of parallel editing (the race to rescue the drowning children), a certain amount of character-based, rather than slapstick, comedy with broad performances (the portrayal of Billy’s monomania, complete with Edna’s mugging), and a strong placement of the drama within a family context. His treatment of the film’s simple theme of childish delight turning into real danger allows him the range of emotions he seemed to like to pack into one-reelers, so that comedic moments and sentimental scenes were balanced by thrills, just as a full-length stage melodrama would have allowed. In some ways the most curious sequence in terms of Griffith’s editing style comes in the performance Billy and his siblings put on for the neighborhood kids. Generally for the interior scenes in this film, Griffith and Bitzer have placed the camera at a lower height than usual, acknowledging that his key players are children, shorter than the adult leads in most Biograph films. (Griffith had similarly adjusted the camera height in one of his first “kid pictures”, I Did It, Mamma, from early 1909). This performance takes place in the kids’ nursery. As the kids get the idea of staging their performance (partly it seems as a way to stop the boys clobbering each other), Billy places a chair in the center of the frame. Although serving as the sole theatrical prop, the chair also divides the frame for Griffith, with the audience down on the floor over on the right of the frame, and the actors take places on the left half. The next shot cuts in to a closer view of the thespians (framing the young actors from head to toe and eliminating the upper part of the nursery walls) with the chair now on the right side of the frame and the feet of a few spectators entering the right edge of the frame, as if to guarantee our sense of the whole room. Billy seems to take on two roles in this play, as well as director, instructing his siblings in their roles as precocious young lovers, then performing as a heroic rescuer, and – when the young audience finds this too tame – becoming a grimacing villain. As Billy’s brother declares love to his unencouraging sister in the first shot of the first version, Griffith makes an interesting cut to his young audience watching the drama with amused attention. This shot is rather curious. First off, it is a still somewhat unusual example of scene dissection in Griffith’s work. During most of the Biograph period, and certainly through 1911, Griffith’s primary methods of articulation are to intercut between different locations rather 102

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

than to cut to a different view (in terms of angle and/or distance) of a location already shown. Most frequently, closer views of one location simply enlarge central characters (whether the shot of Jose and Mildred after the attempted lynching in The Greaser’s Gauntlet [1908] – the first instance in a Griffith film with such a cut-in – or the scene between the Tobacco Planter and his ward in The Rose of Kentucky, shot almost simultaneously with The Ruling Passion). Here, Griffith is actually revealing another part of the room and characters not shown in the previous shot (except for a few stray feet). In this way this shot is closer to the classical scene breakdown, which will become common in Hollywood films by 1917, and appears in the circumstance that often motivates such cutting, an interaction between characters such as conversation or (as in this example) watching. But while this shot and (the editing pattern it forms part of) may anticipate the later breakdown, it shows Griffith’s still rather tentative approach to it. The children, seated on the floor watching the drama, look off screen to the left, which corresponds with classical orientation, the performance being to the left in the wide shot. However, in contrast to the classical shot/counter shot, the angle between the two shots don’t truly match, since the offscreen gaze of the watching children, while certainly angled to the left, is aimed only somewhat to the left of the camera, and the view of the performance itself is shot from nearly the same frontal angle that the wider shot was filmed from. Thus, the two angles are not complementary, and the angle from which the performance is filmed most certainly is not the angle of view of the young audience. Griffith maintains a frontal view of the performance rather than shifting to another angle reflective of the audience’s point of view. As a result, the cuts twice back and forth from performance to audience articulate the act of looking but don’t portray it accurately in terms of point of view. But a close examination of the shot of the kids seated on the floor reveals some other anomalies. Whereas in the wide shot of the nursery they seem to seat themselves against the nursery wall, in the closer shot (filmed from a high angle looking down on them) they are seated in front of a bed. It is clear Griffith “cheated” this reaction shot by rearranging the space (or even shooting it entirely separate), a practice not unknown even in later classical Hollywood (where it was frankly called “cheating” – rearranging the space in a way not entirely corresponding to its orientation or appearance in previous shots). If the relation between the shots is somewhat awkward in terms of later standards, it does show Griffith’s increasing willingness to edit within a single space – and its portrayal of the youthful theatrics remains charming. While I caution against reading too much of Griffith personally into the plot, nonetheless the central parable here of a director’s desire for greater realism, moving from the scenic simplicity of the nursery floor to the dynamics of real water and boats, does seem to mark a movement from the realm of theater to that of cinema. Inspired by his nursery hit, Billy apparently wants to restage its drama of abduction in more realistic locations, hence the selection of the old and insecurely fastened rowboat as his preferred stage. Here, of course, Billy’s spectacle literally gets away from him. The rescue melodrama that overwhelms Billy’s production is clearly cinematic, with real locations and suspenseful parallel editing, but also by this time was almost cliché with Griffith. Setting this rescue on the water and putting kids in danger gave it a certain novelty. However, the spatial plotting of the climax seems occasionally rather offhand. The opening shows strong visualization. The key shot as Billy on the dock realizes the boat is drifting off is nicely staged, with a real depth-of-field tension between Foster’s conniptions in the foreground and the boat at an ever-increasing distance as it drifts out of frame. The following close shot of the kids in the boat realizing their plight captures the effortless ubiquity Griffith’s editing has mastered by this point: we see them drifting out of reach, but then we are there with them, observing their fear and panic. The ensuing shots 103

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

as Billy rushes to find grownups to help him are followed by an extremely expressive long shot of the boat again drifting out of the frame after the children lose one of the oars, the distance and framing expressing their helplessness. A similar long shot is intercut with the children’s father as he looks through binoculars searching for them (a clear point-of-view shot pattern although, interestingly, Griffith foregoes any use of a masking device to indicate a view through the binoculars). But after the motor launch has been pressed into action, the space gets rather vague. (The Moving Picture World flatly stated, “This part isn’t very interesting”.) The shots of the kids remain effective, especially the way the boat drifts out of the frame, as if our concern remains helpless to keep the children in view. But the motorboat runs first away from the camera then toward the camera curving in seemingly random directions, as if no one knows where the kids are (this may be the point, but a shot of the rescuers on the boat would have made it clear and provided additional character-based drama). However, the final rescue with the kids clinging to a nearly sunken boat looks realistic enough that one wonders if it caused concern from the Gerry Society, which protected the health and well-being of children performers (but probably had no control over motion pictures). While not a major film in Griffith’s oeuvre, The Ruling Passion nonetheless makes one aware of the innovation and craft a master could bring to such simple material, providing a film that undoubtedly delighted young audiences and probably made a few adults concerned about the effect on kids of seeing too many movies. Tom Gunning

104

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

356 BIOGRAPH

THE ROSE OF KENTUCKY Filming date: 13/14/29 June, 5/15 July 1911 Location: Hartford, Connecticut/Coytesville, New Jersey/New York Studio Release date: 24 August 1911 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 26 August 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Planter); Marion Sunshine (Orphan); Charles H. West (Partner); Kate Bruce (Housekeeper); William J. Butler [in blackface] (Servant); Kate Toncray (Mother); Alfred Paget (Among night riders) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A ROMANCE OF THE FIELDS OF TOBACCO The little girl, having lost her mother by death, would have been a homeless orphan had not the generous-natured adopted her. He sends her to school, and as he watches her progress he also realizes a growing interest in her that digs deep into his heart. Feeling that he is too old to be her husband, he encourages her interest in his partner, who is a younger man. But she, in spite of the planter’s efforts at concealing his love, appreciates the fact that he is making a sacrifice for her welfare, as he sees it. However, she herself loves her benefactor, and is given an opportunity to reject the younger man, as he shows the yellow streak, when the night riders attack the planter’s tobacco barns. Biograph Bulletin, August 24, 1911

A Kentucky tobacco planter takes in a young orphan after her mother’s death and sends her off to school. When she returns a grown-up young woman he responds to her obvious affection for him, but feels he is too old for her. Instead, he encourages her to consider his younger partner. Meanwhile, a group of night riders, angered by the planter’s refusal to join them, has decided to intimidate him with an attack on his farm. The planter, however, boldly defends his farm, holing up in a barn with guns and ammunition along with his ward and the younger partner. During the attack the younger partner turns coward, while the planter and the girl side by side hold off the night riders, who, encountering unexpected resistance, decide to make peace with the planter. Aware of his true mettle, the girl rejects the younger partner and makes it clear to the planter that he is the man she has chosen to marry.

Griffith’s action films from late 1911 such as The Last Drop of Water, Swords and Hearts, The Battle and this film strain against the one-reel format and show a strong desire to extend the Biograph one-reel structure into something more extensive. With eighty-one shots, a complex plot and frequent cut-in to medium shots of the characters at key moments, The Rose of Kentucky shows Griffith’s epic sensibility blending personal drama with action plots. 105

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

A few months earlier, with Enoch Arden, Griffith had produced Biograph’s first complete two-reel film, and after that film Griffith attempts to re-invent the one-reel format and to chafe against its limits. In the ambitious staging of these action films and, especially, in their more extensive and even digressive narrative forms, Griffith sketches a novelistic cinema that competes with his mastery of the short-story form of compressed time and space and a single central incident. The Rose of Kentucky, for instance, begins some years before the main story, and the opening shots of the planter taking in the orphan at her mother’s deathbed and bringing her back to his mansion give this film a temporal extension that Griffith will often pursue (his great 1912 film, The Massacre, has a similar prologue, setting up the cavalry scout’s early relation to the Blanche Sweet character, also an adopted orphan, but The Massacre’s two-reel length allows some dozen shots to fill in this background, restricted of necessity to two shots in this one-reel film.) This novelistic impulse is also evident in the attention Griffith devotes to milieu. Perhaps the most striking and innovative section of this film comes with the nine shots devoted to the tour the planter and the girl take around the plantation after her return from school. The first shots of this sequence serve simply to root this story in a particular milieu and environment and to display its uniqueness in detail. As the planter demonstrates a planting machine, Griffith cuts from a medium shot of the couple watching the machine to an inserted close-up of the plants being inserted in the soil as the machine moves on. Such inserted close-ups of objects or details, while part of Griffith’s filmic vocabulary from his earliest Biograph films, were still relatively uncommon in 1911, only appearing in a handful of films. That Griffith uses such a cut-in here for a detail that is explanatory rather than dramatic (nothing hangs on this manner of planting) demonstrates what we could call his documentary impulse. (Although the Biograph company did not travel to Kentucky for this film, they did go to Hartford, Connecticut, to find a real tobacco field, and Griffith was probably as interested in the process as he felt his audience would be). The planter takes the girl past small plants being hoed, and then through fields of larger plants far along in their growth. These six shots moving over the farm not only deliver a sense of environment, but also give the couple time to be together and for the audience to observe their interaction. Griffith’s direction of body language is flawless: the planter’s restrained seriousness as he points out a detail, or examines a plant, is more than a bit undercut by the girl’s persistent clinging to his rolled-up sleeve, as if plucking at him to get him to pay attention to her, refusing to lose contact. In the seventh shot of the tour, she takes the upper hand. Snatching off his hat, she rushes out of frame with it, the planter in merry pursuit. In the shots that follow, the cultivated fields and farm labor of the previous shots give way to more bucolic landscapes, a fitting background for this child-like, yet also erotic, game of hide and seek. Planter and ward end up chasing each other around a shade tree like a couple of kids, until he finally makes physical contact, grabbing her arm, as she returns his hat. He gestures as if to slap her for disobedience, and she confidently raises her lips to be kissed. He takes the hint and does so. She raises her finger as if to chide him, but poses her lips for a second kiss, which the planter, sunk in thought, refuses. The physical interaction here is delicate yet precise, sensuous and clearly legible. Marion Sunshine, playing the orphan, does most of the work, of course. Wilfred Lucas, who plays the planter, supplied Griffith with a stolid and good-looking leading man in 1911 and 1912 especially, but his acting never shows great subtlety (his overly literal, gestural soliloquy a few shots later, as he looks in the mirror and then traces over the lines in his face to convey that he thinks he is too old for the girl, is typically wooden, even if Griffith undoubtedly instructed him in the actions). But Sunshine truly provides here one of the most 106

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

engaging and imaginative performances in a Biograph film. Russell Merritt has supplied an appreciation of Sunshine and a thumbnail sketch of her extraordinary career in his notes for her 1910 Biograph film A Decree of Destiny (DWG Project, #317). Sunshine acted in a handful of films at Biograph in 1910 and 1911 during breaks in her vaudeville engagements. A vaudeville headliner, Sunshine was part of a fascinating team, Sunshine and Tempest, whose other half, Florenze Tempest was a young woman who most frequently appeared in men’s clothing (as Scott Simmon, in The Films of D.W. Griffith (p. 124), pointed out in his appreciation of Sunshine’s performance in The Rose of Kentucky). Actually Cuban-American, Sunshine had an important later career as a Latin songwriter. According to Linda Arvidson’s memoirs, Griffith had approached her on the street, struck by her dark Latin looks and unaware she was already a celebrity. In 1910 she turned in a wonderful performance in Sunshine Sue, but I think The Rose of Kentucky arguably offers her strongest performance. In her youthful vitality and unselfconscious eroticism, Sunshine recalls Mary Pickford, but her dark hair and flashing eyes hold a mature sensuality Pickford rarely expresses. Thus, her reaction when Lucas does not come up with a second kiss, ends in a reflective smile to herself, rather than the teasing frustration Pickford might show. The modernity of these performances of female sexuality offered by both Pickford and Sunshine strikes us even today. As she anticipates a visit from the younger partner, Sunshine leaps up onto a parlor table and examines herself in a hand mirror, a bit like Pickford might. But her bust of laughter as she gazes at herself is uniquely her own. Her jittery hops before meeting the partner seem more broadly Griffithian and probably appear more natural when performed by Pickford or Mae Marsh, but her pivot on the piano stool to avoid the young suitor’s kisses shows absolutely perfect timing and carries complex meaning: flirtatious, certainly, but also designed to be in significant contrast to her poised lips offered earlier to Lucas. She cleverly puts off the younger man’s attempt to hold her hand by handing him some small object from the tea tray instead. In contrast, when she goes to Lucas and finds him moping in self-renunciation, she first pulls his ear then pokes his cheek with her finger, establishing unforgettably their physical intimacy. As she laughs at his morose behavior, she pounds his shoulder repeatedly. When (in a cut-in to a close medium shot) Lucas tells her he thinks she should accept his partner’s attentions, she smiles, listens obediently, and twists Lucas’s finger as she moves off to the younger man. Once confronting the partner, she looks back off screen toward Lucas, then approaches the young man with her hands outstretched – but pulls them in hesitantly as he comes toward her. This language of gesture is far from conventional pantomime, but it offers a dialogue of hands and physical proximity, of degrees of intimacy expressed through touch, that is as eloquent as the most perfectly written and delivered spoken dialogue. Luckily the subplot of the attack of the night riders breaks the deadlock between the lovers and allows Sunshine to disobey her benefactor and withdraw from the cowardly younger partner. Her final gesture toward Lucas, picking up his arm and placing it around her waist, supplies an essential Griffithian appreciation of female initiative (Pickford performed the same gesture with her hard-laboring beau at the end of What the Daisy Said in 1910). But when Lucas still does not respond, she starts to leave. He holds her back, finally getting the message, which he expresses with one of his prosaic gestures (pointing at her, then himself: “You want me?”), which Sunshine answers sublimely by leaping into his lap for the film’s final image. If I feel the most unique aspect of The Rose of Kentucky lies in its treatment of the romance plot and especially Sunshine’s and Griffith’s control of body language, it certainly must be admitted that the action plot supplies not only a convenient resolution to the romantic dilemma, but also deals with subject matter that acquires an eerie quality from Griffith’s subsequent film career. It is fascinating to realize that the director of The Birth of a Nation 107

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

(1915) made an earlier film about the Ku Klux Klan, and, furthermore, one in which the film’s hero bravely resists an attack by a horde of night riders. The climax of The Rose of Kentucky seems to predict the action climax of the later feature, only with the Klansmen as villainous attackers of a small group of heroic defenders, rather than the rescuers of white womanhood. The film is oddly reticent about this part of its plot. The period of the film is not specified, but the modern tobacco-planting machine would seem to indicate it is nearly contemporary to 1911, and nothing overtly contradicts this. However, the Ku Klux Klan basically had two periods of activity: during the Reconstruction (mainly from 1865–1872), and after 1915 (with its revival sparked, if not caused, by Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation). There were other vigilante or “night rider” groups in between the two periods (such as the “White Caps” active in the Midwest and border states during the turn of the century, the subject of Edwin S. Porter’s 1905 film The White Caps), and it is quite possible that Griffith’s film is dealing with a similar group rather than the Klan. However, the costuming of the night riders, down to the cross on their horses’ caparisons, is strictly that of the Klan (one even speculates that the costumes the Biograph company used were taken from some stage production of The Clansman, Thomas Dixon’s popular play based on his novel and the source of The Birth of a Nation). If the night riders are actually supposed to be members of the Ku Klux Klan as the costumes indicate, then the modern planting machine is anachronistic and the film should take place during the same Reconstruction period as The Birth of A Nation. This supposition makes the film directly opposed in its sympathy to Griffith’s more famous (and notorious) feature. The juxtaposition of the planter’s black employees with the night riders (especially his servant’s terrified discovery of them in the woods, which almost directly anticipates later images of the Klan terrorizing African Americans in The Birth of a Nation) also encourages their identification as Klan members. One of the Klan’s targets during Reconstruction was white farmers who paid their black hands “too well” (i.e., nearly equal with whites) or encouraged them to vote. The film is unclear precisely on the motivation for the night riders’ attack, but certainly Northern audiences would be familiar with the stories of Klan violence during the Reconstruction and the “bloody shirt” was a powerful (and usually political) image of the beatings meted out to Northern activists who supported the freedman’s cause. Although the attack is brief, it is effectively climactic, providing the scene of action that this varied novelistic melodrama called for, as well as the incident that, by proving the younger partner’s cowardice, resolves the romance. The shots of the hooded Klansmen charging on horseback and on all fours creeping up on the planter’s barn is effectively creepy (Griffith lost a visual opportunity by making the Klansmen the heroes rather than the villains of his later epic!), and one could hardly fault his anachronistic, but visually compelling, costuming decision if we are supposed to take this for a contemporary story. One wonders whether, if there had been an anti-Klan melodrama of the established popularity and success of Dixon’s The Clansman, with as many opportunities for epic filmmaking, Griffith would have made a feature film closer to The Rose of Kentucky – and if this could have happened, would we scholars have been relieved of the burden of defending a politically reactionary, racist film as a cinematic masterpiece? I have always felt that Griffith’s ideological commitment to Dixon’s racist and fascist agenda penetrated about as far as his pocketbook, that is, as his recognition that the film’s theme and the controversy it would ignite would make him a lot of money. While it raises the issue of whether Griffith truly felt a personal allegiance to the Klan, The Rose of Kentucky may provide too small a platform to actually claim Griffith’s anti-Klan credentials. Tom Gunning

108

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

357 BIOGRAPH

THE STUFF HEROES ARE MADE OF Filming date: 28 June, 1/17 July 1911 Location: New York Studio/Lynbrook, New York Release date: 4 September 1911 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 6 September 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (Alice); Marion Sunshine (Jennie); Edwin August (Young author) NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from a photograph of the three principal actors reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative HOW A YOUNG GIRL CLEVERLY OUTWITTED A BURGLAR A young author comes to spend the summer at the homestead, and becomes quite impressed by Jennie and Alice, the two daughters of his hostess. He is, however, rather impartial in his attentions, though Jennie fancies she is the favored one. On the evening of his departure, Mamma and Papa go for a visit to be away over night. The sisters have several of their girl friends to come and keep them company for the night. An ugly looking tramp, appreciating the favorable opportunity, breaks in, frightening the girls, with the exception of Alice, out of their wits. She, learning that her sister’s locket is down stairs in easy access, braves the danger to get it, by pretending to be sleep-walking. Her scheme works until she tries to overpower the burglar. She puts up a stubborn fight, which terminated in her favor, for the author returns for his forgotten suit case. The author is not long in realizing who is the real one of the sisters, much to Jennie’s chagrin, who makes a bluff at self-destruction, but her rube sweetheart says, “Don’t do it” and she “don’t.” Biograph Bulletin, September 4, 1911

Although the Museum of Modern Art holds a 35mm nitrate print of this film, no print from this source or any other collection was available for viewing at the time of this writing. Judging from the promotional copy provided by the Biograph Bulletin, The Stuff Heroes Are Made Of appears to mine a vein similar to Griffith’s 1910 The Banker’s Daughters. Similar plot elements suggest this possibility: two sisters, one active and willing to expose herself to danger in order to protect family property, the other sister less assertive and incapable of confronting intruders (in The Banker’s Daughters, an invalid who is incapable of any decisive action; in The Stuff Heroes Are Made Of, merely timid); burglars who force their way into a home and who have to be defeated when the male parent is absent; a precious object, a necklace or a locket, in particular danger of theft, which spurs the braver sister into activity and gives a purpose to her confrontation with dangerous men. The Stuff Heroes Are Made Of also enables Blanche Sweet to reprise her quick-thinking, fearful-but-still-functioning role in The Lonedale Operator, which Griffith had filmed only four months earlier. David Mayer 109

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

358 BIOGRAPH

SWORDS AND HEARTS Filming date: 27 June, 7/18 July 1911 Location: Coytesville, New Jersey/New York Studio Release date: 28 August 1911; reissued by Biograph, 1 May 1916 Release length: 1000 feet Copyright date: 30 August 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Emmett Campbell Hall Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Hugh Frazier); Claire McDowell (Irene Lambert); Dorothy West (Jennie Baker); William J. Butler (Old Ben); Charles H. West (Suitor); Francis J. Grandon (Jennie’s father); Verner Clarges (Hugh’s father); Kate Bruce (At Lambert house); Guy Hedlund, Donald Crisp (At Frazier house); Alfred Paget, Guy Hedlund, J. Jiquel Lanoe (Union soldiers); Frank Evans, Charles Hill Mailes, W.C. Robinson, Donald Crisp, J. Jiquel Lanoe (Bushwackers) NOTE: Lionel Barrymore recalls, originally recorded in We Barrymores, having appeared in the film as an extra (Schickel, p. 165). Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate positive A STORY OF THE WAR TIME IN OLD VIRGINIA As Hugh Frazier, son of a wealthy tobacco planter, leaves to join his company in the Confederate Army, he becomes engaged to Irene Lambert, a beautiful but cold and calculating girl, who promises her hand when he returns victorious. Unknown to Hugh, Jennie Baker, a little girl of the “poor white class,” has fallen passionately in love with him. Her father is one of those who hate the “aristocrats,” eking an existence selling berries, etc., from their little garden. Hugh, making a flying visit to Irene, is only saved from capture by Jennie’s devotion, she taking his horse and donning his hat and coat, by which she leads his pursuers astray. That night, Jennie’s father is killed leading an attack by Bushwhackers upon the Frazier Mansion in an attempt to secure the family wealth, but old Ben, the negro servant, anticipates their designs by taking the family strong box and burying it. The Bushwhackers, however, burn the old mansion to the ground, Hugh’s father perishing in the ruins. Hence, when Hugh returns, he finds himself homeless. Irene has turned her attentions upon a Union officer, but Jennie is still faithful. Hugh now sees her worth, and old Ben appears with the strong box which has remained hidden since the night of the attack. Biograph Bulletin, August 28, 1911

A poor girl, secretly in love with a wealthy young planter who has become engaged to a girl of his own class, bravely assists the man, now an officer in the Confederate forces, in escaping capture by Union soldiers when he returns to visit his fiancée. Concurrently, the girl’s father leads a gang of bandits disguised in military uniforms to loot and destroy the wealthy 110

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

plantation, but these “bushwackers” fail to find the valuables they seek. The war ended and the Union victorious, the fiancée now breaks her engagement and betroths herself to a Union officer. The poor girl declares her love by aiding the young Southerner who, his father dead and his home and plantation in ruins, is reduced to rudimentary farming. A loyal servant, formerly a slave, restores the family valuables he has hidden and reveals the girl’s heroic role in misleading the pursuing Union cavalry.

On the face of it, Swords and Hearts is a romantic melodrama with feminist undertones. Its protagonist is an active heroine who – having shown restraint and self-denial when the man she secretly loves departs for war – finds the object of her love threatened with capture, dons the man’s outer clothing and, mounting a horse and riding skilfully, misleads his pursuers. Later, the heroine is forced to reveal her devotion when her fickle rival breaks her engagement and pledges herself to another man. It might appear that this film is one of Griffith’s takes on the current “female question”, with Dorothy West (who rides a horse discernibly better than the departed Florence Lawrence) reprising her role in The House with Closed Shutters (1910) and again emerging as an action heroine. But Swords and Hearts is also, significantly, one of Griffith’s films set in the American Civil War and therefore raises important questions about the sources and strategies of Griffith’s films. The film also raises questions about the literary integrity of Emmett Campbell Hall, the purported author of the screenplay. A year earlier, Hall, ripping off the dramatist Charles Townsend’s The Golden Gulch, had claimed credit for the plot of That Chink at Golden Gulch. Hall’s list of screenplays for Biograph suggest that there may be further appropriations, and there is much in this film and the immediately contemporary His Trust films to suggest that Hall scavenged his screenplay from other popular material or that he and Griffith collaborated to mine lodes previous authors had exposed and effectively developed. Swords and Hearts is the fourth film (the three previous ones are His Trust, His Trust Fulfilled, and The Rose of Kentucky) on the subject of the Civil War and Reconstruction period (the term applied to rebuilding the economy and infrastructure of the war-damaged Confederate states), which Griffith will release in 1911. These films were preceded by six earlier Griffith Biograph films on the same theme – The Guerrilla (1908), In Old Kentucky, The Honor of His Family (1909); In the Border States, The Fugitive, The House with Closed Shutters (1910) – and will be followed by two more – The Battle (1911) and The Informer (1912) – before Griffith turned away from the convulsions of the war for three years. But if, thereafter, Griffith and Biograph failed to produce films of the Civil War, rival directors – Thomas Ince, Kenean Buel, Mack Sennett, Joseph Smiley – and studios – Kalem, Keystone, Klaw and Erlanger, Vitagraph, Domino – continued to produce films set against this national conflict. The twenty-odd Civil War films produced by the various studios between 1908 and 1915 are neither random nor coincidental. Rather, they may be understood as evidence of the film industry joining a debate, which, if not of the industry’s making, occupied American dramatists and drew large audiences for nearly fifty years. It was a debate with a known commercial appeal, and it touched chords in American life which still reverberated and stirred painful emotions, ineradicable memories of loss and sacrifice, and patriotic – if sectional – pride. Although many decades in the past, the Civil War had never enjoyed a mutually agreed history and remained then, as it remains to this day, a contentious, unstable subject still capable of inducing acrimonious partisan debate. However, with time passing and with memories of the war and of the equally contentious Reconstruction period losing some of their sharpness, the climates in which plays and films were viewed and the emotional, social, and political resolutions of personal conflicts slowly moderated to appeal to still broader audi111

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

ences. The Civil War, with its narratives of campaigns, skirmishes, political strategies, and grave social and domestic disruption, had become and was to remain the American epic and the American tragedy. Thus, these new films, as much as the stage melodramas before them, can be understood as contributing to an on going process of re-examining, re-evaluating, and understanding the causes and effects of that conflict. Critical analyses of Griffith’s pre-1915 American Civil War films predictably follow one of three pathways: 1) scholars discover in these early films narrative elements that will be elaborated when Griffith sets his hand to The Birth of a Nation (1915); 2) the films are scoured for details relating to the Griffith family history and, in particular, its “Southern” or “Confederate heritage”; and 3) the films are viewed as discrete works, connected neither with a past or future place in the Griffith canon, and are explicated entirely within the visual means accessible to the viewer. All of these approaches are valid and, indeed, desirable, but they stop short of the further essential act of placing these Civil War films in the context of a significant national debate, a debate postulated, developed, and codified on the American stage almost from the very cessation of the war itself in 1865, and only in 1908 taken up by motion pictures and placed before new audiences. Here, my discussion of Swords and Hearts will consider earlier analytical trajectories, but will also introduce and describe the dimensions and agreed conventions of Civil War theatrical melodrama – by 1911 well known to American theatre audiences – and will point to Griffith’s effective use of these familiar dramatic elements. Standing behind Swords and Hearts are many amateur melodramas (1865–1873) and a most substantial body of professional dramas, somewhere in the region of 100 plays, introduced between 1874–1918 and remaining in the American stage repertoire well into the 1930s, which established the language and conventions of debate. It was this body of dramas that prepared audiences, establishing conventions and determining audience expectations, for the films to follow. Although the earliest of these melodramas from the 1860s are crude narratives of daring and combat victories, which vilified the enemy and celebrated the heroism and undiluted regional loyalties or national patriotism of the militias drawn from the local district, these amateur pieces were replaced from 1874 with professional melodramas, many emanating from New York, but many more developed and performed on national and regional touring circuits. Professional melodramas offered dramatic narratives enacted with more exacting theatrical standards, with incisive characterisation, and with deliberately scripted attempts to acknowledge personal hardships inflicted on both Union and Confederate adversaries and on civilians, both North and South, whose unprotected homes lay in the paths of military forces. These numerous professional pieces brought enactments in which, the threat of the Confederate secession overcome, parties on both sides of the conflict might resume their lives and, acknowledging differences, achieve some sort of mutual and personal closure. As usual with such melodramas, courting couples, made bitter opponents by the war, renew love affairs, and marriages torn by ideological and sectional difference are repaired. Spies and renegades are exposed and, if not killed, exiled; loyal servants are rewarded and honored; members of the defeated Confederate forces are acknowledged as heroes and brothers. Character function and plots for such Civil War melodramas are stylised and, to a certain degree, preordained, and it is from this pool of dramatic conventions that film scenarists and filmmakers draw as they make their entry into the genre. Robert Lang writes of these pre-1915 Biograph films as trial-essays for The Birth of a Nation (p. 29), and, although there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Griffith had this mammoth project in mind at such an early date, the one and two-reel Civil War films offer convincing proof that Hall and Griffith were conversant with – steeped in may be the 112

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

more likely phrase – the theatrical tropes and structures of Civil War melodramas. Here we see Griffith not only joining the debate but also acquiring and skilfully developing the visual language and practical means of dramatising ideological and social division, war, resolution, and, as he approaches Reconstruction, complex depictions of unresolved hostilities, resentment, and subversion. In Swords and Hearts, Hall and Griffith borrow heavily from Civil War stage melodrama, not so much in detail as in overall structure and dramatic strategies. In particular, they accept the symmetries of stage melodrama: two households and two fathers – Frazier and Baker; two rival suitors – Frazier and the unnamed Union officer – for Irene Lambert’s hand; two female lovers – the calculating Irene Lambert and the adoring Jennie Baker – for Frazier; two final pairings of couples – Irene Lambert and the Union Officer, Jennie Baker and Hugh Frazier; two serio-comic black servants – one dutiful and loyal, the other lazy and selfish. We have earlier seen Griffith resort to these symmetries, albeit ironically, when in The Fugitive he offers complementary – Southern and Northern – pairs of soldier-sons, waiting sweethearts, mothers, military units, and rural landscapes. Only in death and loss is there painful asymmetry, with a dead Confederate son and bereaved Confederate mother. In the pattern of the professional stage pieces, Swords and Hearts’s villain, Baker, is neither Yankee nor Rebel but a member of the envious underclass, who fires on the Northern cavalry pursuing Colonel Frazier and then returns, disguised, to burn and loot the Frazier mansion and to kill its aristocratic owner. Following the example of several Civil War stage melodramas, the heroine dons a military cloak, mounts a horse, and dashes to lead the enemy cavalry astray. And the film ends, typically, with honor and love satisfied on all sides, with missing property restored, and with the personal cost of the conflict – death and despoliation – swept aside by warm feelings of affection, regard, and reconciliation. As with His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled, Hall and Griffith break with earlier, shorter Civil War films and follow the pattern set by both the Northern and Southern professional melodrama in taking the action beyond the cessation of the Civil War into the post-war South and noting the dire effects of Reconstruction: agricultural and domestic property destroyed, desolation, impoverishment, social opportunism. But their theatrically familiar solution, the union of Jennie Baker and Hugh Frazier, is sentimental and romantic, not yet savage and political. There may be some truth in Lillian Gish’s assertion that Griffith lacked the confidence to work without the example of a full-length drama about Reconstruction, which Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman was to provide (Gish, p. 132). There is little here to foreshadow the anger, bitterness, and racial contempt that characterise the latter half of The Birth of a Nation. Inevitably, discussion of Swords and Hearts must address an element of Griffith family history (or mythology) with Griffith insisting: Down in Kentucky ... was the house of my father, Colonel Jacob Wark Griffith, a Confederate cavalry officer ... Once there had been quite a pretentious place – more or less like the popular conception of Kentucky mansions ... Guerillas, disguised as Union raiders, burned the house in the first year of the war... (Griffith, p. 19)

Griffith apparently believed enough in this account for it to provide episodes in his 1908 The Guerrilla (DWG Project, #64), and again in His Trust (1911 [DWG Project, #310]), where plantation homes are looted and torched by marauding bands of irregulars whose motive is plunder rather than patriotism or tactical policy. Autobiographical or not, the villain, who is neither a Union or Confederate regular (although he may disguise himself as one or the other or both) and who puts his own self-interest above commitment to a cause, 113

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

recalls a deeply-imbedded convention of Civil War stage melodrama, and Griffith’s repeated use of this incident may owe as much to his knowledge of audience expectation as it does to personal and spontaneous plot-making. However much Swords and Hearts owes to earlier dramatic narratives, Griffith goes beyond the formal requirements of the Civil War film and brings this drama in line with some of his earlier pieces, such as A Corner in Wheat (1909) and The Iconoclast (1910), which depict and analyse the home life of the working poor. In this film, it is the lower-class Baker family, headed by a father forced to subsist on the sale of produce from his small garden and resentfully envious of the upper-class Fraziers’ wealth, which, in contrast, is derived from farming the big cash crop, tobacco. Biograph intertitles repeatedly call attention to the social and economic gulf between the upper-class Fraziers and the poor white-trash Bakers. The Bakers are identified in the second intertitle as “THE POOR WHITE CLASS” and Jennie as “THE ‘POOR CLASS’ GIRL IN LOVE WITH THE HANDSOME SOLDIER”. We observe Baker resentfully watching “THE FATHER [FRAZIER] SELLS HIS TOBACCO”, and Jennie’s rival, Irene Lambert, presented on the veranda of her own elegant home, is described as “THE SOUTHERN BELLE”. By contrast, Jennie hoes row-crops, and the ex-Colonel Hugh Frazier is obliged to undertake the same labor until Old Ben returns the hidden family treasures for the deserving couple to share. Indeed, with the emblematic destruction of the rich plantation house – which Jennie, barred by her lowly class, never enters – a class-barrier is removed and the new South permits a more egalitarian marriage. Tom Gunning has previously drawn attention to the restrained acting in this film and, in particular, to Griffith’s use of the actors’ backs as expressive instruments (Gunning 1991, pp. 228, 263, 271). He correctly notes this use as an element of stage technique and cites the examples of the American actresses Minnie Maddern Fiske and Nance O’Neil, both of whom were familiar to Griffith. (The reader may find it helpful to consult my essay, “Opening a second front: the Civil War, the Stage, and D.W. Griffith”, on the extensive theatrical legacy with its dramatic strategies, conventions, and audience expectations, all intertwined with a sequence of monuments, veterans’ reunions, and anniversaries.) David Mayer

114

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

359 BIOGRAPH

DAN, THE DANDY Filming date: 24/27 July 1911 Location: Fort Lee, New Jersey/New York Studio Release date: 18 September 1911 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 20 September 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Bernardine R. Leist Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: William J. Butler (Father); Charles H. West (Son); Wilfred Lucas (Tramp/Clubman); Marion Sunshine (Heiress) NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from a photograph of the three principal actors reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A FATHER’S DISAPPOINTMENT IN HIS SON The opening of the picture impresses one that the family is expecting the arrival of a most important personage, and such is the case, for the father expects the return of his only son from college in whom he had set great hopes, only to have them crushed into absolute disgust upon the entrance of his son who has become a pronounced mollycoddle. The father at once sets about to cure the son of his present milksop nature by engaging the services of a tramp to taunt manhood into his son. This tramp proves to be a wealthy club-man disguised, in quest of new sensations, and enters into the spirit of the game with vim. This, however, proves fruitless. Still, the son’s interest in a wealthy young heiress arouses hopes in the father for he sees another plan – jealousy. To bring this about he gives a house party and the pretended tramp monopolizes the girl’s attention. Jealousy is aroused, but Dan reasons he hasn’t the sufficient sand to back his rage up, so he repairs himself to a gymnasium where later we see him entirely transformed, and so, when next he encounters the quasi tramp, the father has reason to be proud of him. Biograph Bulletin, September 18, 1911

The Museum of Modern Art holds a 35mm workprint of Dan, the Dandy, but, as with all Biograph original nitrate negatives received and held by the Museum, but not yet restored, no viewing print (at the time of writing) has been made. It is known that Griffith was working between the Biograph studio in New York City and outdoor locations primarily in Fort Lee and Coytesville, New Jersey, and Cuddebackville, New York. He appears to have divided his company between these venues and to have employed a small group of performers, these principal actors included, for films made at the New Jersey locations. Looking at the synopsis as provided by the Biograph Bulletin, it is little wonder that this film should have been forgotten and neglected. This is formula comedy plotmaking – with 115

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

a manipulative father, a reluctant hero, and a courtship instigated by a quest for wealth. With deft handling, it can be effective, as such dramatists as Molière, Labiche, and H.J. Byron (the latter two outstanding nineteenth-century authors of farces whose works would have been familiar to Griffith) have successfully demonstrated. In creating in Dan a character who is moved by the machinations of others, Griffith appears to have given little thought to devising a part in which Dan’s inherent nature overrides the self-serving ends of those who would change him – and change him not necessarily for the better. David Mayer

116

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

360 BIOGRAPH

THE SQUAW’S LOVE Filming date: 31 July, 1/3 August 1911 Location: Cuddebackville, New York Release date: 14 September 1911; reissued by Biograph, 10 July 1916 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 18 September 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Stanner E.V. Taylor Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer, Percy Higginson, John Mahr Cast: Mabel Normand (Wildflower); Dark Cloud (White Eagle); Alfred Paget (Gray Fox); Dorothy West (Silver Fawn); William J. Butler, Kate Bruce (Parents); Donald Crisp (Extra) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Archives of Canada, 35mm acetate negative; National Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate positive (titled Twilight Song) AN INDIAN POEM OF LOVE IN PICTURES White Eagle is betrothed to Silver Fawn before leaving for a hunting trip. Gray Fox, his friend, loves Wild Flower, the chief’s daughter, but when he asks her father’s sanction, he is exiled for his presumption, the chief ordering him to be taken off to the wilds and deprived of his firearms. Starvation would have been his fate, had not White Eagle happened along. To aid his friend, White Eagle promises to bring Wild Flower to him, and when Silver Fawn sees White Eagle stealthily leave the camp with Wild Flower, she imagines her lover false. She follows, and creeping up behind, hurls Wild Flower over into the stream, from which perilous plight she is rescued by Gray Fox, who is escaping in a canoe from a gang of drunken Indians who have seized him. The chief, however, has ordered death to the fugitives, and after the meeting of the four and an explanation given, they make good their escape only after Wild Flower has swum under the canoes of their pursuers and ripped them with a knife, causing them to sink. Biograph Bulletin, September 14, 1911

Wildflower, an Indian woman, aided by a friendly brave, follows her banished lover, Gray Fox, into the wilderness. Her departure from the Indians’ encampment is witnessed by another woman, Silver Fawn, who misconstrues the help Wildflower receives as an elopement with Silver Fawn’s fiancé. Silver Fawn sets out in pursuit and jealously attacks her supposed rival on a bluff high above a turbulent river. The two women fall into the river but are rescued by Gray Fox, who has managed to outwit and elude a party drunken Indians. Together with White Eagle, Silver Fawn’s fiancé, the two couples flee in canoes but are soon exhausted. Wildflower secures their escape when she dives into the water beneath the pursuing canoes, which she slashes and causes to sink.

One of the enduring and familiar images of the Native American has appeared in the United States on cartons of butter for the past eight decades. Dressed in beaded and fringed buck117

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

skin, her hair braided into two plaits which frame her face, and with a single eagle feather stuck into a porcupine-work headband which encircles her forehead, the Land O’ Lakes Indian maiden kneels to offer her treasure of golden butter to white consumers. This emblem, which Dorothy West and Mabel Normand so minutely resemble, is a lasting signifyer of American primitivism, a picture of Native American life in a state where innocent, wholesome people dwell in harmony with nature and consume products described as “dependable, pure, good, [and] genuine”. Griffith’s Native Americans – “Indians” – are never so simple. His narratives are often those of encounters between essentially unsophisticated, peaceable Indians (Comata, the Sioux [1909], The Broken Doll [1910], The Call of the Wild [1910]) and aggressive European-Americans, where the Indian is a casual victim of white hostility and disregard. Alternatively, and in the tradition of frontier stage melodrama going back to Louisa Medina’s Nick of the Woods (1838) and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Ned Buntline’s Scouts of the Plains (1878) and looking forward to Griffith’s own The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1912), the Indian is the hostile aggressor, dangerous to peace-seeking white settlers. There is a third Griffith approach to depicting native people – we see it here in The Squaw’s Love – showing them in their primitive state, apparently untouched by white civilization, except that this tribe has somehow been tainted by the white vices of abusive parental authority; rebellious, disobedient female offspring; firearms; and, more harmful to themselves, alcoholic drink. These dangers intrude and threaten, but their sources are never mentioned nor even implicated, and the extent to which such films offer a critique on the world of the white American in the first decade of the twentieth century is never made obvious. Nevertheless, we may read this film for what it conceals of Native American life and what it may reveal of white society. The Squaw’s Love is an action melodrama, which gives its four principal actors much to do within a single reel. The innocent maiden has been snatched from the idyllic, primitivist lakeside of the Land O’ Lakes butter-wrapper, cloned, and translated to Griffith’s perilous Third World. Here, the two women’s (and their partners’) resourcefulness, courage, intelligence, and stamina are tested. They must be combative, be able to survive a dangerous tumble from a bluff into a cold, fast-running river, escape pursuit and injury from drunken Indian warriors, and be able to swim underwater to slash and sink their pursuers’ canoes. Behind this contrived action and synthetic world lay the reality of Native American life in 1911. White Americans were active in advocating and enforcing “detribalisation”, a movement which had as its objectives making the Indians subject to white legislation by removing the younger Native Americans from tribal lands and designated “reservations”, where native laws and customs regulated behaviour, and placing these adolescents in schools, where, with children from other tribes, they were taught exclusively in English and encouraged to lose their “Indian ways”. Although obviously native born, all Indians were denied full rights and status as citizens until 1924. These realities, however, were concealed, and if Americans wished to experience Indian life as depicted on butter-wrappers – which they knew through such poems as H.W. Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” – they might encounter groups of Native Americans in travelling “Wild West” shows, in “Indian Encampments” at such major venues as the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, or in numerous motion pictures – Biograph’s included – which perpetuated for a new generation the stereotyped mythic “redskin” inherited from the stage and dime novel. Griffith is further complicit in this process of mythmaking as he casts his authentic Native American “Indian advisor” Dark Cloud (about whom little is known except that he also appears in Biograph’s The Song of the Wildwood Flute [1910] and An Indian’s Loyalty [1913]) as White Eagle. These mythic Indians, however, had value as metaphor. 118

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

One such example where the fictitious or mythic Native American serves as metaphor is the film’s approach to Female Emancipation. Here, as in Swords and Hearts, Griffith’s support of the emancipated woman as action heroine is enthusiastic, but he pairs this heroine, played by Mabel Normand, with Dorothy West’s irrationally jealous and violent Silver Fawn and diverts audience admiration of Wildflower’s independence into anxiety for both women as they struggle high above the river’s edge. The two Indian warriors are not altogether effective in deterring their pursuers, and it takes Wildflower’s active stratagem of leaping into the stream and scuttling two canoes to make their escape and independence secure. The struggle between Normand and West, culminating in their fall into the river below, is known to have stimulated Griffith to a further innovation in moviemaking. Anxious for his actresses and fearful that they might not repeat their fall, Griffith positioned three cameramen and shot the struggle with three cameras simultaneously filming. David Mayer

119

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

361 BIOGRAPH

THE REVENUE MAN AND THE GIRL Filming date: 29 July, 5 August 1911 Location: New York Studio/Fort Lee, New Jersey/Cuddebackville, New York Release date: 25 September 1911 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 27 September 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Edwin August (Revenue man); Dorothy West (Moonshiner’s daughter) NOTE: Information on casting has taken from the photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; 35mm nitrate positive (incomplete) IN THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS The moonshiner’s daughter meets one of the revenue men and is attracted by his appearance as he is with hers. She, while rough in nature, has a tender heart, as is shown by her attention to her pet dove. The revenue man makes a daring arrest of a couple of the moonshiners, which arrest the other moonshiners resent, and swear vengeance. The girl’s father leads the vindictive mountaineers and is killed by one of the revenue men, who in turn meets his death. This sets the girl’s fierce mountain spirit ablaze, and after her father’s burial she joins the pursuit. Two days later, the survivor of the two officers, worn out with fatigue, sits on a bank by the stream, when the girl approaches. She is about to make good her threat, when her pet dove falls at his feet. He picks it up tenderly and sends it on its way, impressing the girl so that she later helps him to escape by hiding him in her room and afterwards leaving the mountains for a new life in the city beautiful [sic]. Biograph Bulletin, September 25, 1911

The Museum of Modern Art holds 35mm nitrate elements of this film. However, no print from this source or any other collection has been available for viewing at the time of writing. As he developed the scenario for The Revenue Man and the Girl, Griffith may have been thinking about a sequence of recent events in his home state of Kentucky and in adjoining states along the Ohio River. Kentucky was justly known in Griffith’s lifetime for the efficiency of its legal whiskey-distilling industry and for the quality of bourbon whiskey produced. A thriving cottage-industry ran (and still runs) parallel and hidden. Less well known, but hardly less drinkable, is the “moonshine” whiskey (“white lightnin’”), illegally distilled in hundreds of concealed woodland stills and widely sold in grocery stores, filling stations, bars, and at public events. Throughout the nineteenth century, the legal distilling trade predominated, but in 1898, to raise additional revenue to fund the Spanish-American War, the Federal Government placed excise duty on numerous domestic items, alcohol 120

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

included. At the war’s end, excise duty on most items was repealed. The only exceptions were alcoholic spirits and tobacco. Legally made and legally sold alcohol remained expensive. Concurrently, the American temperance movement (which would eventually achieve the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – Prohibition – in 1919) was gaining credibility and adherents. In 1909 the Anti-Saloon League, operating in the nearby state of Ohio, introduced referenda on the legal sale of alcoholic drink. The result was to ban the sale of alcohol in fifty-seven counties, a blow to Kentucky’s legal distillers. However, this ban came as a godsend to the moonshiners and bootleggers. Sales of illegal spirits smuggled from Kentucky increased hugely. But this increase in activity brought investigations and punitive action from Federal and State agents, “revenuers”, who occasionally fought fierce gun-battles with distillers who sought to avoid arrest and the consequent destruction of their stills and store of newly made whiskey. As Griffith directed The Revenue Man and the Girl, this war between the revenue men and local people was a daily fact. Doves appearing in the film are a Griffith trademark, appearing as early as 1908 and continuing at least until 1920 and Way Down East. He uses them to express tender feeling, usually of love, but also of purity, loyalty, friendship and peace. David Mayer

121

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

362 BIOGRAPH

THE ETERNAL MOTHER Filming date: 19/22/25 July, 11 August 1911 Location: Coytesville, New Jersey/New York Studio Release date: 11 January 1912 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 13 January 1912 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Edwin August (John, the husband); Blanche Sweet (Martha, the wife); Mabel Normand (Mary, the woman); Kate Bruce (Old woman); J. Jiquel Lanoe, Guy Hedlund (Friends); Donald Crisp, Jeannie MacPherson (In field); Charles Hill Mailes (Mary’s father) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative SACRIFICE OF THE WOMAN’S HIGHER LOVE This is rather a symbolism than a picture of the material. The young couple are [sic] betrothed and later are [sic] married, and so the days pass by, they happy and contented on their little farm, each helping with the other’s burdens, until a restless, thoughtless woman appears and meets the man. He is possessed of an irresistible fascination for her, and so the grief-stricken wife, whose love for her husband is of the unselfish kind, feeling he would be happier with the attractive woman, makes the sacrifice of freeing him. He is divorced and married to the other woman, and later begins to pay the penalty. His second wife is ill, and he is alone in his distress when his first wife, in whom is strong the spirit of the eternal mother, comes to him in his hour of need, caring for the wife and taking the infant after her death. It is now that the man awakens to the realization of his unworthiness, and as the years pass he works out his redemption. Biograph Bulletin, January 11, 1912

John, a young farmer, courts Martha and marries her. Their life is happy until he meets the restless Mary, who is unhappy in her own marriage. Seduced by Mary, John betrays Martha and, after their divorce, marries Mary. Having given birth to a daughter, Mary sickens and dies, and Martha, taking the infant to rear as her own, refuses all contact with John, who works alone and, guilt-stricken, denies himself the society of others. Years pass, and, when John becomes feeble, he finally finds rest and forgiveness in Mary’s arms.

What accounts for such a moralistic, dreary film? Griffith often shows a preoccupation with, and even reverence for, motherhood, but motherhood, as depicted here, seems directed toward another purpose. We must be necessarily wary of reading in biographical information as a critical approach, but, in the circumstances of this film, it may be that The Eternal Mother is explained – or if not fully explained, is clarified – by events lying outside the drama that appears on screen. 122

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Although described by the Biograph Bulletin as “rather a symbolism than a picture of the material”, The Eternal Mother might have been more precisely designated a “meditation on adultery and guilt”. We might then acknowledge this stodgy, lachrymose narrative to be a drama with a key: the real-life subject of this adultery might be Griffith himself. The Eternal Mother, with its succession of mutual attraction, betrayal, discovery, desertion, generosity, and prolonged – even excessive – expiation could be read as an apology for and commentary on the Griffith-Arvidson marriage break-up. The film could also be viewed as Griffith’s fantasy of atonement and recrimination as it adds, in the character of Martha, the depiction of a woman who is less a mother and more a long-suffering, self-denying and even masochistic first wife who lays claim to her husband and his second wife’s child (as Linda Arvidson was to claim authorship of Griffith’s Biograph films). According to Griffith’s biographer Richard Schickel (pp. 159, 163-166), the Biograph troupe had gone to California for January and February of 1911. There, Griffith was observed by Billy Bitzer to have exhibited more than professional interest in his actress Dorothy West. Some months later and back in New York, Linda Arvidson discovered a love letter to Griffith from an unnamed actress (whom Schickel speculates was West). Arvidson’s discovery of betrayal and Griffith’s defiant insistence that his interest was not in one woman, but in a variety of women – past present, and future – permanently fractured their marriage. In his fantasy, Griffith appears to side with the wronged Martha (Blanche Sweet) and to describe the predatory Mary (Mabel Normand), “no longer satisfied with the simple joy of home”, as the guilty party, but his developing portrait of a relentless, unbending Martha, who shows scant love for her foster daughter, raises questions about where his sympathies truly lie. Furthermore, if this is Griffith’s version of the collapse of his marriage, his depiction of himself is disingenuous. John (Edwin August) is largely passive, lured to Mary without any resistance, lethargic as a husband, humble, self-denying, abstaining as a repentant widower, uncommunicative as a father, and sluggishly docile in accepting Martha’s dominance and de facto moral superiority. Yet somehow our twenty-first-century sympathies eventually gravitate to him. Martha’s conspicuous goodness has inflicted its revenge on John, but in taking that revenge she has substantially depleted her store of generosity and goodness. Biograph’s actors give performances that compensate for the schematic script. Much of the acting, particularly by Sweet and Normand, is characterised by tight restraint, the performers concentrating on intentionally mastering and concealing their characters’ feelings rather than letting them break forth, embarrassingly, in the presence of a rival or spouse. This technique involves, as Tom Gunning (pp. 228, 263 271) has pointed out, increased use of the actors’ backs as means of theatrical expressivity. Thus, moments when characters allow their masks of contrived restraint to slip are notably powerful, as in Blanche Sweet’s gestures of despair as she acknowledges the reality of John’s infidelity, and in both Sweet’s and Normand’s depiction of Mary’s awful childbirth death, conspicuous when contrasted with John responding to the same event with numb helplessness and mute grief which preempt strong gesture. Some of the intertitles for the MoMA viewing print of The Eternal Mother were reconstructed from the Biograph Bulletin by Tom Gunning and Eileen Bowser. David Mayer

123

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

363 BIOGRAPH

ITALIAN BLOOD Filming date: 8/11 August 1911 Location: Coytesville, New Jersey/New York Studio Release date: 9 October 1911 Release length: 999 feet Copyright date: 11 October 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Bernardine R. Leist Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Vivian Prescott (Wife); Joseph Graybill? (Husband); Wilfred Lucas, J. Jiquel Lanoe, Charles H. West?. NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from the photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A ILLUSTRATION OF WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN THE RESULT OF INDIFFERENCE [sic] In the little Italian home the wife feels she is neglected and apparently it seems that her husband´s love is growing cold, for he has become decidedly indifferent. She, therefore, plans with her cousin to arouse his love through jealousy. At an Italian picnic, after repeated vain efforts to draw her husband´s attentions toward her, she starts off with her cousin, passing in view of her husband. His fiery nature is violently aroused with jealousy, and rushing home in a towering rage would have wreaked disaster to the entire family, for his terrible suspicion poisons his mind even against his two little children. He learns the truth, however, and realizes now to what extreme the result of his neglect would have driven him. Biograph Bulletin, October 9, 1911

Although it has been preserved at the Museum of Modern Art, Italian Blood is not yet available in a viewing print and little can be said about it except that it was well received at release. The Biograph Bulletin photo suggests that Vivian Prescott plays the lead, a wife in Italy who feels neglected by her husband (probably Joseph Graybill) and schemes with her cousin (Wilfred Lucas or J. Jiquel Lanoe) to arouse her husband’s jealousy. The plan works all too well and the enraged husband nearly murders his children along with his wife before grasping the truth. The New York Dramatic Mirror singled out the performances of the wife and husband: “The two principal players in this film are deserving of marked praise for their splendid interpretation of their respective roles. Both were delightfully representative of what the film would express, ‘Italian Blood.’ In fact, the entire picture suggests the life of these people in a marvelously convincing way” (October 18, 1911, p. 29). The film’s use of “these people”, hot-blooded Italians, as a vehicle for extreme family melodramas, harks back to much earlier Griffith films with even wilder plot devices, such as the pistol-in-the-altar contrived by the rejected Italian suitor in At the Altar (1909) or the 124

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

infant-hanging-by-the-window-cord contrived by the “facinorous Sicilian profligate” in The Cord of Life (1909). Italian Blood’s closer inspiration may be Griffith’s The Spanish Gypsy, from six months earlier in 1911, where Vivian Prescott took the other role, the murderously jealous partner, “the Latin type of girl [who] loves with extreme ardor [and] hates just as intensely”. The scenario for Italian Blood is credited to Bernadine Leist, an actress who appeared in Edison films starting from at least 1909. Although her known writing credits are few, she seems to have had a way with tales about angry and irrational men, to judge from her earlier scenarios for Griffith’s Waiter No. 5 (1910) and his fascinating The Iconoclast (1910). The New York Dramatic Mirror also praised the construction of Italian Blood’s resolution, when “the husband first decides to kill his family. Scenario writers who have difficulty in expressing thought in action might note the manner in which this is suggested … . There were possibly subtitles that were not necessary, but on the whole the film is one of the strongest of the Biograph issues” (ibid). One looks forward to the availability of this promising film. Scott Simmon

125

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

364 BIOGRAPH

THE OLD CONFECTIONER’S MISTAKE Filming date: 10/20 July, 12 August 1911 Location: New York Studio/Fort Lee, New Jersey Release date: 7 September 1911 Release length: 999 feet Copyright date: 12 September 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Edward Acker [“The Lawn Party”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Old Daddy Dodson); Grace Henderson (Lady Bountiful); Edna Foster, ? (Children) NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from the photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A CASE OF TOOTHACHE THAT ALMOST CAUSED A TRAGEDY Old Daddy Dodson would have spent a cheerless life had it not been for the children in the neigborhood [sic], who all loved him, and to all of whom he was indeed a daddy. He was an ice cream maker and when the Lady Bountiful of the village takes all the kiddies for an outing he is commissioned to supply the ice cream. While making the cream he is seized with a violent toothache and sends to his druggist friend for some laudanum to ease the pain. When the children get to the grove they become impatient for the ice cream, so Lady Bountiful goes to the nearest telephone to hurry it up. This and several other things flurry Daddy and in his haste and excitement he pours the laudanum into the ice cream instead of extract. When he makes the discovery the cream is on its way, and the effort to intercept it or keep the children from eating it is most exciting. Biograph Bulletin, September 7, 1911

This is another film not yet available in a viewing print (although it has been preserved onto safety preprint material from the original negative at the Museum of Modern Art). The Old Confectioner’s Mistake seems to combine a syrupy story of a lonely candy maker fond of the neighborhood children with an extended race-to-the-rescue, after he mistakenly puts “laudanum” in their ice cream. The title character, “Old Daddy Dodson”, is apparently played by Wilfred Lucas, in heavy makeup. “Daddy is played with the finest sort of feeling, and his love for the children and their love for him gives a sentimental touch that is delightful”, reported The New York Dramatic Mirror (September 13, 1911, p. 25). The scenario is credited to a certain Edward Acker, who wrote a number of such light dramas for Griffith. There seem also to be curious touches of darkness in the film, including a suicide attempt by the candy maker that sets things right. The New York Dramatic Mirror’s review adds details to the Biograph Bulletin synopsis above; the laudanum mistake:

126

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

is done so logically and convincingly that it carries conviction and makes the resulting suspense and climax entirely plausible. The messenger who is delivering the ice cream to the picnic party of children dallies on the way to spoon with his girl. Only for this ‘daddy’ and his employer would never have reached the scene in time to prevent a wholesale tragedy. Even as it is, they meet with delays. The traces of the team break and ‘daddy’ in despair tries to shoot himself. The sound of the gun stops the picnickers in the act of eating the ice cream, and the rescuers are eventually able to get there in time. Each little incident in the story has its reason for being there and its part in the plot. It is a model of construction. (ibid)

As routine as all this sounds, a letter to the editor in the same week’s The New York Dramatic Mirror (September 13, 1911, p. 23) suggests that Griffith’s Biograph films were now also routinely superior. The correspondent, who “seldom misses a night at the movies”, rated the companies this way: “Biographs seem always dependable, the Edisons nearly as much so, and I am always glad to see ‘Vitagraph night’ on the bill” . Scott Simmon

127

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

365 BIOGRAPH

THE MAKING OF A MAN Filming date: 14/17 August 1911 Location: New York Studio/Fort Lee, New Jersey Release date: 5 October 1911 Release length: 1000 feet Copyright date: 7 October 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: R.L. Bond Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Dell Henderson (Leading man); Blanche Sweet (Young woman); William J. Butler, J. Jiquel Lanoe, ? (Her family); Frank Evans (Sheriff); Kate Toncray (Landlady); Gladys Egan, Charles Hill Mailes, Frank Evans, W. Chrystie Miller (In first audience); Guy Hedlund (Boyfriend); Edward Dillon (Usher); Joseph Graybill, Claire McDowell, Donald Crisp (Actors); Edward Dillon, Frank Evans, W. Chrystie Miller, Kate Toncray (At dance); W.C. Robinson, Charles Hill Mailes (At first stage door); Vivian Prescott, Mabel Normand, Harry Hyde, Frank Evans, Wilfred Lucas, Kate Toncray, Grace Henderson (In second audience); Harry Hyde (At second stage door); Donald Crisp, Charles Hill Mailes, Joseph Graybill (Backstage); J. Waltham (Desk clerk) Archival Sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate positive (AFI/Delbert Pfister Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative HOW THE GOOD IN A SHIFTLESS ACTOR WAS BROUGHT OUT A barn-storming company is playing at the village theatre and a young girl becomes fascinated by the leading man. There is a dance given during the stay of the company in the town, and the girl meets the actor, who attends. His [sic] the old story – her infatuation grows into love. Her father, who has a terrible aversion for actors, becomes almost despotic when he finds that his daughter is smitten with the actor, and his unreasonable discipline causes her to leave home to follow him. The actor realizes that he honestly loves the little girl, and so he marries her at once. Her father, however, forces her back home as she is under age. The actor determines to make himself worthy of her, and his ambitious efforts meet with success. He returns to claim his wife, but is told she is dead – for she was considered dead by her family when she finally left home in search of him. Fate, however, brings them together in a most unlooked for manner. Biograph Bulletin, October 5, 1911

A young woman in the town of Pine Grove is smitten by the flair of the “LEADING MAN” in a traveling theatrical troupe and abandons her boyfriend for him at a town dance. Her father catches her attempting to kiss him goodbye at the train station and drags her back home. Soon, however, she sneaks away to join him in a hotel in the next town. He obtains a marriage license but the father “ENLISTS THE HELP OF THE POLICE” to return his underage daughter. Back home, she is offered up as a bad example to her younger sisters and bookish brother. She leaves home again, this time for dingy “LODGINGS ACROSS TOWN”. When the actor comes seeking her, he is told by her father, “MY DAUGHTER IS DEAD. GET OUT OF 128

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

MY HOUSE.”

This encounter is the final blow to the weak-hearted father, whose lifeless body the daughter attempts to reason with before discovering that he has died. Months later, the troupe returns to town, and the daughter, now with a new infant, goes backstage to find the actor. They embrace and all is well.

This film and Griffith’s subsequent one, Her Awakening, make an instructive pair. They were produced back-to-back in mid-August 1911. Each had a two-day shoot, one day in the studio and one on location in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Each is a tale of a daughter who finds her single-parent household restrictive; each daughter takes up a secret romance that proves to be the death of her parent but results nevertheless with the daughter and her lover reunited. The Making of a Man is more elaborate, with a cast that includes virtually the full company of Biograph actors and with much more rapid cutting. Even so, the result is a conventional, formulaic draft for the next film. It’s as if Griffith learned something in producing the rushed drama of The Making of a Man and tried out the story again, taking time in Her Awakening for realistic details, comic counterpoint, and character complexity. Griffith made relatively few films about actors (and, surprisingly, none at all about filmmaking), and in The Making of a Man we get a sample of stage acting of the unhand-her-you-brute style that enraptures the wide-eyed, small-town girl, played by Blanche Sweet. There are none of the droll observations about theatrical passion, on stage and off, as there will be in 1912’s The Old Actor. Instead, Griffith mounts something of a defense of the moral integrity of his much-maligned profession. The lead actor who takes up with the country girl is never merely a sophisticated city cad, despite the “N.Y. Theater” identification on his suitcase, and he appears as upset as she over their first separation. The film forgoes opportunities for contrasting stage melodrama with subtler film acting styles by including such wild scenes as the one where the father clutches his failing heart just before his daughter confronts him and discovers she has been reasoning with a corpse. Indeed, William J. Butler’s stagy goatee and heavy make-up give a weirdly caricatured comic look to the father. Beefy Dell Henderson is also strange casting for the reputedly entrancing matinee idol. Even Blanche Sweet is hard pressed to find time for subtlety in a film filled with rushed cutting between rooms and distant locations. Although the complex cutting among the rooms in the hotel is typically coherent, it’s unclear when our moral couple could have had time to conceive their child, since the daughter hasn’t even removed her traveling hat by the time her father and the tin-star sheriff arrive to drag her back home. (Two crude jump cuts in the surviving print suggest that it is missing at least two of the original intertitles.) One fascinating moment of female assertion comes when daughter seems to propose marriage herself to the actor immediately after arriving at the hotel (although the title placement and staging are ambiguous enough that the surprised look on the actor’s face might be his shock at his own question). Our impatience with The Making of a Man might seem only a reflection of our distance from 1911 were it not for The New York Dramatic Mirror’s review, which also groused that the film “does not … show by anything other than titles that the particular man referred to either needed to be made a man of or was made a man of. And if he was so made it gives no hint as to how or why” (October 11, 1911, p. 29). The film’s title, so inappropriate to this story, was a popular one. Selig brought out another Making of a Man the following week, with Herbert Rawlinson in any early film role as a city man who learns higher ethics in a small town. There may be a similar notion within Griffith’s film – the more fervent applause at the actor’s return curtain call hints that his performance has deepened – but it’s lost in a rush through intercut spaces and dispersed characters. Scott Simmon 129

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

366 BIOGRAPH

HER AWAKENING Filming date: 21/22 August 1911 Location: Fort Lee, New Jersey/New York Studio Release date: 28 September 1911 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 28 September 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Mabel Normand (Daughter); Kate Bruce (Mother); Harry Hyde (Sweetheart); Vivian Prescott, ? (Laundry employees); Fred Mace, ? (Laundry customers); Robert Harron (On street); Kate Toncray (Old woman); William J. Butler, J. Jiquel Lanoe (Doctors); J. Jiquel Lanoe, Robert Harron, Frank Evans, Charles Hill Mailes, W.C. Robinson, Donald Crisp, Kate Toncray (Accident witnesses) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) THE PUNISHMENT OF PRIDE A pretty but dutiful daughter has one fault, vanity. She is ashamed of her poor old mother, who is decrepit and lame. Working in the office of a laundry, she meets on social terms one of the customer, who, becoming quite attracted by her, is later considered her sweetheart. Ashamed of her home and mother, she has never let him visit her, preferring to meet him outside at a trysting place. One day when walking with her sweetheart, she meets her mother, but denies her. Her awakening comes a few minutes later when she sees her poor old mother knocked down by an automobile. Her mother dies from the effects of the accident, and the poor girl’s grief knows no bounds as she fondles the old cane so long carried by her dear mother. Her future does not remain hopeless, for the young man vows he still loves her; but what a bitter punishment she had suffered for vanity. Biograph Bulletin, September 28, 1911

A vivacious young woman lives in a modest home in a small town with her stooped, shabbily dressed mother. The daughter works in the front office of a laundry, where she meets a welldressed young man with whom she soon is taking park promenades and ferry rides. She never allows him to accompany her home, parting instead on street corners. After one of their dates, he accidentally walks off with her parasol and runs back to find her with her mother, who is on her way to market in a particularly soiled apron. The daughter turns her back on her mother and pretends that she is a stranger. The heartbroken mother walks distractedly into the street, where she is struck down by a speeding automobile. Carried back home, she clings to life while her daughter prays abjectly in the next room. When the doctor pronounces the mother past all hope, the daughter cowers at her feet and the boyfriend looks down in stern judgment. After the funeral, he relents in his resolution to not march past her gate. He pulls her into an embrace and pries from her hands her mother’s now-treasured apron and cane. 130

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Her Awakening is a small, subtle masterwork, filled with deft details and containing the first obvious star-making performance from Mabel Normand, who previously had appeared for Griffith only in bit parts and as an Indian in The Squaw’s Love. The film is a complex tale about women’s options at a time of employment and generational change, but it’s a parable that never feels formulaic. At least in outline, Her Awakening is another of Griffith’s cautionary stories about children who neglect the humbler, shopworn values of their parents (as in, say, the explicitly titled The Lesson [1910], where “the awful results of filial indifference” lead a son into murder). Mabel Normand plays the daughter whose moment of ethical failure, when she denies her mother, is ancestor to all of those Hollywood family melodramas about generational class mobility that turn on scenes of children denying their parents, always futile and tragic, as in Gregory La Cava’s Symphony of Six Million (1932) or Frank Capra’s The Younger Generation (1929), where the son introduces his mother and father as servants. Beyond her fashionably tight-waisted dresses and flamboyant hats, it is the daughter’s job at the laundry office that most fully suggests the problems arising in separating from the traditional female domestic sphere. Her job as a shop clerk encourages freedom to meet young men unknown to her mother, and the daughter is able to see her beau alone in new public leisure spaces, as represented by the ferry ride and walk in the park. Griffith doesn’t quite condemn her for her independent job at the small shop – which he had himself experienced as a dry goods clerk in Louisville – but he is droll about the sexual hazards. Working at the other counter in the laundry is another woman (Vivian Prescott in “a gem of character comedy work”, as The New York Dramatic Mirror noticed [October 4, 1911, p. 30]), who represents the looser female options: chomping her gum incessantly, flirting with customers, and flipping her fan in catty jealousy at our heroine’s capture of a man. The staging of these scenes with Prescott and Normand is unflamboyantly assured. Instead of intercutting the two women, they are counterpointed in complex medium shots, with Prescott’s exaggerated gestures placed in the background of Normand’s more refined charm. The tragedy of the mother’s death seems to result from the vibrant daughter throwing herself too completely into the (male) world of work and too decisively severing her ties to the (female) world of the home. It’s as if the daughter’s new style of dress, public leisure, and work outside the home combine to invoke the specter of a speeding automobile, essence of the century ahead. The hit-and-run accident is a shocking incursion, especially because it’s caused by the first car we’ve seen, despite earlier street shots. The spatial staging of the film is invariably precise. The active daughter initially captures the center of complexly composed frames, with the mother pushed to the edges; hence the haunting quality of the key shot in which the daughter hustles her boyfriend away from the accidental street corner meeting, leaving the confused mother to contemplate blank space from the edge of the frame. In part because Her Awakening is a “marvel of natural realism”, in The New York Dramatic Mirror’s words (the crowded life at the laundry, the dispute by mother and daughter over placement of dinner utensils, etc.), its cautionary social parable about changing women’s roles doesn’t play as retrograde as it sounds in outline. Mabel Normand’s vibrant performance evokes great sympathy, notwithstanding her character’s one crucial moment of moral weakness. As I argue in The Films of D.W. Griffith (pp. 80-84), the film also contains a counter parable – a psychosexual tale of the daughter’s necessary “awakening” before she can move on to a new life with a man. Scott Simmon 131

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

367 BIOGRAPH

THE UNVEILING Filming date: 13 July, 26/28 August 1911 Location: New York Studio Release date: 16 October 1911; reissued by Biograph, 18 September 1916 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 17 October 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: T.P. Bayer Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Robert Harron (Boy); Grace Henderson (Mother); Mabel Normand (Showgirl); William J. Butler NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from the photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative SAVING A YOUNG MAN FROM MORAL, SOCIAL AND MAYBE FINANCIAL RUIN The boy, who is the idol of his widowed mother, returns from college with a collegiate record she is justly proud of. To mark the occasion his boyhood sweetheart and her mother come to spend a few days. The too-indulgent mother, however, is blind to the fact that the boy is spending most of his evenings in full dress, which should have told her that Bohemian society was engaging his attention. A show girl, who learns that he will soon come into great wealth, determines to win him. Unsophisticated as he is, he is an easy prey. A friend of the family warns the mother of her boy’s danger, which she is loath to believe until positive proof is presented. Pleadings are in vain for the boy is fascinated, and so the sorrowing mother, feeling she has lost all that she has lived for, determines upon self-destruction and is prevented only by the timely appearance of her visiting friend, who devises the plan that awakens the boy. She has the mother pretend suicide on account of the loss of fortune. This shows the boy the true nature and design of the object of his infatuation. Biograph Bulletin, October 16, 1911

At the time of this writing, this film is not yet available for viewing, although it does survive and has been preserved onto safety preprint material by the Museum of Modern Art. The plot elements suggest that there must have been some obsession or compulsion around Biograph in August 1911. As with Griffith’s two previous productions, this is one more film about the trauma induced in a single parent when a young adult child finds unacceptable romance outside the home. This time the death of the parent is averted, although just barely. In The Unveiling, it’s a son who falls under the spell of a “show girl” who apparently hasn’t the solid ethics of the traveling player in The Making of a Man. (Mabel Normand, the lead in Her Awakening, here plays the show girl.) As the Biograph Bulletin synopsis above puts it, the mother in The Unveiling feels “she has lost all that she has lived for” and “determines upon self destruction”. The New York Dramatic Mirror review makes clearer how this 132

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

near-suicide serves to bring the son back to a more acceptable romance, with the daughter of a friend of the mother: “The mother is about to poison herself, feeling that she has now lived for naught, when her friend suggests the ruse. The showgirl comes to the house with the youth, who apparently is bent on introducing her into the family, but there she is told that the mother’s fortune has been swept away and she has committed suicide. She leaves the youth without much ado and he later rejoices that his mother really lives” (October 25, 1911, p. 29). Robert Harron (1894–1920) had worked in every odd job at Biograph since he was thirteen. In the previous few months he had been given the lead roles he would maintain with Griffith throughout the decade of the 1910s, beginning with the heroic boys of Fighting Blood and Bobby, the Coward. In The Unveiling, he is playing (at age seventeen) a young man returning from college. The New York Dramatic Mirror found the film’s main flaw in the underdeveloped character of his former girlfriend, daughter of the mother’s friend, whose rekindled romance with Harron provides the apparently perfunctory happy ending: “Perhaps it would have been better had this character been introduced more in the later scenes – thus avoiding the tacked-on effect of the last scene” (ibid). Scott Simmon

133

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

368 BIOGRAPH

THE ADVENTURES OF BILLY Filming date: 23/24 August, 2/3 September 1911 Location: New York Studio/Fort Lee, New Jersey/Westfield, New Jersey Release date: 19 October 1911 Release length: 999 feet Copyright date: 21 October 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: James Carroll [“An American Boy”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Edna Foster (Billy); Joseph Graybill, Donald Crisp (Tramps); Dell Henderson, Claire McDowell (Rich couple); Kate Bruce (Maid); Frank Evans (Farmer); W. Chrystie Miller (Robbery victim); Alfred Paget, Charles Hill Mailes (Farmhands/Rescuers); Grace Henderson (Woman on porch); Harry Hyde (On lawn); D.W. Griffith (On bench) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Film and Television Archive, 35mm acetate negative (version undetermined); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) SUGGESTED BY PRESS COMMENT ON THE TRAMP EVIL Recently there has been much comment in the press on the tramp evil, and one writer suggested that moving pictures might be made to clearly show the results of this public nuisance. Little Billy, the bootblack, finding luck against him, decides to move to some other town. To do this he must walk, as he hasn’t the wherewith [sic] for a railroad ticket. While trudging through the country, he falls into the hands of a couple of sinister looking tramps, and they at once, by threats, force him to beg for them. A day or so later, the tramps hold up an old man, and while procuring his money throw him down with such force as to unintentionally kill him. Panic-stricken at their awful deed, they feel that the boy’s knowledge of the affair will prove disastrous for them, and so they decide to get rid of him. Through the sagacity of a dog the boy is saved and the tramp are captured. Biograph Bulletin, October 19, 1911

A homeless orphan named Billy finds city folk uncharitable and walks into the country. There, he is befriended by two tramps who turn violent and force him to beg from rural homes. When Billy witnesses them accidentally killing a robbery victim, the tramps decide that he too must be killed and lock him into a shed. Their dispute over which of the two will do the murder allows Billy to put a note in the mouth of a dog, who carries it back his owner. The rescuers arrive in time to save him.

The opening intertitle on The Adventures of Billy proclaims it to be ripped from today’s headlines: “SUGGESTED BY THE PRESS COMMENT ON THE TRAMP EVIL.” The two “tramps” here are certainly evil, with the one played by Donald Crisp more cold-bloodedly murderous than the one played by Joseph Graybill, and their characterization might support the frequent observation that American films by 1911 were, in their push for a higher class clientele, 134

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

becoming less sympathetic to the poor and to what we would now call the homeless. However, The Adventures of Billy balances its harsh depiction of the adult tramps with the concern for its title character, a perhaps ten-year-old boy first seen waking in a straw bed amid city lumber. His tough life is visually contrasted with the lovely shot of the sundrenched garden of the well-off country family from whom he is forced to beg and who will eventually adopt him. Indeed, notwithstanding the opening title, the figure of the threatening tramp had been a staple figure from Griffith’s first films, most memorably in A Rural Elopement (1909), with its unusual early close-up of the tramp who stares into the camera and nods menacingly before beating up a man and then abducting the victim’s girlfriend disguised in his clothes. By 1911 Griffith had begun to treat the homeless “tramp” with a wider range of characterizations. The “sentimental hobo” of A Knight of the Road, filmed back in February, saves a woman from “the machinations of several of his type”. The man who lives in a box behind the tenement in The Miser’s Heart (shot in October, a month after The Adventures of Billy) steals bread from a passing delivery boy but helps out the police when a more life-threatening crime is committed by others. Young Edna Foster makes a convincing “Billy” here, coolly underplaying the dire situations, and she was cast again in the adventurous role in Billy’s Stratagem (1911), the loosest sort of sequel, set back in time on the Indian frontier. The Adventures of Billy is simple, direct and quite compelling, a well-paced one-reeler with an authentic feel for character and a mastery of suspense. The race-to-the-rescue features relatively restrained crosscutting to an auto overloaded with farm hands and the country family. The murder and other violence in the story was pushing at the limits of the acceptable even within such a well-constructed drama, as is evident from this crazily roundabout sentence in the New York Dramatic Mirror review: “There is no denying the fact that this is a very strong film in teaching what it sets out to teach—namely the tramp evil, but as a purely dramatic subject, though a most artistic and careful production, it is a question whether it is well, as it leaves a rather horrible impression upon a defenseless spectator, mainly on account of the intense realism of the situations that are almost uncanny in their compelling qualities” (October 25, 1911, p. 30). Such a comment also entirely misses the charm that perfectly counterpoints the film’s violence and realism. The dog’s ability to carry the rescue-plea note provides a wonderfully absurd way out for Billy. And in the proto-Chaplinesque coda after his rescue, Billy resists the idea of being adopted by the country couple, pointing out toward the freedom of the road, until their display of his new, cute “sister” convinces him otherwise. Watch for D.W. Griffith himself, in an extremely rare cameo, in the foreground of the second shot, sitting on a park bench. In another amusing touch, perhaps an in-joke, Griffith cast himself as grimly unsympathetic and tight-fisted, a city man whose refusal to give Billy anything convinces the boy that it’s time to set out for the country. Scott Simmon

135

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

369 BIOGRAPH

THE LONG ROAD Filming date: 30/31 August, 1/5 September 1911 Location: New York Studio/Fort Lee, New Jersey Release date: 26 October 1911 Release length: 1000 feet Copyright date: 30 October 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Bernardine R. Leist [“The Swinging Door”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (Edith); Grace Henderson (Her mother); Charles H. West (Ned); Claire McDowell (His wife); Edna Foster (Their son); Kate Bruce (Mother Superior); Kate Toncray (Nun); Donald Crisp, ? (Servants); Donald Crisp (Landlord); Charles Hill Mailes (Priest); Dell Henderson, Frank Evans, Harry Hyde, J. Jiquel Lanoe, Alfred Paget (Wedding guests); Robert Harron (Family friend); J. Jiquel Lanoe (On street); Edwin August, Alfred Paget, Harry Hyde, William J. Butler, Kate Toncray (At party); Wilfred Lucas, ? (Policemen); Frank Evans, Charles Hill Mailes, Joseph Graybill, Fred Mace, W. C. Robinson, Alfred Paget, Edward Dillon (In bar); ? (Bartender); J. Jiquel Lanoe (Doctor); ? (Old man); Guy Hedlund? (Butler) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) DESTINY’S ROADWAY, WITH ITS MANY TURNS At a garden party, Edith, in a spirit of coquetry, arouses the jealousy of Ned, her fiance [sic], who, taking her action seriously, gives a parasol, which he intended as a present for her, to another girl. This induces a quarrel, and both stubborn, the break is never mended. Hence, he marries the other girl. Heart-crushed, Edith seeks solace in the convent as a Sister of Mercy. Some time later, fate ordains it that she be assigned to embroider the layette of Ned’s first baby, a task often undertaken by the Sisters. This, you can imagine, is a terrible ordeal, but there is no help for it and the task is finished, which brings about the first meeting since the day of the garden fete between the two women. Several years later, while Edith is working among the poor of the East side she is startled by the sound of a shot, and following a small boy into a saloon from whence the sound came, finds Ned, who, having suffered business reverses, and become a hopeless drunkard, the accidental victim of the shot, with his child, now grown to boyhood, and his wife by his side. Ned has now reached the final turn in the road. Biograph Bulletin, October 26, 1911

At a garden party, Edith plays the coquette and has a falling out with her fiancé, Ned. He soon falls in love with another and marries. Edith, in despair, enters a convent. Some time after, Ned and his wife have a baby boy, and Edith is assigned by the Mother Superior of the convent to embroider the newborn’s layette. She does so and, upon delivering it, sees the happy mother and child, and the life she might have had. Several years later, Ned suffers a financial setback, and the family must move to a poor part of town. One day, Edith 136

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

and a fellow sister are working among the poor, when Ned is accidentally wounded during a fight between two gangs in a saloon. She enters the bar just behind Ned’s son, now a young boy, and recognizes her former fiancé. Edith quietly absents herself from the scene as Ned’s wife arrives. Later, dressed in widow’s black, Ned’s wife accepts a charitable gift of cash from Edith.

The Long Road is a crowded, disjointed film, within which is contained what might have been a profoundly moving study of love and despair. The film’s opening sequence recounts the dissolution of Edith and Ned’s engagement, and the differing paths each takes as a result of the breakup. Here is the film that might have been, a film that might have traced those miscalculations and missteps that cause a couple to drift apart. As it is, these moments serve merely as an introduction to a much more conventional story of coincidence and chance meeting. It would be another year before Griffith would attempt to present a subject in which a character’s psychological makeup is at the heart of the film, and not just a sidelight to the story at hand (The Painted Lady). Interestingly, his leading lady in that film would be the same as in The Long Road: Blanche Sweet. When we first see Edith (Blanche Sweet), she is seated serenely amidst the swirl of guests at a garden party. She notices Ned, her fiancé, talking to another woman and, in a jealous fit, she flirts with a young man rather than accept Ned’s gift of a parasol. This bit of “coquetry”, as the Biograph Bulletin describes it, costs her both the parasol and Ned’s affections. Neither is able to put aside their pride and call the other for a reconciliation, and by the time Edith does determine to heal the rift between them, Ned has fallen in love with another. When Edith and her mother attend Ned’s wedding, she causes a small scene of hysterics. In an effort to forget, she decides to become a nun. As this prologue ends, we see Ned and his new wife surrounded by a bower of flowers, followed by Edith saying her farewells to her mother as she follows the Mother Superior into the convent. The implication is clear: Ned’s life is just beginning, while Edith’s is now over. There is enough incident crowded into these scenes to make a full reel, but next we are shown the unlikely coincidence of Edith being given the responsibility of embroidering the layette for Ned’s newborn son. While rare today, such needlework done by nuns was common enough a century ago to cause no comment from the reviewer in The Moving Picture World (November 11, 1911, p. 468-9). Nevertheless, the fact that Edith is the one chosen for the task, and that she is instructed to endure such suffering by her superior, strains credibility. Years later, when Edith is shown ministering to the urban poor, she unknowingly brushes elbows on the street with Ned, now without work or hope. That she is witness to his death as a result of a barroom brawl in which he was not involved, thus making him a much more pathetic figure than if he were the agent of his own demise, is but one more unlikely coincidence layered on an already unbelievable series of events. In the end, Edith offers Ned’s widow and son charity, a distinctly unsatisfying conclusion to a tortured plot. And yet … It must be admitted that, at times, The Long Road is a moving film, one in which the conviction of the performances goes a long way toward overcoming the narrative’s twists and turns. In particular, Blanche Sweet is much better than one has a right to expect. In her scenes as a Sister of Mercy she does little more than cast her eyes downward, in an apparent effort to suggest devotional calm. However, and in marked contrast to her performance as a nun, her opening scenes as a vibrant, yet foolishly jealous fiancée are filled with small bits of business and telling gestures that signal much more than the story requires or suggests. Her performance gives a shading and depth to Edith’s character that makes her transformation into a repressed nun all the more dramatic and unfortunate. When, in the 137

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

last shot, Edith notices the rejected parasol among the widow’s possessions, we are thrown for one fleeting moment back to the realm of “what if…?” It is an old device, but the memory of Blanche Sweet’s earlier, heartfelt performance as the younger Edith makes it poignant. Steven Higgins

138

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

370 BIOGRAPH

THE BATTLE Filming date: 8/9 September 1911 Location: Coytesville, New Jersey/New York Studio Release date: 6 November 1911; reissued by Biograph, 11 June 1915 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 7 November 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (Woman); Charles H. West (Her sweetheart); Charles Hill Mailes (Union commander); Robert Harron, Harry Hyde, Donald Crisp, W. Christy Cabanne, Guy Hedlund, W.C. Robinson (Union soldiers); Dell Henderson, J. Jiquel Lanoe, Edwin August, William J. Butler, Joseph Graybill (Union officers); Kate Toncray, Edna Foster, W. Chrystie Miller (At dance); William J. Butler, Kate Toncray (At farewell); Lionel Barrymore (Wagon driver); Alfred Paget (Confederate soldier); Kate Bruce (In the town) Archival Sources: Cineteca del Friuli, 35mm nitrate positive (from Cineteca Griffith, Genoa, German intertitles); Filmoteca Española, 35mm acetate positive (no intertitles); George Eastman House, 35mm nitrate positive (incomplete); 28mm diacetate positive (incomplete); Library of Congress, 28mm diacetate positive (AFI/George Marshall Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate positive; UCLA Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate negative; 35mm nitrate positive (generation undetermined); 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) AN INFLUENCE THAT MAKES THE HERO In the days of ’61 how many of the brave soldiers were urged to deeds of valor and heroism by thoughts of “the girl he left behind”. This story tells of the transforming of a pusillanimous coward into a lion-hearted hero by the derision of the girl he loved. The battle takes place outside her home, and he, panic-stricken, rushes in, trembling with fear, to hide. She laughs in scorn at his cowardice and commands him to go back and fight. Her fortitude inspires him and he manages to rejoin his company before his absence is noticed. Ammunition is low and somebody must take the hazardous journey to procure more from another regiment, which he volunteers to do. This undertaking cannot be adequately described, for the young man faces death at every turn. The most thrilling part of his experience is where the opposing forces build bonfires along the road to menace the powder-wagon. This, without question, is the most stirring war picture ever produced. Biograph Bulletin, November 6, 1911

A prologue depicts the youthful gaiety and earnestness of a generation about to embark on the great adventure of war, with couples dancing and lovers pledging their devotion to each other. Swiftly, the call to arms is sounded and lines of soldiers march off to battle, crowds of celebrants cheering them on. With little warning, we are thrown into the midst of a fierce 139

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

fight in which the young soldier of the prologue loses his nerve and seeks shelter in his sweetheart’s home. Her disdain for his cowardice forces him to depart, and he finds his way back to his unit. Soon, the wounded commander of the Union forces falls back with his staff to the young girl’s house, using it as a command post. The young boy gets a chance to redeem himself by crossing enemy lines to request help from General Grant for his beleaguered comrades in the trenches. He accompanies an ammunition wagon back to his lines, enduring terrible resistance as he does so. He saves the day for the Union and regains the girl’s love.

This one-reel work of art has been reissued of late by the Biograph Company. It should be kept in the libraries of the Universities as a standard…. The best of the old one-reel Biographs of Griffith contained more in twenty minutes than these ambitious incontinent sixreel displays give us in two hours. It would pay a manager to hang out a sign: ‘This show is only twenty minutes long, but it is Griffith’s great film “The Battle”.’ Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915)

In mid-1915, the Biograph Company made available to exhibitors a special series of films, all reissued from its back catalog, and all directed by D.W. Griffith. Why this was done, of course, was no mystery: Griffith was the filmmaker of the moment, having recently released The Birth of a Nation to great acclaim (and condemnation), and he was embarked on the production of what would become Intolerance (1916). Biograph, on the other hand, was struggling to stay afloat. Since Griffith’s departure in October 1913, the company had stumbled along without direction, releasing mediocre films in an increasingly competitive market and remaining steadfast in its reliance on one and two-reel films in an industry moving inexorably to feature-length productions. For many months after Griffith left, his old employer believed that the luster of its name would draw audiences into the theaters, failing to realize that Griffith and his colleagues were the source of that audience’s loyalty. By the time it began its re-release program, Biograph was hopelessly out-of-step with its competitors and would soon shut down production at its Bronx studio. Biograph’s selection of The Battle as one of its first reissues was no mystery, either. Aside from the obvious effort to capitalize on the success of The Birth of A Nation, the year 1915 marked the close of the nation’s observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War. In fact, the original release of The Battle in 1911 coincided with the initial phase of the country’s commemoration of that war, one that was still vivid in the memory of many Americans living at the beginning of the twentieth century. While not the first Civil War film directed by D.W. Griffith, The Battle holds pride of place among his Biograph films as a work of grand ambition and impressive execution, an epic film in one reel. The above quoted passage from Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture may be found in the chapter titled “The Picture of Crowd Splendor”. Later in the same chapter, Lindsay actually claims The Battle to be greater than The Birth of a Nation, due to its “selfpossession and concentration”. I will not argue the point either way, except to share his admiration for Griffith’s ability to cut away all extraneous narrative information in the service of his larger goal: the depiction of battle in all its terror-inducing confusion, and its effect upon a single soldier. Earlier Civil War subjects from Griffith’s Biograph career – such as In The Border States, The Fugitive and The House with Closed Shutters (all 1910), and His Trust, His Trust Fulfilled and Swords and Hearts (all 1911) – avoided large recreations of battle by focusing instead on small skirmishes or domestic settings, or by suggesting great numbers of combatants 140

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

through skillful staging and camera placement. In The Battle, Griffith foregoes such devices for the deployment of large numbers of men and an almost documentary-like staging of combat. In this, it foreshadows The Birth of a Nation, but the canvas is smaller, the effect more intimate. In his featured review of The Battle in The Moving Picture World (November 4, 1911, p. 367), W. Stephen Bush observed that the film “is about a thousand feet long, but so intense and natural is its fascination, that at the end we could only realize that it was all over by a special effort of the will”. While this might suggest that the film is rushed, forcing more into its single reel than it can reasonably hold, the important point Bush is making is that the film feels “natural”, that its intensity is well earned and not artificially achieved. Griffith takes great care to fill every frame of battle with clearly delineated planes of action, each easily distinguishable from the others, and each necessary to the forward motion of the narrative. No confused rush of costumed extras in this film; The Battle arranges its forces with clarity and care. As for the story itself, Griffith and his actors break no new ground. Charles H. West’s cowardly soldier is clearly a type, yet the experience he endures on the battlefield is so convincing, one is struck by Griffith’s ready reliance on unsubtle stage conventions to convey his fears. Similarly, Blanche Sweet’s young girl too easily mocks his failure of nerve, shifting quickly from concern to derision as she witnesses his breakdown. Showing no sympathy for the trial he has endured, her laughter is all the more cruel for its thoughtlessness. Nevertheless, these aspects of the film would not have troubled audiences of 1911; it is their appearance in a production of such realism that makes them seem odd today, as if two quite different films – one shot at the 14th Street studio in New York, and the other on location in Coytesville, New Jersey – had been joined together arbitrarily. In the Moving Picture World review quoted above, W. Stephen Bush offered a “welldeserved word of praise regarding the women’s dresses and coiffures of the wartime period; it is in the elaboration of such details that the masterhand often betrays itself as it does here even to the last chignon on the young girl’s heads.” Griffith had drawn upon his obsessive fascination with the Civil War in past films to create a palpable sense of time and place, but as even his contemporaries noted, in The Battle he exceeded such past efforts. Steven Higgins

141

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

371 BIOGRAPH

LOVE IN THE HILLS Filming date: 21/23 September 1911 Location: Suffern, New York Release date: 30 October 1911 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 31 October 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Dell Henderson Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (The girl); Wilfred Lucas (The manly suitor); Charles H. West (The shiftless suitor); Joseph Graybill (The city suitor); Kate Toncray, ? (Girl’s parents) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A TALE OF THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS WHERE STRANGERS ARE UNWELCOME The old soldier’s little daughter has two persistent suitors. One, a manly fellow who tells the girl she will marry him in spite of all. Her other suitor is a good-natured, shiftless chap, whose weaknesses are booze and music, he being the village fiddler. He tries to get the lead on his neighbor by presenting her with a mammoth pumpkin. He thinks this little attention should win her, but she has met and become interested in a young stranger from the big city, who is hunting and fishing in these hills. The fiddler, despairing, plays soulfully on his violin, thinking the strains may soften her heart – they do, but for the other fellow, with whom she consents to elope. Her manly friend prevents this, however, by driving the city fellow away. The girl realizes the error of her intentions and accepts her mountain knight, just as the fiddler arrives to renew his suit, aided by the pumpkin. He might have exclaimed “Well, I’ll be darned,” but he simply ejaculates “Oh! Pumpkins!” Biograph Bulletin, October 30, 1911

A pretty young mountain girl has two suitors: one, a manly type and the other, a shiftless fiddler. The manly suitor seems all but certain to win the girl’s affections until she meets a vacationing stranger from the city. The fiddler, in despair, plays himself a sad tune on his violin, which inadvertently softens the girl’s heart toward the stranger. She agrees to elope with him. The manly suitor encounters the interloper on the way to his prearranged meeting with the girl, wounds him with his pistol, and sends him on his way. The mountain man then finds the girl and convinces her that he is her one true love. The fiddler, arriving to court the girl with a pumpkin, sees the hopelessness of his suit and slips away. In the end, all are gathered outside the family cabin, the happy couple with their baby and the fiddler playing a tune.

Northwest of New York City, on the border between New York State and New Jersey, are found the Ramapo Mountains, a part of the great Appalachian chain of rolling mountains 142

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

that, while not nearly as imposing as the Rockies, nevertheless possess a beauty all their own. While today given over to the suburban sprawl so typical of contemporary America, for many generations the Ramapo Mountains were home to an intensely proud and private people who lived a self-sufficient life, only rarely venturing out of their secluded settlements to make contact with nearby towns. In this, they were quite similar to the “hillbilly” types so often found in Biograph backwoods dramas. One such nearby town, and still very much a thriving community, was Suffern, New York. An important stop along a major train line heading out of New York City – the same line that might very well have led Griffith and his team even further north to Cuddebackville – Suffern would appear to have been a natural place for Griffith to film his mountain melodramas and comedies. Curiously, and despite its strong resemblance to Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as its proximity to the New York, Griffith shot only one film that we know of in the Ramapo Mountains near Suffern: Love in the Hills. Though a decidedly minor production in its time, Love in the Hills holds a certain fascination for us today. In part, this is because it records, in a fictional setting, a long-lost rural landscape, but the film also captures the longstanding conflict in American culture between the city and the country, the corrupt and the pure. The story, written by Biograph regular Dell Henderson, whittles this conflict down to its most basic elements, with a bit of homespun humor thrown into the mix. Blanche Sweet portrays a young girl courted by Wilfred Lucas, a “manly suitor”, and Charles H. West, “a shiftless suitor”. Of course, it is a foregone conclusion as to which of these two men she prefers, but into their midst arrives Joseph Graybill, a seemingly innocent vacationer who represents the decadent influence of the city. His easy seduction of the girl, unwittingly aided by the strains of the fiddler’s tune, marks him as the kind of ne’erdo-well for whom such encounters are all too common. Since the outcome of the confrontation between the city suitor and the manly suitor is also never really in doubt, Griffith and Henderson give the film what life it has by highlighting the role of the shiftless suitor, a musician who likes to drink a bit more than he should. He is a comic figure, chewing cloves to mask his alcohol breath and courting the girl by offering her ever-larger pumpkins. Still, his part in the story becomes critical for, without his fiddling, the girl might never have succumbed to the charms of the city visitor. It is an unusual part for Charles H. West, playing as he usually does virtuous young men who, despite their weaknesses, emerge from their trials with the love and respect of the leading lady. West is actually quite effective in this pivotal character role, one that we might assume Dell Henderson wrote with himself in mind. It also shifts the emotional balance of the story from melodrama to comedy, a necessary device given the lack of real tension in the film. Griffith and his actors clearly understand that this is a small film, one in which the performances must be as relaxed and genial as the setting itself. In doing so, they crafted a small, yet lovely idyll. Steven Higgins

143

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

372 BIOGRAPH

THE TRAIL OF BOOKS Filming date: 26/30 September 1911 Location: New York Studio/Fort Lee, New Jersey Release date: 9 November 1911 Release length: 997 feet Copyright date: 13 November 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Jerome J. Olson Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Edwin August (Husband); Inez Seabury (Daughter) NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from the photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Russell Merritt identified Seabury from Bulletin photograph. Archival Sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate positive (AFI/National Screen and Sound Archive–ScreenSound Australia Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative HOW A RECONCILIATION WAS BROUGHT ABOUT BETWEEN A HUSBAND AND WIFE The couple quarrel over a trivial matter and a separation seems inevitable. Their little child understands there is something wrong and endeavors to smooth matters, without avail. Left alone, she goes to amuse herself, and as several children pass on their way to school, she wants to accompany them. They playfully tell she has no books. An idea! She goes into the house and gathers up an armful of books out of the bookcase, and off she starts by her “lonely”. During this time mamma has been packing up her trunk to leave the place, and has ordered the expressman to call. In readiness to go, she looks for the child, and the only clue leading to her whereabouts is the finding of a book on the front lawn. The expressman remembers passing, in fact almost running over, a little tot with her arms full of books. The dropping of these books leads the mother on, accompanied by the expressman, until they find her in the hands of a couple of tramps. How she gets there is impossible to describe in a short space. You ma y be assured that by this time the parents’ quarrel has been forgotten. Biograph Bulletin, November 9, 1911

The Trail of Books survives, but not in viewable form at the time of writing. With that in mind, it is difficult to write much about this film without risking contradiction once it is available for examination. The review in The Moving Picture World (November 25, 1911, p. 636) is of little help. It begins: A little family tragedy with a happy ending. A new child player has a prominent part in it and the pretty naturalness of her work adds much to the picture’s charm. The first subtitle thrown on the screen tells us that the child’s parents are disagreeing over trifles. This title is more trite than the picture of the fact, and its absence would have been an improvement.

144

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

After a summary of the plot, the writer ends the review by praising the subject as “a very well acted and commendable film”. The film’s author, from whom the story was bought, is listed in the Biograph Company’s Scenario Register as Jerome J. Olson, a name that appears nowhere else in connection with the company or its releases. This makes it impossible to infer anything about the story or its construction from other subjects Olson may have written. In addition, the central role of the child is played, as noted in the above review, by a young actress new to the company. The publicity photograph published with the Biograph Bulletin for The Trail of Books shows a girl who looks very much like Inez Seabury, a performer positively identified by Graham et al. in only two other Biograph films (For His Son and The Sunbeam), both filmed in late 1911. However, until a print is made, such identification can only be tentative. It is important to note that, when a print is produced from an original Biograph camera negative, it will contain neither main nor intertitles, as they do not survive in the Biograph Collection at the Museum of Modern Artand no documentation from the Copyright Collection at the Library of Congress exists for this studio’s 1911 releases. In the end, though essentially complete, a preserved The Trail of Books exclusively made from the MoMA material will always be a fragment of the original (the MoMA material measures 936 feet out of an original 997 feet). This, in fact, is the case for virtually all Griffith-era Biograph films derived from MoMA’s collections; researchers and audiences alike should always be mindful of this fact, and what it means to their assessments of Griffith’s work. Steven Higgins

145

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

373 BIOGRAPH

THROUGH DARKENED VALES Filming date: 28/30 September, 2/5 October 1911 Location: New York Studio/Fort Lee, New Jersey Release date: 16 November 1911 Release length: 999 feet Copyright date: 18 November 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Stanner E.V. Taylor Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Blanche Sweet (Grace); Grace Henderson (Her mother); Charles H. West (Dave); Joseph Graybill (Howard); J. Jiquel Lanoe (Among party guests); Dell Henderson (First doctor); Kate Toncray (Nurse); Charles Hill Mailes (Oculist); Fred Mace (Dave’s employer); Jackie Saunders (Howard’s next girlfriend); Kate Bruce (Cleaning woman); William J. Butler (Second doctor); William Bechtel (Office technician?); Adolph Lestina (Oculist’s assistant); J. Jiquel Lanoe (Office worker); W. Christy Cabanne, Harry Hyde (In oculist’s office) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate positive A TERRIBLE SACRIFICE PROMPTED BY TRUE LOVE Grace rejects poor honest-hearted Dave in favor of Howard, the flashy village beau. Dave resolves to show Grace there is something in him, by working hard and raising himself above the ordinary standard. At a house party Grace is the victim of a chafing-dish explosion, which leaves her blind, with hopes of a cure in an operation, which, of course, requires money. For this she appeals to Howard, but he cruelly refuses. In fact he has no patience with her in her misfortune. She now realizes how shallow Howard’s character is. Dave by hard work and frugal living has saved quite a little money, which he intends as the foundation of a future, should Grace reconsider, but fate intervenes and his close application to work has stricken him blind, hence his life’s savings seem destined to be given to restore his sight. While in the outer office of the celebrated oculist, he hears Grace’s voice, and for the first time learns of her misfortune. From the bits of conversation overheard, he realizes Grace’s helplessness, so calling the specialist in, he gives him the money he intended for his own operation, for Grace’s, enjoining secrecy as to who it came from. This sacrifice makes life for him a long, dark road. Grace later finds out the truth. Biograph Bulletin, November 16, 1911

Dave loves Grace, but she rejects him in favor of Howard, a flashier suitor. Dave determines to work harder to improve his chances with Grace. At a party with Howard and some friends, a chafing dish explodes in Grace’s face, blinding her. As a result, Howard grows uneasy around Grace and eventually finds another girlfriend. Meanwhile, Dave continues to work late into the evenings and the subsequent strain on his eyes causes him to go blind, as well. While visiting a clinic to have his eyes operated on, Dave secretly hears of Grace’s misfortune. He tells her doctor to take his money so that she may have the operation she needs. Later, her eyesight restored, Grace learns of Howard’s unfaithfulness and Dave’s sacrifice. 146

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Dave has taken to the streets of their small town, selling brooms. One day, Grace sees him from her window. She rushes to him and they are joyfully reunited.

As the film opens, poor but kind-hearted Dave is seen shaving before a mirror. He interrupts his toilette to look off wistfully, before his mother rouses him back to reality. We next see Grace in her home, a self-absorbed young woman who is primping herself with her mother’s help. Dave decides against the affectation of a cane as he finalizes his wardrobe, and he leaves his house. What follows is a sadly pathetic scene in which Grace cruelly rejects Dave’s suit with a laugh, favoring Howard, a flashy young man, instead. Dave returns home and tells his mother of the rejection. He falls dejectedly into a plain chair, turning his back to the viewer as he practically disappears below the frameline. With these five simple shots, D.W. Griffith and scenarist Stanner E.V. Taylor establish all we need to know about their major characters, and how they will drive the story we are about to see. Social status is conveyed economically through environment and appearance, while personality is delineated through subtle gesture and interaction. It is an indication of just how successfully Griffith and his Biograph colleagues had managed, by late 1911, to create such seemingly effortless introductions to their films, and on a regular basis, that the reviewer in The Moving Picture World (December 2, 1911, p. 724), while praising the players and the settings, could still “have difficulty in finding anything to praise in this poor picture”. In a sense, Griffith’s critics had come to expect such beautifully constructed moments in his Biograph films, perhaps to the point that they could be accused of taking them for granted. To be sure, much of Through Darkened Vales defies logic, from the ease with which its characters are blinded, to the amazing coincidences that bring them together, to the ease with which eyesight is restored. This is the stuff of hoary melodrama, yet it is easily forgiven at film’s end. When we see Charles H. West’s Dave walking alone and blind on the streets of his hometown, a load of brooms on his shoulder and the towering trees diminishing his already tenuous presence in the world, it is as if we have entered another film. The early October day in 1911 when Griffith and his company shot these scenes in Fort Lee, New Jersey, was particularly autumnal, and the heavy skies and strong winds gave the familiar town an unfamiliar cast. Fort Lee never looked so foreboding, yet so beautiful, as it does in Through Darkened Vales. The last scene’s happy reunion, in which Grace (Blanche Sweet) takes Dave into her home, her arm drawing him in much as Henry Walthall’s Little Colonel is welcomed home in The Birth of a Nation (1915), is a neat coincidence that ties up the story’s loose ends. It does not, however, erase those two unforgettable images of Dave wandering the town in search of a livelihood, in search of a life. Steven Higgins

147

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

374 BIOGRAPH

A WOMAN SCORNED Filming date: 4/10 October 1911 Location: Fort Lee, New Jersey/New York Studio Release date: 30 November 1911 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 2 December 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: George Hennessy Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Doctor); Claire McDowell (His wife); ? (Their child); Adolph Lestina (Sneak thief); Vivian Prescott (His sweetheart); Alfred Paget (Thief’s companion); Charles Hill Mailes, Frank Evans (Policemen) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative HER VENGEFUL SPIRIT AROUSED THROUGH JEALOUSY The little sweetheart of a sneak thief finds herself neglected for another, vows to get even, and she gets a chance she little hoped for. A doctor, living in the suburbs, arrives at the bank too late to make the deposit of a large amount of money, so consequently is obliged to keep it in his desk at home overnight. The crook and his companion learn of this and determine to get the money. Going to a telephone, they call the doctor urgently to their rooms, one of them feigning illness. He arrives, and taken unawares, they easily bind him, hands and feet, leaving him on the bed, while they rush off to rob his home. The girl enters shortly after their departure, and to get even with the man who spurned her, releases the doctor, who, after an exciting experience, manages to reach his house in time to save his wife and child from the attack of the crooks, who are taken into custody by the police, who followed. Biograph Bulletin, November 30, 1911

A sneak thief angers his sweetheart when he gives too much attention to another young woman. She expresses her anger and he brushes her aside, leaving their apartment with a confederate. On the street, the two men witness a doctor attempting to deposit a large amount of money in the bank, only to find the bank closed. They follow him to his home and observe him through a window as he places the money in his desk drawer. Later, the thief calls the doctor away from his family on a pretext, but, before he leaves on the house call, the doctor’s wife moves the money to a china cabinet. When he arrives at the thief’s home, the doctor is knocked unconscious and the pair leaves for the doctor’s house to steal the money. Once there, they find the cash gone from the desk and start to search the house. Mother and daughter barricade themselves in an upstairs bedroom, with the money. While this is transpiring, the doctor is discovered by the thief’s sweetheart and, in a fit of jealous rage, she agrees to help the doctor save his family. Doctor, sweetheart and police arrive in the nick of time, but, when the doctor turns to thank the jilted lover for her assistance, she spurns him and follows hopefully after her unfaithful companion.

148

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

On its simplest terms, A Woman Scorned is a remake of The Lonely Villa; yet, it differs from that 1909 landmark film, as well as many other intervening race-to-the-rescue subjects by Griffith, in interesting ways. The story is by George Hennessy, a writer who would be responsible for many of D.W. Griffith’s most important releases of 1912, among them The Girl and Her Trust; One Is Business, the Other Crime; Man’s Lust for Gold; and The Informer. In each of these films, as in A Woman Scorned, Hennessy is concerned less with plot than he is with character and its ability to drive plot. Not that A Woman Scorned is a psychological study, far from it. However, the tensions in this film grow from the choices made by the characters, rather than the needs of the plot determining the characters’ actions, as in early versions of the genre. Whether or not this is Griffith’s doing, or Hennessy’s, is hard to say – all but one of Hennessy’s nine previous scenarios for Biograph had been comedy subjects directed by Mack Sennett, the exception being Griffith’s Saved from Himself, which was filmed almost concurrently with A Woman Scorned – but the shift in emphasis makes for a more interesting, and perhaps a more suspenseful film. Remarkably, A Woman Scorned was shot in just two days in October 1911, a significant achievement in itself when one considers the variety of studio sets and exterior locations used to tell the story. What made such an accelerated production schedule possible may have been the confined setting of the doctor’s house itself. While only five sets were used, all were contiguous spaces – the doctor’s office, the family dining room, the hallway, the second floor landing, and the upstairs bedroom. Given the cramped quarters of the Biograph studio in its 14th Street brownstone, it would have been common practice to build a set, shoot the scene(s), strike the set, and then build the next, repeating the process until all interiors were completed. In this case, it is possible that at least some of the sets may have been constructed side-by-side; this would help explain how all interiors, including the thieves’ tenement, could be filmed in just one day. Certainly, there is a dynamic continuity between shots that would suggest such a possibility. Very little time is actually spent on the race to save the mother and daughter. Griffith and/or Hennessy focus, instead, on the events leading up to the rescue. The character of the primary thief is cleverly explored, from the way in which he deals with the two women fencing stolen merchandise, to the disregard he shows the jealous young woman with whom he obviously lives. The doctor is likewise given more personality than usual in such films. He is clearly a somewhat gruff and impatient individual, as evidenced in how he reacts to the closed bank, as well as to the phone call that takes him away from his family dinner. He seems at a loss as to where he should safely hide his money, and it takes his wife to come up with a creative solution. Of course, why she should change the safe hiding place she has chosen and keep the money on her person can only be explained by the need to have the thieves break down the bedroom door and attack her just as help arrives. In this, A Woman Scorned abandons character (and logic) for plot. And it is the thief’s female companion, presented as a minor distraction in the first scene, who becomes the means by which he is captured. Her refusal of the doctor’s thanks at the end, and her desperate need to follow after the thief, makes her character all the more pathetic. Certainly, she is an interesting and important new addition to the genre. The landscape of Fort Lee, New Jersey, is barely utilized. Tight shots of building corners and sidewalks provide minimal backgrounds to the focus of the story, the thieves’ shadowing of the doctor and the later race to save the doctor’s family. In relation to other films of the race-to-the-rescue genre, less time is spent tracking the rescuers’ progress than in staging 149

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

the game of cat-and-mouse in the doctor’s home. This makes for a claustrophobic, but more suspenseful film; indeed, it is the confined feeling of the action that makes it so. In the end, A Woman Scorned is less a marked advance by D.W. Griffith in his continuing search to find new and exciting ways to place women and children in jeopardy, than it is a variation on a theme. Steven Higgins

150

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

375 BIOGRAPH

THE MISER’S HEART Filming date: 9/14 October 1911 Location: Fort Lee, New Jersey/New York Studio Release date: 20 November 1911; reissued by Biograph, 17 January 1916 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 22 November 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: George Hennessy Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Adolph Lestina (The miser); Wilfred Lucas, Charles Hill Mailes (Crooks); Edith Haldeman (Little child); Edward Dillon (Down-and-out young man); Kate Toncray (Woman); ? (Young girls); Robert Harron, J. Waltham (On street); W.C. Robinson (In front of clothing store); William J. Butler, Frank Evans, Alfred Paget, Donald Crisp (Policemen) Archival Sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate negative (AFI/MoMA Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative HE EXPERIENCES A LOVE GREATER THAN THE LOVE FOR GOLD An old miser living in an east side tenement, forms quite an attachment for a little child in the same house. The old miser is reputed to keep a large amount of money in a safe in his room, and a couple of crooks decide to take a chance to get it. They enter his room by way of the fire-escape, and tying him to a chair, try to force him to tell the combination of his safe. The little child happens in the room, and to further compel him, they suspend the child out of the window on a rope, threatening to let her drop if he does not give the combination. A tramp sees the child hanging from the window and hastens to the police station for aid. On his way he passes a baker boy from whom he stole a bag of rolls, and the boy, following, has him locked up without giving him a chance to explain the object of his errand. The captain, however, consents to hear the tramp out, and sends a quartette of incredulous policemen, who receive a shock when they find the truth of the tramp’s story. The child is saved and the crooks taken into custody. Biograph Bulletin, November 20, 1911

Thieves become aware of an old miser’s hidden money and decide to steal it. After breaking into the miser’s room, they attempt to force him to reveal his safe’s combination. He refuses, but when they discover a young girl from his building who has been in his room the entire time, the robbers threaten the miser with her endangerment. They dangle her from his window by a rope but the child catches the attention of a vagrant who knows her. He alerts the police, who arrive at the miser’s room in time to capture the thieves.

Becoming the master of the last-minute rescue must have taxed Griffith’s ingenuity, as he was faced repeatedly with the narrative challenge of devising new situations that could produce a race against time. The Miser’s Heart shows the strain such demands could place upon 151

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

the one-reel format, as Griffith introduces four plot strands fairly rapidly, in order to allow for their convergence by the film’s conclusion. Setting his story in a tenement aids matters considerably, as the building’s staircase links the miser’s apartment with that of the little girl downstairs, while the robbers enter via the fire escape and the vagrant views the girl’s predicament from the alley below. Unlike more famous versions of the last-minute rescue, like The Lonely Villa or The Lonedale Operator, The Miser’s Heart provides a situation where imperilled party and rescuer are not separated by any great distance, at least initially. In fact, Griffith inverts the standard set-up: the vagrant runs away from the site of danger in order to bring the police back to save the girl. Perhaps realising this could result in a slackening of tension, Griffith introduces another complication to maintain suspense, in the form of the robbers burning the rope suspending the girl with a candle’s flame. While handled expertly through cut-ins to close-ups of the pertinent action, the increased threat posed by the candle seems the mark of a director desperate to wring suspense out of a hackneyed situation more so than the handiwork of enterprising criminals. The endangered youngster suspended outside a window recalls the situation of The Cord of Life (1909), but there, the child’s fate was tied (literally) to her unknowing parent’s actions on the other side of the window, producing a discrepancy between audience knowledge and character knowledge that enhanced the sense of dramatic irony. In The Miser’s Heart, the miser sits looking on at the burning candle helplessly, neither unwitting participant in the child’s imminent demise nor responsible for her implication in the robbery. Divested of the emotional charge which would elevate it beyond the status of a stunt, the burning rope and its rapidly fraying cords stand as an all-too revealing metaphor for a director pressed to innovate. What with juggling the four separate plot lines, clarifying the spatial relations among the diverse spaces, and motivating and providing impediments to the rescue attempt, Griffith understandably decides to forego the attention to performance which increasingly characterises his work in 1911. The central relationship between the miser and the little girl receives less development than one might expect; similarly, the vagrant’s investment in the girl’s wellbeing derives from a single sketchy scene devoted to them sharing stolen baked goods. Even so, Griffith manages some moments of admirable narrational economy. He signals the young girl’s ability to unlock the heroism latent in the hearts of both miser and vagrant with the unlikely act of sharing breadstuffs. The rhyming scenes of the young girl eating with each of the men not only motivate their acts of chivalry but lend a formal inevitability to the three coming together via the vagrant’s intervention. And even the child’s omnipresent doll comes in handy when she employs it to draw attention to her dilemma by dropping it on the oblivious vagrant sitting below. For the most part, in this film Griffith tends to employ props to expedite storytelling over and above developing characterisation. Nonetheless, the trade press was impressed by the acting, so much so that The New York Dramatic Mirror concluded that the film “might have appeared rather maudlin and impossible” were it not for the level of performance attained (November 29, 1911, p. 26). The “impossible” nature of the film derives from its devotion to a principle of action, a characteristic which divided the trade press: The New York Dramatic Mirror noted with regret that this “melodrama … is not the kind of film that lifts picture art to the higher and better plain [sic] of thought,” while The Moving Picture World found the handling of the “thrilling, melodramatic rescue scene … both sensational and novel”(December 2, 1911, p. 724). Griffith’s most memorable Biograph films, of course, managed to satisfy both camps, by combining the skillful articulation of exciting narrative action with developed characterisation to produce a form of “elevated melodrama”. Charlie Keil

152

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

376 BIOGRAPH

THE FAILURE Filming date: 13/24 October 1911 Location: New York Studio/Englewood, New Jersey Release date: 7 December 1911; reissued by Biograph, 20 December 1915 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 8 December 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: M.B. Havey Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (The man); Dorothy Bernard (The woman); Adolph Lestina (Bank manager); J. Jiquel Lanoe, Donald Crisp (Bank employees); Lily Cahill (Fiancée); Grace Henderson (Her mother); Joseph Graybill, Robert Harron, W. Christy Cabanne (At fiancee’s house); J. Waltham (Tavern owner); Alfred Paget, Charles Hill Mailes, W. Christy Cabanne, Kate Toncray, Edward Dillon, W.C. Robinson, Adolph Lestina, J. Jiquel Lanoe, Robert Harron, Harry Hyde, Frank Evans, Edwin August, Dell Henderson (In tavern) Archival Sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate negative (AFI/MoMA Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative THERE IS ALWAYS A CHANCE IF WE TAKE IT A man’s a failure through his own fault, for he who is bound not to give up is sure of success. The hero of this Biograph story gives way under the pressure of bad fortune, instead of fighting against it. His sweetheart, disappointed in him, turns him aside. Down the hill he goes until he is finally a singer in a low dance hall. Here he meets a young woman, who, through the want of strength of will power, has gone about the same downward road as he. She, however, realizes that it is impossible for her to turn back – ’tis the way of the world – but for him, yes. He gets a chance if he will marry and settle down on a farm, and while he is willing he hasn’t even the money to get him to the place. The girl, unknown to him, helps him to take advantage of the offer. He goes to seek his former sweetheart, only to find himself forgotten, so he reasons that as it was the dance hall girl’s persuasion that influenced him to brace up – he, of course, still ignorant of the extent of her aid – she would be the one with whom to begin the new life. Biograph Bulletin, December 7, 1911

After his business fails, a man finds that his fiancée loses interest in him as well. Dejected, he drifts aimlessly into a life as a dance hall singer. There he meets a young woman whose life has also unexpectedly led her to this low point. Determined to aid the man in recovering a measure of his former success, the young woman works behind the scenes to enable him to take advantage of an offer to buy a farm. Convinced that his fiancée’s attitude will change once she learns of his plans, the man returns to her but finds she has already replaced him. Though ignorant of her role in his restoration, the young man realises the woman from the dance hall has proven more steadfast than his fiancée. He chooses her to help him start anew on the farm. 153

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Despite its downbeat title, The Failure actually depicts a life lost and then regained. This simple situation receives a formally involved treatment, where internal rhymes and inverted doublings persist throughout. Even the film’s structure offers a rigorous symmetry, with two briefer segments sandwiching a long middle section, which is itself composed of two contrasting halves. The opening and closing segments establish the protagonist’s turn of fortunes at the outset and then confirm his options for the future at the end, while the internal sections offer first his further decline at the dance hall, paralleled by the plight of a woman in similar straits, and then the opportunity for their mutual restoration but also the threat of their possible separation. The opening section reveals how Griffith uses repetition and variation to draw connections between distinct actions. Within the first six shots, the protagonist has lost both his job and his fiancée. Griffith links these rejections in two ways: bracketing shots of the fiancée’s doorway reinforce how the loss of his job leads directly to her sending him away; more importantly, the staging of both acts stresses their similarities, as Griffith positions boss and fiancée to the left of the frame while also placing the protagonist to the right in each instance. The section is marked off from the next by a long shot of the hero “staggering down a desolate hill”, in the words of the New York Dramatic Mirror reviewer (December 13, 1911, p. 32). This shot, as both The New York Dramatic Mirror and Tom Gunning (1991, p. 270) have noted, emphasises the hero’s declining fortunes through the shot scale’s diminishment of his size and its effective depiction of the literal descent involved. Once the hero arrives at the dance hall, Griffith reinforces the shared misfortune of the man and the young woman he meets there by often keeping them in separate spaces while paralleling their actions. (Griffith maintains a strict alternation between these two spaces for the fourteen-shot entirety of this section.) The man appears primarily within the central room of the dance hall, usually at the foreground of a frame filled with the type of distractive action Griffith was becoming progressively more adept at orchestrating. Here, despite the relative shallowness of the set, at least three distinct pools of activity occur, all of them relegated to a separate plane within the set’s depth. In stark contrast, the décor of the woman’s room is spare and no more than two people occupy the set at any one moment. Griffith compensates with some inventive direction of actress Dorothy Bernard’s movements, positioning her in the foreground with her back to the camera for a notably extended time in shot 16, for example. The break between the second and third section occurs within the temporal duration of an extended moment the couple share in the woman’s room, as Griffith indicates an ellipsis by returning to the couple via a fade-in. The introduction of a new space (the man’s room) initiates a different set of alternations, with the dance hall now becoming the pivot space between the rooms of the two protagonists. The emphatic limitation of spaces in The Failure lends significance to any change in pattern: by providing a room for the man at this juncture, Griffith suggests the possibility that the entwined lives of the man and woman may now separate. This renders her unacknowledged efforts on his behalf all the more noble, as providing him opportunity risks his loss. The final shot of this section shows Bernard alone in the back corner of her room once he has left, collapsed in grief. The following shot, the recognisable door to the fiancée’s home shown twice in the first section, signals the return to the film’s other realm, the site of the hero’s initial failure. Looking in from an exterior window on his beloved, he sees her in the arms of another (possibly the boss who fired him), and his physical separation from the viewed scene confirms his inability to re-enter this earlier phase of his life. The final shots of the film offer some of its 154

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

most formally involved moments. When we come back to Bernard’s room one final time, a door on the back wall opens to reveal the activity of the dance hall in the background. Griffith signals the lure of the lifestyle identified with the young woman, allowing the two primary spaces of the dance hall to finally merge. Looking on at the activity in the background, the protagonists choose to reject it; significantly, they leave diagonally via the foreground, even though the exit has previously been marked as frame right. The direction of their departure counterposes their chosen new life with the rejected life left in the background. Griffith literally provides a new direction in much the same way he had earlier expanded the enclosed world of Bernard’s room by opening the rear wall door. The film’s final shot shows the couple walking away from the camera in a long shot behind a plough. More than just an image of pastoral bliss, this composition builds on the directional opposition of the previous shot: the couple’s movement mirrors the closing shot of the first section, when the man had wandered down the hill toward the dance hall. In a final display of the powers of parallelism, Griffith converts an earlier image of defeat into one of hope. Charlie Keil

155

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

377 BIOGRAPH

SUNSHINE THROUGH THE DARK Filming date: 16/24 October 1911 Location: New York Studio/Fort Lee, New Jersey Release date: 27 November 1911 Release length: 999 feet Copyright date: 29 November 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Harriet Quimby Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Dorothy Bernard (Maid); Grace Henderson (Her employer); Edward Dillon (Stable boy) NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from the photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative THE LITTLE SLAVEY FINDS THE SILVER LINING TO THE CLOUD OF DESPAIR The poor little housemaid, with her tired hands incessantly toiling, despairs of ever experiencing a kindness, for although she reproves herself for complaining, having what she deems a good job, still her life is that of one driven like a beast of burden. Even the spoiled child of the household orders her about and treats her with absolute disdain. The child wears a bright ribbon sash, which to the poor eyes of the slavey is overwhelmingly beautiful; so much so that she is tempted to steal it. She has it in her possession but a few minutes, when she reproaches herself and starts to return it. But, meanwhile, her act has been discovered and she is denounced as a thief. This is done in the presence of her sweetheart, the stable boy, who at first turns from her, but finally realizing the act was one of impulsiveness, forgives her and takes her to his heart. Biograph Bulletin, November 27, 1911

Judging by its title and the Biograph Bulletin description, this is yet another dark-toned entry in what must be one of the more grim run of releases from the company in any one-month period. Though The Moving Picture World refers to the film as a “character comedy” (December 9, 1911, p. 817), the New York Dramatic Mirror review (December 6, 1911, p. 32) reinforces the sombre effect created by the Bulletin, especially when indicating that the film culminates in an attempt at suicide that the Bulletin refrains from describing . Critics were generally impressed, though Dorothy Bernard’s performance as the maid elicited mixed responses: The Moving Picture World thought her “poorly cast”, while The New York Dramatic Mirror found her work “especially captivating”. Without a viewable print for verification, one cannot guess just how consistent the tone of Sunshine Through the Dark might be, but one aspect of the film emerges as notable through descriptions alone. The sash, which proves pivotal to the narrative’s development, appears to function as a valued object, the type of prop Griffith employed to deepen characterisation by investing it with a multitude of charged meanings. In this case, the brightly coloured sash doubtless serves to remind the maid of the drabness of her own existence, especially 156

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

given its connection to the child of the household who taunts and berates “the slavey”. When the maid is caught, the sash proves her guilt, but the New York Dramatic Mirror review shows that Griffith pushed the garment’s instrumentality to yet another level. Once accused, she tries to hang herself with the sash, investing the Bulletin’s tagline – “The Little Slavey Finds the Silver Lining to the Cloud of Despair” – with more irony than derives from the description provided there. If for no other reason than to see how the sash’s meanings and uses change as the film progresses, one wishes for a viewable print of Sunshine Through the Dark. Charlie Keil

157

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

378 BIOGRAPH

AS IN A LOOKING GLASS Filming date: 20/25 October 1911 Location: New York Studio Release date: 18 December 1911 Release length: 999 feet Copyright date: 20 December 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: George Hennessy Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Husband); Claire McDowell (Wife) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative THE FATHER SEES HIMSELF AS HIS CHILDREN SEE HIM If we saw ourselves as others see us, we would correct our faults, and this is just what occurs in this Biograph subject. The wife patiently pleads with her husband to leave off his drinking and care more for his family of herself and two children. Her endeavors, however, are in vain for he returns to their home in the evening in a beastly state of intoxication. The wife is nearly heartbroken, but their little son is highly amused at the antics of his drunken, besotted father, and the next day while the mother is at market, the children play at housekeeping with the boy as dad, he going through the performance enacted by his father on the day before. The father, now sober, views this from the next room, and it makes him so ashamed of himself that he swears to be done with drink for good, which oath he religiously keeps. Biograph Bulletin, December 18, 1911

A father’s drinking leads him to neglect his family. His young son emulates his father’s actions when playing with his friends. The father looks on and sees his vices replicated in the child’s play and resolves to change his ways.

Borrowing elements of previous Biographs, A Drunkard’s Reformation and What Drink Did (both from 1909), as well as the 1910 Vitagraph film Playing at Divorce, As in a Looking Glass asserts the transformative value of dramatic reenactment while tacitly confirming that domestic life itself serves as a type of theatre, its qualities of melodrama recognised even by a child. As such, As in a Looking Glass operates as a kind of meta-Biograph, its levels of reflexivity conveyed in its very title. The moral correctives available through exposure to uplifting drama no longer require the external example of a staged temperance play provided by A Drunkard’s Reformation; by now, the Biograph single-reeler has become self-sufficient and the “staging” of a character’s conversion need occur only in the domestic realm, understood as the character’s own consciousness. In other words, while Griffith still relies upon a narrative situation to motivate the transformation of character, he no longer needs to dramatise it as an externally viewed spectacle. In The Drunkard’s Reformation, we watch the husband watching the play as he realises its implications for his own 158

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

actions, but the camera’s position (via the implied 180-degree cuts between shots of the husband/diegetic audience and the viewed play) suggests a visual equation between these two spheres of action, so that the husband’s conversion emerges as a performance as much as the play on stage. In As in a Looking Glass, the changes involve more than simply moving the reenactment of drunkenness into the domestic sphere: now the husband spies the dramatised action from an adjoining room, often turning his face to the side in order to peek through a curtain. His act of viewing has become secretive, and the children playing before him remain unaware of being viewed; most importantly, the viewer is encouraged to understand the conversion in the same terms – as a private act revealed. Griffith’s mode of narration itself is adopting the manner of the unseen glance directed inward, with viewer attention guided to coincide with the experiential development of character. As Ben Brewster suggested nearly twenty years ago, the mid-period Biographs represent a crucial stage in the development of the narrative cinema. “A shift in the centre of the fiction from the presentation of scenes to the presentation of differing character perspectives on scenes, and a displacement of point of view from a mechanism for articulating diegetic space to one for articulating characters’ knowledge” (Brewster 1982, p. 14) distinguishes these films from their predecessors. Griffith amplifies the narrative power of the revelatory moment in As in a Looking Glass by shooting the father in medium shot: by isolating the father’s reaction this way, Griffith intensifies the viewer’s sense of understanding the psychological ramifications of this ostensibly private moment. If, in A Drunkard’s Reformation, Griffith staged the father’s recognition of his own flaws so as to render it as public as the performance occurring before him, by the time of As in a Looking Glass, he has decidedly shifted the terms of representing a personal revelation: its voyeuristic qualities mirror the ability of the spectator to look in on the protagonist as effortlessly as the father has viewed his son’s playacting. The only version of the film currently available for viewing is an unassembled work print from the Museum of Modern Art, which makes it all but impossible for one to determine the rhythms or types of tonal contrasts Griffith would have created through editing. Nonetheless, one can still note his approach to mise-en-scène, and here the promotion of verisimilitude and legibility seems paramount, particularly in the handling of performance and staging. As a counterpart to more detailed sets, Griffith allows his subsdiary characters more characteristics, most obviously evidenced by the comic bits of business granted the maid in the scene following the interrupted family meal (where she unselfconsciously gobbles up the food left on the table), and the barflies in the saloon (who provide an inspired lunatic moment which extends the film’s concern with visibility). More pointedly, Griffith finds ways to enhance the psychological depth of his protagonists, be it establishing familial closeness through brief gestures of familiarity (as when the father removes his son’s hat in an offhanded manner bespeaking an habitual routine) or emphasising a moment of intense emotions by staging with reticence (as when the daughter sits on her mother’s lap with her back to the camera after the mother has returned home from the bar in despair). Throughout, Griffith places characters in the frame to allow them to emerge from the background at pivotal moments. The son typically resides at the centre of the frame, espying from midground the action unfolding before him. He functions as the equivalent of an understudy, absorbing the details of his father’s performance until the opportunity arises for him to demonstrate the scope of his observational power. That his performance has the unintended effect of convincing his father to cease providing his protogé with dramatic inspiration is one of the film’s choicest ironies. The final moral of As in a Looking Glass is that the only life worth living (embodied by the sidelit cameo of familial bliss captured in the film’s final image) is one whose tranquility does not invite imitation through performance. Charlie Keil 159

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

379 BIOGRAPH

SAVED FROM HIMSELF Filming date: 12/16 September, 23/26 October 1911 Location: New York Studio Release date: 11 December 1911; reissued by Biograph, 14 August 1916 Release length: 999 feet Copyright date: 13 December 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: George Hennessy Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Joseph Graybill (Young clerk); Mabel Normand (Stenographer); Charles Hill Mailes (Proprietor); William J. Butler (Guest) NOTE: Cast taken from The Moving Picture World (August 19, 1916, p. 1296). Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative. Note: A 35mm acetate positive fragment with this title (in a RKO compilation of the 1940s) at the Nederlands Filmmuseum is not the film in question. HIS SWEETHEART’S INFLUENCE STAYS HIM FROM DISHONOR The young hotel clerk and the stenographer are engaged, and the boy’s one ambition is to provide a rosy future for his bride. With this in mind, he invests all his savings in the stock market, having been induced so to do by the success of an old friend in the market. He, however, is not so fortunate, for the stocks he bought are dropping fast. His broker wires for $2,000 to save him from utter ruin. This, of course, he hasn’t, and in the despair caused by the thought of his hopes for the future being crushed, he is about to yield to the temptation of appropriating a large amount of money left in care of the hotel proprietor by one of the guests, when his purpose is discovered by his sweetheart whose influence saves him from the dishonorable act his desperation would have driven him to. Biograph Bulletin, December 11, 1911

The first three weeks of December saw the release of a trio of Biograph dramas all constructed around the crises experienced by men beset by adversity. The son saves the erring father in As in a Looking Glass, but in both The Failure and Saved from Himself, women function as the men’s salvation. In the former, it is the woman with the tarnished past who proves herself more loyal than the man’s fiancée, whereas in Saved from Himself the fiancée herself intervenes. What is not clear (and will only become so when we have a viewable print) is the depth of the psychological conflict portrayed as the clerk wrestles with the moral dilemma of whether to steal money to prevent financial ruin. Little in the Biograph Bulletin or reviews of the day indicates the principal methods Griffith used to convey the clerk’s inner struggle, though critical response was positive. The New York Daily Mirror’s review is highly favourable, if lacking in specifics: “The full import of this film in subject matter and management has been so cleverly grasped and expressed that it results, as all such pictures must, in an absorbing little drama of life arousing and sustaining the sympathies” (December 20, 1911, p. 30). 160

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

The New York Daily Mirror review does contain one clue as to Griffith’s method that the Biograph Bulletin fails to mention: it implies that the clerk’s decision not to steal coincides with his mother’s prayers. Whether Griffith used crosscutting to suggest causality or whether the mother’s efforts are invoked by the persuasive fiancée, we cannot know. Certainly, the Bulletin makes no mention of the mother in its description. Until a print of this film is available for viewing, we will have to content ourselves with the tantalising prospect that Saved from Himself rivals its companion films from early December as a compelling study of male frailty. Charlie Keil

161

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

380 BIOGRAPH

A TERRIBLE DISCOVERY Filming date: 1–4/6 November 1911 Location: New York Studio/Fort Lee, New Jersey Release date: 21 December 1911 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 22 December 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Edward Acker Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (District Attorney); Edna Foster (His son); Charles Hill Mailes (Dick); Kate Bruce (Housekeeper); Adolph Lestina, W.C. Robinson, Charles H. West (Thugs); Frank Evans, Adolph Lestina (D.A.’s friends); Alfred Paget, Charles Gorman (Policemen); J. Jiquel Lanoe (Rescuer) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative THE GANGSTER’S DESIGN THWARTED BY A BOY’S DARING HEROISM Taunted by the gang over the conviction of his brother by the District Attorney, Dick swears to make the attorney suffer. His plan is a novel one, which might have succeeded but for the daring of the lawyer’s ten year old son. Dick disguises himself as an old woman, and owing to the attorney’s benevolent nature, Dick finds it easy to gain entrance into the house by feigning illness. The lawyer is in the house with only the boy, who is in his own room on the second floor. It looks for a time that Dick will be successful in perpetrating his dire design, but the boy suggests that his father lower him by a rope from the window. This is a perilous move, but the boy bravely undertakes it. The youngster once outside, races off and brings a couple of mounted police to the rescue. This subject is not only a thrilling production, but is also most logical. Biograph Bulletin, December 21, 1911

Angered by a district attorney’s success in convicting his brother, a criminal devises a plan to take revenge. Disguising himself as an old woman, he gains entry to the lawyer’s home and once there, attempts to shoot him. The lawyer manages to avoid his assailant by locking himself in a room with his son. In desperation, the district attorney decides to lower the boy out a window, allowing the child to alert the police. The rescuers arrive just in time to prevent the criminal from killing the lawyer.

If Tom Gunning (1991, p. 264) is correct in citing A Terrible Discovery as the 1911 Biograph with the highest shot count, its current status as an unassembled work print must strike us as particularly unfortunate. On the partial evidence available, it appears this film rivals the March release The Lonedale Operator as one of Griffith’s most intricately edited rescue films from 1911. What one can determine from the version available at the time of writing is Griffith’s marked reliance upon repeated set-ups: save for the boy’s journey to locate the police, 162

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

the film constantly returns to a limited number of spaces, most notably the centrally located stairway in the district attorney’s home, employed eleven separate times. (Griffith also relies upon an uncharacteristic, if slight, high angle to shoot this setting, which renders it all the more memorable in its multiple appearances.) Griffith employs strategies developed back as early as The Guerrilla in 1908 to heighten suspense: the lateral movement of the besieged party from one room to another; the dynamic forward charge of the rescuers on horseback as they rush to prevent the impending crime. Tactics used more recently occur as well: the child hanging out a window, suspended by a rope, figures in A Miser’s Heart, though now this situation allows for the rescue rather than demanding it; the inserted close-up of a gun being loaded confirms Griffith’s growing dependency on a closer shot scale for detailed actions by 1911. Released on the heels of As in a Looking Glass, A Terrible Discovery functions as an interesting companion piece, the parallels further underlined by the repeat casting of Wilfred Lucas and Edna Foster as father and son, respectively. Each film develops a theme Russell Merritt (1981, p. 17) has argued as central to the Griffith Biograph canon: the son as saviour to the father. In the former film, the son’s reenactment of the father’s dissolute behaviour inadvertently leads the erring parent to reform; in the latter, the son’s act of bravery operates as a more direct form of salvation. In both films, Griffith stresses the son’s admiration for the father – initially unjustified in As in a Looking Glass, but fully warranted and reciprocated in A Terrible Discovery. One of the latter film’s most striking qualities is the openly emotional nature of the father-son relationship, signalled by Foster bestowing kisses upon Lucas three separate times. As distinct from the girl’s imperillment in The Miser’s Heart, here the boy’s sacrifice carries emotional weight, because the stakes have been established so clearly. If the Moving Picture World reviewer was to be believed when he claimed that he had “never sat before a picture that got more grip upon an audience” (January 6, 1912, p. 40), then perhaps such spectatorial involvement derived from the resonant depiction of the bond between father and son. Charlie Keil

163

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

381 BIOGRAPH

A TALE OF THE WILDERNESS Filming date: 8/13/14/20 November 1911 Location: Coytesville, New Jersey Release date: 8 January 1912; reissued by Biograph, 9 October 1916 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 11 January 1912 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: none known Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Dorothy Bernard (Young woman); Charles Hill Mailes (The outlaw); Edwin August (His younger brother); William J. Butler (Pioneer leader); Dark Cloud (Indian chief) NOTE: Cast taken from The Moving Picture World (October 21, 1916, p. 441). Archival Sources: none known IN THE PIONEER DAYS OF KENTUCKY In the wilds of the Kentucky hills two brothers, the elder an outlaw, view from a distance the approach of a party of settlers moving forward to a new home in the vast wildness. The younger brother is overwhelmed by the sight of the pioneers, and, unknown to his elder brother, joins their party. The settlers build a stockade home and the outlook is most rosy, until the outlaw brother meets a girl from the stockade at the spring, he, of course, not knowing his brother is among the party. He forces his attentions upon her, which she repulses, rushing back to the stockade for help. The outlaw’s influence with the neighboring Indians arouses them in his plan for vengeance. They attack the stockade, and when the settlers’ chance seems hopeless they dig a tunnel from the back of the stockade to the hillside. Most of them have effected an escape, but among the few captured is the younger brother, so the outlaw regrets his action and uses again his influence with the Indians, but with a different effect. Biograph Bulletin, January 8, 1912

No print of this film is known to survive. In contemporary accounts I was able to find nothing to add to the Biograph Bulletin summary, except to clarify that the pioneers finally captured by the Indians when the majority escape through the tunnel include the outlaw’s brother, his girlfriend, and her father. The film was made on location, but involves a significant set: the stockade illustrated in the Biograph Bulletin still (which shows it to be at least fifty feet long and fifteen feet high). This set was also used for the later-released film Billy’s Stratagem, at the end of which it is burnt, so this film was certainly made first (or at any rate, part of Billy’s Stratagem was shot after shooting finished on A Tale of the Wilderness). Whereas Billy’s Stratagem is a fairly intimate film, concerning a single pioneer family, a trader, and a smallish band of Indians, A Tale of the Wilderness is of epic proportions (though only a single reel); The Moving Picture World’s advertising column cites a Salt Lake City theatre ballyhooing it as having “over 100 164

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

people in the cast” (February 7, 1912, p. 567), and, allowing for salesman’s hyperbole, this gives a sense of its scale: the Bulletin still shows at least twenty-five characters inside the fort, and at least ten Indians outside, where billowing smoke no doubt conceals many more attackers. The New York Dramatic Mirror reviewer praises the film for its handling of mass scenes. This compliment was not necessarily penned by Frank Woods, althought he was still, as “Spectator”, the editor of the magazine’s motion picture section. The volume of films released in the American market by 1911 precluded one critic from seeing all titles, and in response to a correspondent Woods notes: “The Spectator does not pretend to see all pictures; it would be a physical impossibility to do so. There are other picture reviewers on the Mirror” (January 17, 1912, p. 26). Nonetheless, this anonymous reviewer also remarks that A Tale of the Wilderness “is notable that unlike a good many spectacular subjects the actors stop to properly set the situation and thus bring conviction by the addition of the human element” (ibid). While “stop” probably does not here mean a succession of theatrical tableaux, it does imply an attention to the pictorial aspect of each incident in a flurry of action such that the situation that informs the incident is made palpable, which, in its turn, gives a rhythmic structure to the whole. Ben Brewster

165

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

382 BIOGRAPH

THE BABY AND THE STORK Filming date: 9/22 November 1911 Location: New York Studio/Westfield, New Jersey Release date: 1 January 1912 Release length: 999 feet Copyright date: 8 January 1912 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: George Hennessy Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Edna Foster (Bobby); Charles Hill Mailes, Claire McDowell (His parents); Kate Bruce (Nurse); William J. Butler (Doctor); Grace Henderson (Maid); Edward Dillon (Workman); Dorothy Bernard (His wife); Edith Haldeman, ? (Their children); Alfred Paget (At zoo); Frank Evans, J. Jiquel Lanoe (On street); Charles H. West, W.C. Robinson (Policemen); William Bechtel (Assisting doctor) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative LITTLE BOBBY WAS JEALOUS OF THE NEW BABY Bobby’s love for his mamma and papa is so great that he even fears they might die and be taken from him. On the other hand, he is his parents’ only thought and care. However, some time later a new baby arrives at the home, and Bobby is told that the stork at the park brought it. It isn’t long before he realizes that the baby is everything now, and he is “left out in the cold”. This treatment fires the youngster with jealous rage, and remembering the story of the stork, takes up the baby from its crib, puts it in a basket and carries it out to the stork’s cage in the park, exclaiming, “Here, Mr. Stork, take your old baby, we don’t want it”. Meanwhile, his parents are wild with anxiety over the disappearance of the baby, believing it to have been kidnapped. Their fears are relieved later by the appearance of the park officer with Bobby and the baby. Biograph Bulletin, January 1, 1912

When Bobby’s mother is giving birth to a new baby, Bobby is sent to the zoo with the maid, who shows him the stork and indicates it is bringing him a baby brother or sister. While she is not looking, Bobby writes the stork a note forbidding it to do so. Some time later, Bobby’s fears are confirmed; the baby absorbs all his parents’ attention. When it is left alone for a moment, Bobby takes the baby to the zoo and deposits it by the stork’s cage. Finding the baby missing, Bobby’s parents fear it has been kidnapped and call the police. Searching the streets, Bobby’s father spots a coalman carrying a baby; he grabs the coalman and summons two policemen, who accompany the coalman to his house for identification, while Bobby’s father takes the baby home. At the coalman’s house, his wife is horrified when she finds their baby has been taken away. Bobby’s mother sees that her husband has brought the wrong baby. The coalman and his wife arrive to reclaim their baby. Meanwhile, Bobby’s action has been seen by the zoo keeper, who grabs him and takes him home with the right baby. The babies are sorted out and scores settled with gratuities all round. Bobby’s mother assures him he is still loved, so he decides to cherish the baby. 166

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

In the print I viewed, a Museum of Modern Art 16mm viewing copy deriving from the original Biograph negative, the parents’ suspicion of the coalman is motivated by their reading in a newspaper of kidnappings by black-hand gangs, and a title describes the coalman as “Italian”. The newspaper story (given as an intertitle rather than an insert) and the expository title are restorations (original intertitles are missing from the negatives, and no title lists survive); “Italian” is confirmed by The New York Dramatic Mirror’s review (January 10, 1912, p. 32), though nothing in the characterization by Edward Dillon or the costumes suggests this to me, and a “black-hand” story is a plausible inference to something they might read that would suggest kidnapping by an Italian, but this aspect of the story remains a little obscure in the absence of a copy with the original intertitles. The story has three focuses and is constructed by alternation between them: Bobby; his parents; and the coalman and his family. Griffith (or George Hennessy) tighten the structure by making the coalman the family’s coalman and a friend of Bobby’s, though nothing in the plot hinges on this; a similar tightening is achieved by making the zoo keeper the family maid’s sweetheart, and this does at least serve to motivate why Bobby is left unattended to leave his letter for the stork while the couple are courting a few yards away. The three focuses give rise to three limit locations: the zoo, the family’s house, and the coalman’s house. Most of the parents’ action takes place in one set up, the sitting room, which becomes the baby’s room (an instance of the tendency to use the same set for scenes which, in a real middle-class house, would surely take place in different rooms that I noted in relation to Gold Is Not All [DWG Project, #246]); similarly, the coalman’s house has only one interior set up while the zoo has three: a general view of the zoo when Bobby and the maid first visit it; one with the stork’s cage front right for most scenes at the zoo; and an extreme long shot through which the zoo keeper chases Bobby after he has left the baby at the stork’s cage. As befits a title character, Bobby’s domain is much more extensive than the other characters’ (despite the standard omniscience of narration by alternation in Biograph films, Bobby’s appreciation of events firmly dominates); he is also seen on the family house porch, in its coal shed, and on various streets linking the limit locations. There is only one set other than the sitting room and the coalman’s home: the interior of a police station to serve as the “other end” of the father’s phone call for police assistance (a set used again for the same purpose in The Old Bookkeeper, presumably filmed a little later). Some of these additional spaces are purely transitional; thus, the house porch simply serves to move people out of the family house and, more importantly, to anticipate their arrival in it; and a few of the street corners merely dilate Bobby’s and the coalman’s walks around the town (though these same street corners are also later traversed by the father in search of his child). Other spaces appear in blocks: after the initial scenes in the family sitting room (punctuated solely by intertitles), there is the first series in the zoo; after a return to the house (again, articulated by intertitles), there is a series associating Bobby and the coalman, introducing the latter’s house (and hence his family); then an alternation between the sitting room and the police station as the baby is stolen and the loss then reported to the police (with one view of the porch as Bobby leaves with the baby); the second sequence in the zoo; a new group of street scenes for the pursuit of the coalman; a return to the coalman’s house; the zoo, as the keeper and Bobby leave; and an alternation between the sitting room and the porch as all the characters assemble in the former, bringing the film back to its starting point. Contemporary reviews of the film that I have read do not discuss its technique, except for commendation of Edna Foster’s acting as Bobby, and its mildly suspenseful system of 167

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

alternation seems a degree zero of Biograph style at this period. As for Edna Foster’s acting, child actors are never held to the standards of adults, but even so the ready acceptance of such elements of pantomime as rocking one’s folded arms to represent a baby shows that Woods’ and others’ hostility to pantomime was not universal. Perhaps the New York Dramatic Mirror critic who praised the “appealing and lifelike presentation of the little boy” was referring to Foster’s gestural monologue in the first scene, where, left alone, Bobby executes a series of poses representing joy at the family’s happiness and fear that he may be deprived of his parents by death, which are conventional, but not mime stand-ins for words. Ben Brewster

168

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

383 BIOGRAPH

THE VOICE OF THE CHILD Filming date: 9/28 November 1911 Location: New York Studio/Fort Lee, New Jersey Release date: 28 December 1911 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 29 December 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: George Hennessy [“The Turning Point”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Edwin August (Husband); Blanche Sweet (Wife); Joseph Graybill (False friend); Inez Seabury (Child); Kate Bruce (Maid); Dorothy Bernard (Typist); Edward Dillon? (Clerk) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; National Film and Television Archive, 35mm acetate negative (from 35mm nitrate positive destroyed in 1969) TINY, YET HOW POWERFUL IS ITS APPEAL The young business man becomes so engrossed with the building up of his new business, that he, to a degree, neglects his wife and little child. Of course, like all enthusiastic business men, he does not realize that his wife tires of the everlasting harangue of business. It is “business, business – always business”. Hence it is small wonder that the wife listens to the poisonous flattery of the husband’s college mate, whom he introduces to her. This false friend tries to strengthen his sinister purpose by arousing the suspicion of the wife against her husband by placing a photograph of his stenographer in his coat pocket, which is found later by his wife. This is apparently most convincing, and the wife consents to go away with this wretch. The maid overhears their plans and informs the husband, who would wreak vengeance, but the child’s cry of “Mamma, Mamma” averts a tragedy of a soul and body. Biograph Bulletin, December 28, 1911

Engrossed in a new contract, a businessman neglects his wife. Noting her resentment, a friend of the husband tricks the wife with a planted photograph into believing her husband is unfaithful to her, and persuades her to run away with him. The couple’s maid overhears the decision and runs to the office to tell the husband. Taking a revolver, he returns home and hides in the garden. The wife packs to leave and the friend drives up in his car to collect her. She says goodbye to her little daughter asleep in her cot and goes out to the car. Before the husband can intervene, the little girl wakes, comes to the door, and calls her mother. The wife decides she cannot leave and returns to the house. The husband emerges and sends the friend packing. The child explains the friend’s deception to the couple, and they are reconciled.

The last sentence in the summary above is an inference from the slightly truncated National Film and Television Archive print and the plot summary in the New York Dramatic Mirror review: “Happily, the child saw the man’s act, and brings peace to the parents by telling 169

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

about it after the elopement has failed” (January 3, 1912, p. 32). The false friend persuades the wife of her husband’s infidelity by planting a photograph of his office typist in his pocket for the wife to find. The child oversees the planting, and the print ends as she is showing the photograph to her father and mother; presumably she explains how it got into the pocket, and thus gives the wife an excuse for her behaviour, leading to a reconciliation. The handling of this photograph shows how Griffith was already deviating from the mainstream of American filmmaking in a way, which has led to modern scholars describing him as “old-fashioned” or even “retarded” stylistically (though “idiosyncratic” might be a more neutral epithet). By late 1911 it was standard to handle incidents of this kind by inserting a big close-up of the object a character is looking at, filmed from the character’s point of view with his or her hands holding it and perhaps a background matching the surroundings visible in the main scene (this is how the hero’s reading of the racing tip is already handled in Vitagraph’s The One Hundred to One Shot in 1906). In The Voice of the Child, the photograph appears first in a scene at the husband’s office before his arrival. It is given to the office clerk by the typist. He looks down at it, more or less facing camera, and gestures toward her to the effect “It’s you”; then there is a big close-up of it. The close-up first shows hands holding the photograph with its back visible, inscribed “To my sweetheart”; then the hands turn the photograph around to reveal a portrait of the typist; then there is a return to the main scene. This might seem like the standard pattern, but it is not: the closeup is an axial cut-in, not a point-of-view shot, so the audience sees the back of the portrait while the clerk is looking at the front and vice versa, and the background is his waistcoat and jacket. The point of this sequence is not, of course, the mental processes involved, it is simply to establish the photograph for later use by the family friend. When the wife later finds the photograph in her husband’s jacket pocket, she looks down at it; there follows a close-up of the back of the photograph, then a return to the scene in which she turns over the photograph; a second close-up then shows the portrait; then there is a second return to the scene. Here mental process is everything, but the pattern is even more deviant, since the close-ups are exactly the same as in the scene in the office – the background shows the clerk’s coat and his hands, their backs to camera (given the refusal of duplication at this time – a condition of a Motion Picture Patents Company producer’s license as well as an aesthetic judgment – it is presumably a second take shot at the same time as the first one rather than the same footage reprinted). Throughout his career, Griffith showed great reluctance to use point-of-view shots in the way that was already standard in 1911; a sequence that shows a character sees something need only establish the act of looking and the object seen. Such sequences are not uncommon in the films of other filmmakers at this time and later, though not with inserts of small objects; what is remarkable is that Griffith chooses the angle for the “subjective” shot on the same basis as he does for any other shot, as far as possible maintaining the audience’s spatial relationship to the scene. The second example suggests that, at a stretch, any view of the object will do, even one entirely mismatching the setting (of course, the repetition of the original framing may have resulted from neglecting to make an insert during filming on the set of the couple’s sitting-room or something wrong with the footage which was obtained when such an insert was shot). The scene in which the little girl oversees the false friend planting the photograph can also be seen as an example of stylistic retardation. The development of room-to-room cutting as his basic editing pattern for filming in interiors led naturally to the way overseeing and overhearing scenes are filmed in Biograph films of this period. When the maid witnesses the wife’s consent to run away with the friend, the scene in which the friend seduces the wife in the sitting room is followed by one in the dining room next door to the right (filmed, of course, with a parallel camera axis) in which the maid enters right and crosses and exits 170

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

left. In the return to the first scene, the wife and friend are embracing and the maid briefly enters right, stops, expresses horror and re-exits right. In the dining room, the maid enters left and stands listening to what is going on off left. This is spatially clear, and the couple’s unawareness of the presence of the maid in the same room is reasonably verisimilar, given its brevity. The relationship between the two rooms has, however, been amply established in previous scenes, so the actual incursion of the maid into the sitting room is redundant, but this is an example of the tendency to condense climaxes – even secondary or tertiary ones such as this – into a single picture rather than a sequence. The earlier scene, however, is shot in a much more old-fashioned way. The friend is left alone in the sitting room. He looks off right to be sure he is unobserved, then takes out the photograph and looks around for somewhere to place it. He sees the husband’s jacket hanging on the back of a chair rear left. The little girl enters midground left, and as the friend goes to the jacket rear left, the girl crosses the front on tiptoe to stand front right, watching. As he turns to go back to the right, she keeps behind his back and crosses back to the chair rear left. She takes the photograph from the pocket, looks at it, looks significantly at camera, returns it to the pocket, and re-exits midground left. Editing, which in the maid’s scene helps guarantee the verisimilitude of the overhearer remaining hidden, is abandoned for the stage convention that allows characters to be unaware of one another in the same space so long as backs are turned – a convention that is much more strained in the confined space of the standard cinematic playing area than it is on a large theatrical stage. It may be that Griffith is relying here on the fact that you can get away with much greater offences against verisimilitude where child performers are concerned. Nevertheless, The Moving Picture World, while generally praising the performance of Inez Seabury (identified for me by Russell Merritt), is critical of her acting in this scene: “One feels that the producer was at fault in permitting her to give a melodramatic touch to the scene where she sees the ‘friend’ putting the photograph of the husband’s stenographer in the pocket of the coat the wife and mother is about to mend. This provoked a laugh and was, indeed, very amusing, but it didn’t belong in this particular picture” (January 13, 1912, p. 126). The director’s error here was more the choice of staging in a continuous scene than allowing the resort to mime, for the latter is more or less imposed by the former; a cutaway to the child in the next room looking off right and a significant glance to camera would have established that she saw the friend put the photograph in the pocket without her having to go to the coat, take the photograph out of the pocket, and put it back again, but her awareness of what is going on is much harder to establish without further clues in a single shot showing two significant actions – the planting and its witnessing – at the same time. The New York Dramatic Mirror reviewer quoted above thought the film mechanical and trite, but praised the climax: “Exciting suspense is added by the presence of the wronged husband, hiding behind the bushes ready to shoot. The situation is led up to with skill”. Most of the film consists of alternations within the family’s house, between spaces in that house and the husband’s office, and a few intermediate spaces to mark characters moving from the office to the house and vice versa. The climactic scene is led up to by a complex version of this, with the seduction an alternation between the guilty couple and the maid in the next room overhearing and then preparing to go to the husband; then an alternation between the friend’s departure, the maid and the husband at the office, and the wife packing; then one between the wife saying goodbye to the child and the husband getting the gun, leaving the office, going home and hiding in the bushes; then one between the arrival of the friend’s car, the wife leaving the house, the husband hiding, and the child getting up, dressing, and following her mother to the front door. The climax brings all these strands together (except the maid who, once her connective function has been performed, vanishes from the 171

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

film), and presents the usual problem as to how to conclude a converging alternation. Up to this point, the shot scale has been a constant medium long shot in interiors and full long shot in exteriors (the shots of the child’s room are slightly closer, and, of course, there are the big close-ups of the photograph). And adjoining spaces have always been shot with what appear, at least, to be parallel lens axes. The shots of the exterior of the house at the climax introduce a more complex scenography. In the final stages of the alternation between the husband’s arrival at the house and the wife and then the child leaving it, several new framings are introduced: a slight high-angle medium long shot of the spot low down beside the porch where the husband hides to await the friend’s arrival; a long shot across the street of the house front for the arrival of the friend’s car; a low-angle medium long shot of the front door for the wife’s (and later the child’s) entrance; and a view along the sidewalk of the car and the front gate for the meeting of the wife and the friend, their joining by the pleading child, the wife’s decision to stay, and, after the return of wife and child to the house, the husband’s final non-violent (apart from a bit of hustling) confrontation with the friend. Thus, the climactic moments of the wife’s final decision and the friend’s discomfiture are shot at ninety-degree angles to the main axes of all previous scenes in this location. Although Biograph films (like those of most production companies at this time) show more flexibility in camera placement and shot scale in exteriors than interiors, and the lesser change of angle for the shots of the hiding husband was more or less forced on the cinematographer by the location (as Barry Salt noted in a National Film Theatre, London, programme note of August 19, 1976), the abandonment of frontality in this sequence is remarkable (but not by comparison with the series of eyeline-matched reverse angles used for a fight scene in the Essanay film The Loafer, released only three weeks after The Voice of the Child). The New York Dramatic Mirror reviewer’s further comment on this climax, that it is led up to with “expressive acting,” may be a reference to an example of the growing use of business by Biograph actors at this time noted also by Barry Salt: “The examples of this are almost innumerable, but a good one that recently caught my attention is the enraged and jealous husband in The Voice of the Child (1911) walking around his office chomping on a cigar and puffing clouds of smoke out of it through clenched teeth” (Salt, p. 100). The print I viewed, the NFTVA’s viewing copy, was black and white, but it contains a record of the tinting of the original. All the film was black and white, except the night exteriors (that is, all the exteriors save a couple during the sequence where the friend visits the husband’s office in working hours – most of the film’s scenes take place at night), which were tinted blue. No attempt was made to distinguish by colour between day and night interiors or daytime interiors and exteriors. This film was not viewed by Graham et al., who based their cast list on the Biograph Bulletin still; the extra identifications are Russell Merritt’s (Inez Seabury), mine confirmed (from frame stills) by Russell (Dorothy Bernard), or mine alone (Kate Bruce, whom I would swear to, and Edward Dillon, whom I wouldn’t). Ben Brewster

172

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

384 BIOGRAPH

FOR HIS SON Filming date: finished November 1911 Location: New York Studio/New Jersey location? Release date: 22 January 1912 Release length: 999 feet Copyright date: 22 January 1912 Scenario purchase date: 17 September 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Emmett Campbell Hall [“His Only Son”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Charles Hill Mailes (Doctor); Charles H. West (Doctor’s son); Blanche Sweet (Son’s fiancée); Dorothy Bernard (Doctor’s typist); Dell Henderson, Alfred Paget, William Bechtel (Dopokoke factory employees); Harry Hyde, W. Christy Cabanne (Son’s friends); Grace Henderson (Landlady); Robert Harron, W. Christy Cabanne, Gus Pixley, Kate Toncray, Edna Foster, Edward Dillon, J. Jiquel Lanoe, W.C. Robinson, Inez Seabury (At the soda fountain) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative THE AWFUL RESULT OF CRIMINAL SELFISHNESS A physician, through his love for his only son, whom he desires to see wealthy, is tempted to sacrifice his honor by concocting a soft drink containing cocaine, knowing how rapid and powerful is the hold obtained by cocaine, even in the most minute quantities, feeling assured that there will be an enormous demand for the drink. As he expected, the drink meets with tremendous success, and his balm to his conscience is the thought that he will be rich. But, his son, ignorant of the ingredients of the drink, cultivates a liking for it, unknown to the father. The father discovers his son’s weakness too late, for he soon becomes a hopeless victim of the drug. What a powerful lesson the final scene teaches, as we see the stricken father mourning his son’s death. He did not care whom he victimized until he found the result of his dishonor at his own door. Biograph Bulletin, January 22, 1912

Eager to impress his college friends, a doctor’s son begs his father to increase his allowance. Reluctantly at first, the doctor invents and promotes a soft drink containing cocaine, in order to support his son’s lifestyle. The drink, named “Dopokoke”, is a success, and father and son rejoice in their new wealth. The son takes a liking to Dopokoke, and before long is addicted. So is the doctor’s office typist, and a cynical employee in the Dopokoke factory introduces her to neat cocaine. Visiting the factory, the son discovers the secret ingredient, and starts to inject cocaine himself. His fiancée finds out and rejects him. Discovering that the typist shares his addiction, he proposes they run away together, and she agrees. Some time later, they are reduced to want. During a fight with the typist over the hypodermic, the son dies of a heart attack. The doctor regrets his actions, too late.

173

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

The print I have seen, a 16mm viewing copy from the Museum of Modern Art, derives from the Biograph negatives, but was prepared for commercial purposes. Steven Higgins tells me that, although the negatives are not in release order and lack intertitles, they unequivocally indicate the release ordering of the shots and the points where intertitles should be interpolated. Hence, prints reconstructed for archival and other scholarly purposes are reliable as to ordering (but, of course, the wording of the intertitles is conjectural). Commercial prints are not necessarily so reliable, and there are a number of suspicious features in this one. First, it has twenty-one intertitles (excluding the main title and the end title). Compare The Baby and the Stork, with four (plus one letter and one newspaper insert); The Voice of the Child, with seven (possibly there was once one more in the final feet, missing in the print I viewed); and The Old Bookkeeper, with eight. The twenty-one in For His Son are distributed throughout the film, whereas in the other three cases the intertitles are concentrated in the expository portions of the film, leaving the climax almost entirely free of them. Moreover, two of the titles in For His Son are dialogue titles, which simply convey what a character says. None of the other three films has a dialogue title; dialogue titles do occur in Biograph films at this time, but almost always have some wider function than simply conveying dialogue – they are apothegmatic, or serve as names for the succeeding scene (see my discussion of such a title in As It Is in Life [1910], DWG Project, #245). There are also puzzling gaps in the story. The plot seems to call for a scene where the doctor discovers his son’s addiction; in this print, the son elopes undetected, and at least some time elapses before his death, when the doctor is summoned to the house where he has been living. There is a shot that looks like it is going to initiate such a discovery scene. The Dopokoke company offices have two rooms: an inner office for the doctor and an outer one, where the typist works, with the safe holding the cocaine. When the son is hooked on Dopokoke but has not progressed to cocaine, the two are together in the outer office when the cynical employee comes in with the bottle of cocaine. The son sees it (big close-up) and realises what it is, expressing horror. The doctor takes it from him and puts it in the safe, then he exits left into the inner office. When the cynical employee has also left, the son gets out the cocaine and tastes it. In the inner office, the doctor hears something off left. In the outer office, the son returns the cocaine bottle to the safe. In the inner office, the doctor smiles complacently. It looks as if there ought to be an extension of this scene where the doctor, hearing his son next door, looks in and sees him taking the cocaine. But the scene simply ends with a title leading to the next sequence, where the son’s addiction is discovered by his fiancée. The print is the equivalent of 950 feet of 35mm film, somewhat shorter than the release length of 999 feet. Given its many extra titles, one would expect it to be longer than the release length. Did the restorers omit some scenes in the negative? Does the negative now lack some scenes that were in the release prints? In the last parts of the film Charles West twitches, shifts his eyes, laughs nervously, and fidgets just as every theatrical and cinematic drug addict has ever since; as the New York Dramatic Mirror reviewer put it, “in the later part of the drama the work of the players is remarkable showing the results of cocaine” (January 31, 1912, p. 61). Clearly the performance draws on the long-standing stage representation of alcoholism, in particular the exhibition of the symptoms of delirium tremens, but it seems distinct from it. Was there already a stage tradition for the representation of drug addiction? Tom Gunning lists For His Son as one of a number of Biographs that use alternation to contrast rich and poor (1991, Gunning, p. 134). Presumably he means the parallel of the son and the typist. This is clearly true at the level of the plot, since both are introduced to Dopokoke and graduate to an addiction to injected cocaine before they ever meet; but from shot to shot there is less of the insistent alternation in this film than in any of the others I 174

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

have been assigned to review for this year’s volume. Throughout, the story switches from father to son, who do not appear to share a house, but their actions are rarely simultaneous: the son visits his father’s office to beg for money, and the father has the first inklings of how he could satisfy his son; the son visits his fiancée; he revisits his father; the son is seen in his rooms; the father perfects Dopokoke (these last two scenes might be seen as simultaneous, and hence an alternation, but they could just as easily be successive); a trial sale of Dopokoke in a drug store is witnessed by the father; the son visits his father to ask for money again and is gratified to receive a lot; the father visits the Dopokoke factory and occupies his new office, while in the outer office the typist drinks Dopokoke; the son and friends visit a drug store and drink Dopokoke, and the typist is then introduced to cocaine (three-way alternation); the son in his rooms drinks Dopokoke while the typist visits the drug store to drink (alternation, but only two scenes); the son visits the Dopokoke factory (alternation between his discovery of the cocaine in the outer office and his father gloating over his wealth in the inner office); the son, now injecting cocaine, visits his fiancée and she breaks off their engagement; at the Dopokoke factory, the son discovers the typist’s addiction, proposes to her, and they elope; at the typist’s house the son and the typist fight over the hypodermic, the son dies, and the doctor is summoned to see the body; in his office the father weeps. Thus most of the film tells its story in successive scenes; only the sequence where the son and the typist are introduced to Dopokoke, consists of a repeated alternation. Moreover, if the parallel is intended to make a contrast between the rich son and the poor typist, there is too little difference between the two for the ironies in the other cases Gunning cites to be brought out. Both son and typist are innocent victims of Dopokoke, and if the son’s initial fecklessness is the original cause of his father’s developing the drink, the film tells us nothing about the typist’s motivations for her actions to point up a contrast between them. The film does have one technical innovation, at least among the Biographs I have seen. When the doctor visits the drug store conducting the trial sale of Dopokoke, after a scene showing customers clamouring for the drink in a long shot of the interior of the store, the doctor enters front left and talks to the barman. As more customers enter left, the doctor exits rear left. There is then a cut to a medium shot of what seems to be a standing screen. The doctor enters right in medium shot, turns and looks off right, smiles and rubs his hands. There is then a repeat of the first framing with customers drinking Dopokoke, a return to the medium shot in which the doctor exits right, and a return to the long shot in which the doctor enters rear left, talks again to the barman, and then exits front left. The cutaway to the character viewing the scene (apparently from behind a screen in the drugstore rather than in another room) uses a much closer framing than is at all common for views of people (as opposed to objects like the bottle of cocaine seen several times in big close-up) in Biograph films at this time. Ben Brewster

175

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

385 BIOGRAPH

THE OLD BOOKKEEPER Filming date: finished November 1911 Location: New York Studio Release date: 18 January 1912 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 20 January 1912 Scenario purchase date: 20 November 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Belle Taylor Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: W. Chrystie Miller (Bookkeeper); Edwin August (His employer); Blanche Sweet (Employer’s wife); Alfred Paget, ? (Thieves); Jackie Saunders (Employer’s maid); Joseph McDermott (Police sergeant); Edward Dillon (Manager’s friend); Kate Toncray (Bookkeeper’s landlady); W.C. Robinson (One of the policemen); Charles Gorman, Harry Hyde, Adolph Lestina, Charles H. West, J. Jiquel Lanoe, Vivian Prescott (Office employees) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A STORY OF THE TRUE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT The old bookkeeper is the beloved of not only his employer, but the fellow employees on account of his generous, benevolent nature. He believes in the biblical injunction “Give to him that asketh thee”. His salary he dispenses in charity, always ready to help the afflicted. His employer goes on an extended auto trip and leaves his business absolutely in charge of a new manager, who immediately finds a reason for discharging the old bookkeeper. The poor old fellow, unable to secure another position, and having used his money in charity, is without that with which to pay his rent, hence he is evicted. Without shelter, he goes to his employer’s house to await his return, which is expected. Here he surprises a couple of burglars and holds them at bay in a most unique way until help arrives. Biograph Bulletin, January 18, 1912

An old bookkeeper, who gives away all his meagre earnings to those poorer than himself and is beloved by his employer and fellow employees, is sacked when his employer goes on holiday, leaving the office in charge of a new manager who wants the bookkeeper’s position for a friend. Evicted for non-payment of his rent, and reluctant to appeal to institutionalized charity, he goes to his employer’s house. Finding him still absent, he waits on the porch. Sitting there, he sees two burglars enter the house by a window. He follows them inside, looks around for a weapon, and can only find a crucifix on the wall. Holding this as if it were a revolver, he sticks up the burglars and phones the police. The burglars jump him, but the police arrive at the moment of the employer’s return and arrest them. The next day the new manager and his crony are fired and the old bookkeeper is reinstated.

176

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

My summary follows the Biograph Bulletin and the contemporary reviews I have read in stating that, after he loses his position, the old bookkeeper is evicted. However, this does not seem to me to be the most natural reading of the images. The bookkeeper enters his room followed by his landlady. She clearly demands the rent, and he indicates that he cannot pay. She then opens the door and points off. He pleads with her briefly, picks up his hat, and exits through the door. Gestures and attitudes suggest that he says “I have no money”, and she replies, “Well, go and find some!” (which, of course, is what he does, first going to the office of the Association of Charity, then to his old employer’s house). There is no discussion of his possessions; he does not take any kind of bundle with him, not even the Bible he was reading in the first scene and to which he refers in justification of his over-generosity (surely even the most hard-hearted of landladies would allow the poor man his Bible!). When the hero is evicted after losing his job in ’Tis an Ill Wind That Blows No Good (1909), he attempts to take a suitcase of his belongings with him, but the landlady insists on keeping it as a pledge against the unpaid rent; nothing like this exchange happens in The Old Bookkeeper. Perhaps after the film was shot, Griffith decided a more extreme misfortune would create more sympathy for his hero and used a title to reinterpret the scene (the titles in the print I viewed, a 16mm Museum of Modern Art viewing copy, were reconstructed by Eileen Bowser and Tom Gunning, who opted for the more cautious “NOTHING LEFT TO PAY HIS RENT”, but the unanimity of contemporary comment suggests that there may have been something more definite in the original). One problem for the viewer (but if I am right in hypothesising a last-minute change in the meaning of the scene, a convenience to the filmmakers) in this scene is the restraint of W. Chrystie Miller’s performance, described in The Moving Picture World (February 3, 1912, p. 392) as “very naturally acted”. This contrasts with the acting, which is quite broad, of the unidentified actor playing the new manager, but this does not have the effect here of an incongruous combination of alternative styles as much as it expresses a difference of character. Whereas Miller’s bookkeeper seems to accept the indignities fate heaps on him with resignation, responding with very few spare gestures (pointing to the Bible in the first scene; taking out money and gently propelling the paperboy into the shop to buy him a coat and holding out a hand to be shaken when he says goodbye; appearing dazed when he is fired; shaking his head as he decides he is not yet reduced to the ministrations of the Association of Charity; briefly re-enacting the stickup with the crucifix to his employer after the arrest of the thieves; wriggling in his chair to express discomfort before the other employees bring him his favourite cushion when he is reinstated), the new manager (a “young man whose estimation of himself is obviously very big”, as the reviewer in The New York Dramatic Mirror [January 24, 1912, p. 39] remarks) uses many broad and stereotyped gestures (swaggering authoritatively the moment the employer has left for his holiday; sneering at the old bookkeeper, bawling him out; holding up a finger in the privacy of his office to indicate that the bookkeeper is one employee for the chop; gesturing that the position is in the bag to the friend after the latter has asked him for a job; ostentatiously rubbing imaginary dirt off a letter the old bookkeeper has dropped; and, after he has given him the sack, executing a mimed drop kick to his friend). Many of the new manager’s gestures are hardly dissimilar to the generally deplored substitution of mimed equivalents for dialogue (the heldup finger, the drop kick), but the effect here is very different from, say, Edna Foster rocking her folded arms to indicate a baby in The Baby and the Stork, because it is motivated by character. As the New York Dramatic Mirror reviewer concludes, “the typical characters ... that the film brings forth are the distinct charms of the picture”, and the Moving Picture World critic agrees: “the acting gives many interesting moments besides carrying the story forward clearly through the whole full-length reel”. 177

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Miller’s reduced acting style is aided by a characteristic use of props. The old bookkeeper’s chair in the office (which seems to combine characteristics of a nineteenth-century office à la Bob Cratchit with high desks to carry the ledgers and very tall stools on the right-hand side, with twentieth-century low stenographers’ tables on the left) has a worn old cushion on it. When he is sacked, his replacement disdainfully throws this at the office boy’s head. When the old bookkeeper is reinstated, he feels uncomfortable in his seat until the employees produce the old cushion for him to sit on. Less developed (and less ironic) than the soap and matches associated with Mary Pickford’s character in Simple Charity (1910) or Blanche Sweet’s character’s shawl in The Painted Lady (1912) – both discussed by Russell Merritt (in “Mr. Griffith, The Painted Lady and the Distractive Frame”, pp. 147–56) – this prop still has clear metaphorical and metonymic functions. Then there is the Bible (from which Bowser and Gunning, following the Bulletin, quote a verse in a reconstructed intertitle) and, with more direct proairetic function, the crucifix that the hero uses to intimidate the thieves. Other characters, too, have their props: redundantly (and rather improbably) the employer’s wife shows the bookkeeper a pendant her husband has given her and then puts it in the safe, to establish that piece of furniture and its contents (the scene is not witnessed by the thieves, who clearly search around for the safe when they enter the house on the mere speculation of the presence of stealable valuables), and the couple’s departure on a long voyage is anticipated by travel brochures they are thumbing. The Moving Picture World review refers to the “well coordinated and speedy drawing together of all the elements to make a dramatic and emotional climax”. Compared with The Baby and the Stork and The Voice of the Child, the film is, in fact, rather sparing in its use of alternation. There is some between the old bookkeeper and his employer in the first part of the film, and in the sequence where the bookkeeper follows the thieves into the house, the film cuts backwards and forwards through the spaces the thieves, then the bookkeeper, traverse (rather than allowing both to pass before moving on to the next space in the old “chase” mode), but a real three-way alternation does not begin until the bookkeeper has phoned the police, and the employer’s car on its way home has also been introduced (however, the speed of the cutting in these last two sequences is enough to bring the shot count up to eighty-seven, more than any other film except The Voice of the Child in the group I am reviewing for this volume ). The reviewer may have preferred the switchback to be reserved for the thrilling climax rather than being the basic scenographic principle of the whole film, as it is in the other two examples. Ben Brewster

178

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

386 BIOGRAPH

A SISTER’S LOVE Filming date: finished November 1911 Location: New York Studio Release date: 8 February 1912 Release length: 999 feet Copyright date: 7 February 1912 Scenario purchase date: 20 November 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Mrs. E.C. Pierson [“Her Awakening”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas, Dorothy Bernard NOTE: Information on casting has been taken from the photograph reproduced with the published Biograph Bulletin. Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative HOW SHE KEPT HER PROMISE TO HER MOTHER At the death of their mother the elder sister makes a scared promise to take care of the younger, and by so doing she sacrifices the love of her sweetheart, who refuses to assume the responsibility of the extra care, as he feels it is an injustice. This separation almost breaks two hearts for they love each other devotedly. The elder sister, true to her trust, toils incessantly to provide money for her sister’s education, even sending her away to the city to study music. Here a young millionaire patron of music falls desperately in love with her and marries her. Her success is so great that she quite forgets the tremendous sacrifice her sister has made for her, and it is only when she learns that her sister is at the point of death that she is awakened to her sense of duty. Biograph Bulletin, February 8, 1912

At the time of writing, there was no print available for viewing. From the review in The New York Dramatic Mirror (February 14, 1912, p. 31), we can glean a few additions to the Biograph Bulletin summary. First, the rich man the younger sister meets in the city and marries is a “wealthy young parson”. Wilfred Lucas’s costume in the Bulletin still, though not an unequivocal “dog collar”, does look clerical, and Bernard looks youthfully vivacious, so it seems likely that he played the rich young man and she the younger sister. However, “parson” might be a misprint for “person”, and the review complains that the actresses playing the two sisters do not sufficiently differentiate their ages. Second, after the younger sister is summoned back to the elder’s deathbed, the suitor whom the elder had originally rejected in favour of supporting her sibling returns, and this time it is he that decides against marrying her (according to the review, his reasons are so obscure as to make him seem not worthy of the woman’s love). Both the New York Dramatic Mirror review cited above and the “Comment” in The Moving Picture World (February 24, 1912, p. 689) criticise the rapid cutting rate of the film. According to The New York Dramatic Mirror, “There is an apparent gliding over situations 179

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

and a general chopped impression in the sequence of the scenes that naturally does not give the impression of a cleancut, smooth delineation”; and The Moving Picture World reviewer comments, “The Biograph Company seems to be experimenting in scene relationship. The scenes as arranged in this picture carry it forward very speedily, perhaps a little too quickly for the mind, which has to keep up with it.” By the summer of 1912, such complaints had become common. In August, the Reverend Elias Boudinot Stockton wrote a letter to Epes Winthrop Sargent, which the latter reprinted in The Moving Picture World, reporting his counts of the scenes in the films of various American producing companies, a list in which the one Biograph film, The Sands of Dee (1912), came out on top with sixty-eight (my count of a modern print gives eighty-two shots including nine titles, so I am not quite sure how Stockton defined a scene). Of the films assigned to me for review in this volume, The Baby and the Stork has fiftysix shots (including eight titles), The Voice of the Child ninety-one (including eight titles), For His Son seventy-four (including twenty-three titles), and The Old Bookkeeper eightyseven (including nine titles). All these counts include main title, closing title, and inserts as titles. The print I viewed of The Voice of the Child is slightly incomplete and may have had one or two more shots and a title; that of For His Son is untrustworthy, and certainly the release prints had far fewer titles and probably fewer shots (even allowing for the fact that there may be one or two scenes missing from the print viewed). The Moving Picture World review complains about The Voice of the Child in similar terms to those of the review of A Sister’s Love: “The picture’s worst fault is that it seems hurried. Because of this it even loses something of the dignity it might have had. Apparently it was the fault of neither the camera nor the projector. Perhaps it came from a desire to keep it from dragging as it would have if played at a slower pace, being overburdened with scenes some of which were not necessary. This hurry also seemed to hinder the acting” (Ibid). (The reviewer singles out Blanche Sweet as suffering most from the rush, despite her excellence in other pictures.) There are no such comments about the other films, so perhaps one can conclude that A Sister’s Love had over ninety shots. But it seems clear that both reviewers of A Sister’s Love are making a generic point, too: the subject, which does not involve a last-minute rescue or other such suspenseful climax, is inappropriate for switchback editing. The Old Bookkeeper probably escapes censure because it does have a last-minute rescue; so does The Voice of the Child, but the pace of the editing speeds up considerably in the climactic part of the former, whereas rapid alternation is used throughout the latter. Ben Brewster

180

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

387 BIOGRAPH

BILLY’S STRATAGEM Filming date: 28 November–2 December 1911 Location: Coytesville, New Jersey Release date: 12 February 1912; reissued by Biograph, 8 October 1915 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 12 February 1912 Scenario purchase date: 28 November 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: George Hennessy Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Edna Foster (Billy); Inez Seabury (His sister); Wilfred Lucas, Claire McDowell (His parents); ? (Grandfather); William J. Butler (Indian trader); Harry Hyde, Robert Harron, Frank Evans (Settlers); Alfred Paget, Charles Hill Mailes, W. Christy Cabanne, J. Jiquel Lanoe, W.C. Robinson (Indians) Archival Sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate positive (AFI/Nederlands Filmmuseum Collection, Dutch titles) A VIVID PORTRAYAL OF THE EARLY DAYS ON THE FRONTIER The little frontier family, in their stockade home, is enjoying the simple life such an existence induces. The father goes off to a distant woods to work, and while the mother is there with his lunch, good-natured grand-dad, who is left in charge of the two young children, allows them to go outside of the stockade to play. In another section of the woods is a peaceful tribe of Indians, but an unscrupulous trader lets them have in exchange for skins, a quantity of whiskey. On this “firewater” they become drunk, and, in search of more, attack the stockade home, killing grand-dad and driving the youngsters in terror into the cabin. The children, cornered, upset a keg of powder in the kitchen and put a slow fuse to it, escaping through a back window. The Indians enter the kitchen just as the powder explodes. The details of this picture make it one of the most thrilling ever produced. Biograph Bulletin, February 12, 1912

Living in a stockade on the frontier, Billy and his sister are left with their grandfather while mother goes out to bring food to their father in the forest. The children wander outside the stockade to stalk prey and encounter marauding Mohawks on a drunken tear. The Indians chase them into the stockade, grandfather dies of a heart attack, and the children are left to fend for themselves. Billy finds two powder kegs in the cabin and makes a fuse. Escaping with his sister through an open hatch, Billy locks the Indians inside the cabin, and runs while the Indians explode.

The raison d’être for this film is apparently the opportunity it gave Griffith to blow up the stockade he had built a few weeks earlier for A Tale of the Wilderness. Billy’s Stratagem was one of the last two outdoor films Griffith made in 1911, and it shows Griffith patching 181

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

together a low-budget wilderness spectacle out of odds and ends from his earlier frontier pictures. Everything seems secondhand and improvised, from the stockade and the escape to the drunken Indians, who have by now been reduced to murderous slapstick clowns. Griffith had been setting buildings on fire since the cabin burning in The Broken Doll (1910) and the plantation fire in His Trust (1911). Here, he still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of representing explosions – the one here is carried across three ill-matched shots. But the final shot of the hysterical Billy dragging his sister across the barren scrubland while the stockade behind them crumbles in flames is still powerfully austere, reminiscent of Claire McDowell’s turn in front of her destroyed Southern mansion in His Trust. Griffith had to master the rapidly changing conventions of the Western while on the job at Biograph. Aside from acting in Ramona and a Pocahontas pageant in Norfolk, Virginia, he had had no prior on-stage experience with frontier or Indian material. The impulse to make them seems to have been entirely commercial, prompted by the success Essanay, Selig, and Bison were having with location Westerns, and the mania for movie Westerns that had been growing since 1908. Robert Anderson has determined that by the end of 1910 one out of every five pictures made by American studios was a Western. Biograph was running a little below average (15% of their 1910-1911 output were Indian and frontier pictures) as Griffith finished the season with a great crowd-pleaser. “[Billy’s Stratagem is] a picture that surely gets over”, the Moving Picture World reviewer wrote. “The spectators gave it more marked approval than any other release shown for several days” (February 24, 1912, p. 690). The New York Dramatic Mirror added: “If all motion picture dramas of early settler life were built on the large and vivid lines of this one there would be less talk about the tiresomeness of these subjects, for it springs into life with vigorous and natural portrayal amid backgrounds of exceptional reality.… The dramatic power and startling effects obtained at this point are both remarkable and absorbing, and the entire production is perhaps as near to a masterpiece as one can attain in a picture of this sort.” (February 21, 1912, p. 29.) As we have seen in the 1909 and 1910 films, Griffith by now had turned the Colonial Indian drama into a Biograph specialty. This is a frontier sub-type that at Biograph extends back to Leather Stocking (1909), and includes such titles as A Mohawk’s Way and Rose O’ Salem-Town (both from 1910). It comprises a broad range of tales about Indians and settlers set in the rivers and forests of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where Indians are often portrayed as spurned lovers, victims of white bigotry, and rescuing figures, and where interracial friendships – both male and female – coexist with Indian uprisings and white retaliation (see Scott Simmon’s note for Rose O’ Salem-Town, DWG Project, #228). But during his two seasons in California, Griffith had shifted noticeably to other kinds of Western stories set in the deserts and mountains of the far West, closer in tone to the Wild West shows and the wagon train dramas of the stage. What gives Billy’s Stratagem its interest is seeing how these California formulas now seep back into his latest eastern Western to form a strange hybrid. Billy’s Stratagem is barely recognizable as a Colonial film, so westernized have the costumes and trappings become. Audiences, then as today, associated Conestoga wagons, stockades, and buckskin fringe more with the West than the frontier East. Only the flintlocks, the Mohawk haircuts, and a problematic intertitle – the family are “de Coloniston”, according to a translated title in Jean Desmet’s 1912 Dutch release print – indicate Colonial New York. Otherwise, Griffith reworks both the landscape and his characters as one of his Western family melodramas. For starters, although shot in the familiar haunts of New Jersey’s Coytesville, Griffith has abandoned the lush foliage and cabins of his 1909 and 1910 frontier Biographs in favor of a colorless scrubland, his eastern counterpart to the California deserts and wastes. His Indians, individualized and often sympathetic in his earlier Colonial Westerns, have become 182

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

undifferentiated California hostiles of West Coast Biographs like His Mother’s Scarf and Fighting Blood (both from 1911). They are savages motivated not by the white man’s cupidity or his acts of injustice, but, in this case, by a barrel of liquor (“brandy” in our Dutch translation) and supposed genetic excitability. The frontiersman himself, formerly a Natty Bumppo figure who lives by himself in a cabin, now is a settler who dwells in a western-style fort with his family where, as though a dress rehearsal for a rescuing cavalry, a posse of frontiersmen comes running to be at Billy’s side. But mostly what gives Billy’s Stratagem the feel of the newer frontier film is Bitzer’s development of heroic, Western composition, appropriate to mythic pioneers. The earlier eastern Westerns are often marked with picturesque vistas, but only in final tableau shots does Griffith provide monumental framing for his actors. Billy’s Stratagem, abandoning the scenic landscape, instead continually frames Billy in self-contained heroic, statuesque compositions. Bitzer lowers the height of his camera or photographs Billy on the slope of a hill at a low angle, most often while the actor (ten-year-old Edna Foster) poses full frame, buckskin clad, rifle caught in the crook of her arm, gazing intently over the camera into the distance. Interior shots of the cabin are strikingly (and uncharacteristically) reframed when Billy and his sister maneuver against the Indians so that the camera is closer and lower to the ground for a similar heroic effect. The extreme high-angle stockade shots and the final shot of the fort on fire create a similar dynamism missing in his earlier eastern Westerns. Like the Civil War, the frontier appears to have fired Griffith’s imagination. The Indian assault against the cabin while horrified parents hurry to the rescue are regulation Biograph plot turns – yet further variations of the ultra-familiar The Lonely Villa formula. But Griffith shows his usual flair for dramatic compression, character nuance, and tell-tale atmospherics in creating curious narrative undercurrents. The film begins in one of those rare Biograph interiors that were built on location. He had constructed another cabin for Fools of Fate (1909) in Cuddebackville, New York, and shot In the Season of Buds (1910) inside a pre-existing barn in Stamford, Connecticut, where he achieved remarkable lighting effects. But here the log cabin is designed with special features impractical inside the New York studio – an open fire blazing away in a large fireplace, a roof that comes crashing down upon the marauders, a practical firewood port that the children crawl through, and a dirt floor with a trail of twigs and shaving that Billy sets on fire. The ubiquitous framed pictures on the Biograph wall have been replaced with cured animal skins, expressions of the family trade. We are in the home of a trapper, and hunting animals becomes a family motif adroitly intertwined with the plot crisis. It starts when we are introduced to Billy, who returns from an outing with his father, proudly holding up a rabbit he has shot. Billy’s greatest fan is his younger sister, and back in the cabin we see Billy on the floor playing with her, miming how he shot the rabbit as, saucer-eyed, she looks on. Griffith plays up Billy’s prowess by showing him, unassisted, loading and priming his flintlock (this is the first of the slightly low-angle shots), then taking sister along for an unsupervised hunt. But more is involved here than a simple plot turn leading to a fateful encounter with Indians. Billy is trying to impress and teach his smaller sister what his father has taught him. The heroic compositions Griffith creates for him while hunting (Billy, unsmiling, coming into full frame with the camera at another low angle) are both serious – Billy is part of a heroic pioneer tradition – and tinged with gentle irony. This is the image he wants to project for his adoring little sister who trails behind. But the sister is no mere onlooker. She, in fact, makes the outing possible by playing up to Grandfather, who refuses Billy’s request to wander outside the stockade, but who surrenders to the little five year-old when she turns on her charm. She is, incidentally, also the one who gives Billy the idea to use his father’s 183

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

gunpowder in order to fight off the Indians. And this entire cycle of teaching and survival is linked to the father’s occupation: the gunpowder kegs sit in the cabin as tools traded for the cured skins father has produced through hunting. The other motif – one that emerges with curious frequency after 1910 – is the ongoing preparation and consumption of a meal as a prelude to separation and division. As the film opens, it is lunchtime. Claire McDowell sets the table with her small daughter toddling beside her, then goes outside (in shot 2) to look for the men. The opening scenes give McDowell a chance to show off the practical fireplace, the steaming dishes, and an actual roast (Griffith, as usual, applying principles of Belasco hyper-realism to domestic chores) she starts to carve. But meals, as almost always in the Griffith Biographs, are preludes – and in this instance, occasions – to separations. Mother leaves with a lunchpail for father in the forest, entrusting her children to the care of the kindly but inept grandfather. And the food becomes the first target of the marauding Indians, who wolf down the table scraps as a prelude to beating on the door to go after the children. The link between the food and the hunt is completed when Billy uses the fire meant to cook the meal to set off the powder kegs meant for the hunting of food. For us, I think, the great Achilles’ heel of the film is the depiction of the Indian menace. Even making allowances for the insensitivities of the time, Griffith’s Indians in this film are hard to take. His painted actors are mugging so broadly that their rampages resemble undirected children’s play. Even as killers, they are not taken seriously. In fact, the evasions their child-like clowning permit may be the most interesting aspect of the crude slapstick. Though the Biograph Bulletin and Biograph’s reissue synopsis both claim the Indians kill the grandfather, Griffith, in fact, goes out of his way to make the old man’s death a matter of heart failure (The Moving Picture World got it right: “The old man, wakened suddenly, loses his wits and falls in a coma.”) But just as the Indians never actually kill anyone, so, we’re led to believe, their own deaths aren’t quite real. Having been blown up, three of them howl out of the stockade, somewhat like characters in a Tex Avery cartoon or the pretend pirates in Peter Pan. Only the explosion itself is heroic; the Indians are entirely impotent. Even the baggy fleshcolored longjohns, the ill-fitting skullcaps, and poorly camauflaged patent leather footwear are of a piece with the idea of a farcical nemesis. Presumably, Griffith did not want audiences to take too seriously the threat against the children or Billy’s brutal response. This is what the Motography reviewer (February 24, 1912, p. 26) thought: “[The Indians’] exeunt gives a very welcome bit of comedy to the picture, the more because it is a proper anti-climax and relief.” But, in fact, Griffith has no ideas about ways to make the attacks and the children’s self-defense effectively playful. In a film that jumbles together conventions from disparate genres, the Indians look and act as though they are in a different film from everyone else. Billy’s Stratagem, according to my calculation, is also the first film Griffith finished in December. Since the production order of Biographs from this point on becomes speculative, this may be the place for a word about the ordering of the six December Biographs, the first such Griffith films. Starting in December 1911, we lose the detailed production dating of the Biograph Camera Register. Up to this point, the Camera register had scrupulously recorded daily shooting dates as well as exact shooting locations, but the Register ends with the completion of The Voice of the Child on 28 November. From this point, we move to the Biograph Scenario Register for production dates, but that register indicates only the month each production was finished. So historians and archivists have generally used release dates to estimate the order of production within any given month, mainly because after November 1911, those are the only daily dates we have. However, this has proven notoriously unreliable (a good 184

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

illustration of that undependability is the January–February 1912 release schedule when films directed in California were distributed interchangeably with films made one and two months earlier in New York). For late November–December 1911, though, we have other controls that can help pinpoint production order. The most important are the scenario purchase dates, which are also listed in the Scenario Register. These dates are important because they establish earliest possible shooting dates. True, scenarios could be put on hold indefinitely (Linda Arvidson wrote the scenario for A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, the Biograph after Billy’s Stratagem, a full year before it was filmed). But as we know from cases where we have both daily production dates and scenario purchase dates, filming never started before the story was purchased. It frequently happened, as I believe happened here, that productions started the same day the scenario was bought. We also know that it snowed on Monday morning, the fourth of December. The snowstorm was reported in the New York newspapers’ weather sections that afternoon, and the scenic results may be seen in the Biograph Bulletin photo for Mack Sennett’s A Near Tragedy. But for our purposes it means that Griffith could not have shot his snow-free exteriors for either Billy’s Stratagem or A Blot in the ’Scutcheon after Saturday, 2 December. Since the script for Billy’s Stratagem was bought 28 November, we have a rather precise idea when the frontier film was made. It also means Griffith almost certainly shot the bulk of the exteriors for A Blot in the ’Scutcheon in some part of the five unaccounted workdays between 8 and 17 November. And we can infer that A Blot in the ’Scutcheon’s interiors were shot during the first week of December, after Monday’s snowstorm. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon had to have been finished in December because it is not recorded in the Camera Register. But no part of Billy’s Stratagem could have been shot after the 2nd because it was shot entirely in and around an open air set. Further, the earliest any of the remaining four December Biographs could have been started is the 6th and 7th, the dates that the first December scenarios – for The Transformation of Mike and The Root of Evil respectively – were purchased. The final two scenarios, for The Sunbeam and A String of Pearls, were bought 11 December and 17 December, which is likely the order in which they were shot – or at least started. This gives us at least a working idea for the production order, quite different from the release order: Billy’s Stratagem (28 November–2 December 1911; released 12 February 1912) A Blot in the ’Scutcheon (several days within 8–17 November, 4–6 December; released 29 January 1912) The Transformation of Mike (started ca. 6 December; released 1 February 1912) The Root of Evil (started ca. 7 December; released 18 March 1912) The Sunbeam (started ca. 11 December; released 26 February 1912) A String of Pearls (started ca. 18 December; released 7 March 1912) The order is of interest because it makes possible the detailed tracking of Griffith’s progress during an erratic and eventful month. Russell Merritt

185

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

388 BIOGRAPH

A BLOT IN THE ’SCUTCHEON Filming date: several days within 8–17 November, 4–6 December 1911 Location: New York Studio/New Jersey location Release date: 29 January 1912; reissued by Biograph, 12 September 1916 Release length: 1500 feet Copyright date: 29 January 1912 Scenario purchase date: 25 December 1910 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: Linda Arvidson [“A Blot on the Escutcheon”] Source: “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon”, the poem by Robert Browning Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Charles Hill Mailes (Thorold, Earl Tresham); Dorothy Bernard (Mildred, his sister); Edwin August (Henry, Earl Mertoun); Claire McDowell (Gwendolyn, Tresham’s cousin); William J. Butler (Tresham’s serf, a hunter); Edward Dillon (Tresham’s brother and Gwendolyn’s fiancé); Edna Foster and unidentified actress (Pages); Charles H. West, Harry Hyde, W. Christy Cabanne, Joseph Graybill, J. Jiquel Lanoe (In the court) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative AN ADAPTATION OF ROBERT BROWNING’S POEM There is possibly no literary classic better known than this work of Browning, in which he presents in his inimitable manner the result of vanity, hence there is but little need of a description further than a brief outline. Thorold, Earl Tresham, proud of his ancestral escutcheon, which he claims shows no tarnish, welcomes the proposal of Henry, Earl of Mertoun, for his sister Mildred’s hand, as it will mean the uniting of two noble houses, he not knowing that Mildred and Henry, who are both very young, ignorant and unguarded, have already met, sinned and now attempt a reparation. He learns from one of his servants that an unknown visitor, who was none other than Henry himself, was seen leaving his sister’s chamber, and in a fury of rage sets out to right the wrong as he believes to be the only way. Biograph Bulletin, January 29, 1912

Earl Tresham, a bookish aristocrat who dotes on his proud ancestry, is unaware that his sister is having an affair with a nobleman from the estate next door. When the nobleman asks for the sister’s hand in marriage, Tresham is delighted. But delight turns to shock when he discovers that the engaged couple are already lovers. He kills the nobleman in a duel, watches his sister die of grief, and then poisons himself.

A Blot in ’Scutcheon sinks like lead, burdened by Griffith’s uninspired adaptation of a turgid Browning play stretched out to the better part of two reels. The film contains scattered pleasures, but they are all minor and they don’t surface until you shake off the torpor created by lovers, as vapid as moon rocks, speaking semi-coherent Browningese. Lacking a center, the film depends upon peripherals to hold our attention. Biograph plainly meant A Blot in the ’Scutcheon as a prestige production appropriate for 186

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

educational uplift. It was Griffith’s first European costume drama since Enoch Arden, and was promoted in the trades as being the latest in the cultural tradition of Pippa Passes (1909), Ramona (1910), and The Unchanging Sea (1910). Exhibitors were encouraged to add tone to the presentation by having a live lecturer accompany the film, speaking Browning’s verse and summarizing the action. As with Enoch Arden and Pathé’s Faust (1912), The Moving Picture World (February 10, 1912, p. 529) published one of the lectures making the rounds. Griffith had already made Enoch Arden in two parts, but A Blot in the ’Scutcheon was touted as his first authentic two-reeler because it was meant to be screened in its entirety at a single performance. Until recently, this has remained its sole claim to importance (though Linda Arvidson, who wrote the adaptation, forgot all about it when tracing her husband’s transition to elaborate features [Arvidson, pp. 195–200]). Biograph was being its cautious self in edging into feature film production, goaded less by Griffith’s lobbying than by the competitive pressure Vitagraph and the independents were creating in building a market for longer movies. Eileen Bowser (1990, pp. 191–215) has made a convincing argument that, contrary to received opinion, the Trust was no monolithic dinosaur that resisted features. Vitagraph, followed by Pathé Fréres and Selig, were creating two-reelers as early as 1910 (and three-reelers by 1911); by 1912 – within a few months of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon’s release – the Patents Company had formally set up a distribution system for multi-reel films aimed at their licensed nickelodeons. Reviewing the films of 1911, The New York Dramatic Mirror (January 31, 1912, p. 51; cited in Bowser, 1990, p. 203) listed “the tendency toward longer subjects” as the dominant trend of the year. A few weeks later, when A Blot in the ’Scutcheon’s appearance in early 1912 was accompanied by a two-page spread in The Moving Picture World, Selig was competing with The Coming of Columbus, “a $50,000 production in 3 reels”; Edison announced Martin Chuzzlewit in 3 reels; Pathé had a 3-reeler called The Orleans Coach; and Vitagraph – the Trust’s trendsetter in feature films – was preparing its fourth feature, The Lady of the Lake. As The New York Dramatic Mirror (January 31, 1912, p. 51) wrote, “Films of more than one reel are no longer a curiosity, and generally speaking they have been received with favor.” But features, like the star system, put Biograph into a notorious pet. Despite favorable and even enthusiastic reviews, Biograph didn’t permit another two-reeler for another five months. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, in fact, was very much a dead end, the final effort to produce two-reelers in the Vitagraph-Pathé tradition that linked length and spectacle to the cultural prestige of a famous literary property. When Griffith was finally permitted to return to two-reelers, the new subjects were Westerns and family melodramas, all of them based upon original sources – The Massacre, Brutality, Oil and Water (all three from 1912), The Little Tease, and The Yaqui Cur (both from 1913). Griffith was more or less finished with European costume dramas (he made only one more, When Kings Were The Law [1912], and then searched elsewhere – notably in the American West and the sea – for esoteric costumes). He stopped adapting literary classics, too: he remade “Pippa Passes” and filmed Charles Kingsley’s poem, “The Sands of Dee”, but otherwise he worked entirely with original story material in his last years at Biograph. All of which is to say that when he ended his career at Biograph with Judith of Bethulia (1913), he was returning to a conception of feature filmmaking that had been superseded since the completion of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon. Exactly why Biograph chose the Browning play is a puzzler. Browning, of course, was in the cultural pantheon and Biograph had had remarkable success with Pippa Passes. But A Blot in the ’Scutcheon would have meant little more to Griffith’s audience than it does to us. Alone among the important Biograph literary adaptations, it had never been performed by Griffith (actually, he never played in Pippa Passes either, but Gertrude Robinson had played 187

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

Pippa off Broadway, with Walthall in support, so it was a known work). Nor had A Blot in the ’Scutcheon ever been performed by Griffith’s wife, or, as far as we know, by any of the Biograph regulars. The play had fallen into deserved obscurity within a decade of its appearance in 1843, excluded from Browning anthologies, and unincorporated into repertoire companies, at least in the United States. It was revived occasionally, but it had never been popular. When Lawrence Barrett toured in 1884, the New York Clipper (December 18, 1884, p. 5) noted it had not been performed in forty years (that is, since its debut), nor were the reviewers surprised: “The play is gloomy, tedious, and lacking in incident and situation”, wrote the man at the New York Times. “It was received with infrequent and very moderate expressions of approval” (New York Times, December 20, 1884, 4:7). By the time of Griffith’s film, it had been seen on the New York stage only once more, when an actress named Sarah Cowell Le Moyne revived it for a one-night stand at the Hudson Theater. On this occasion the New York Times reviewer thought the play insufferably prolix, “such action as the tragedy contains again and again halted amid overpowering luxuriant verbal foliage” (New York Times, April 8, 1905). It is not that Browning’s play is unsalvageable. Griffith had worked with similar material before in The Honor of His Family (1910) and The Mountaineer’s Honor (1909), where lethal family ethics drive parents to kill their children. Thorold belongs in the company of Colonel Pickett who shoots his son for displaying cowardice, and Harum-Scarum’s mother who murders her son to prevent the humiliation of a public hanging. But what made these figures haunting was the psychological analysis that gave insight to their dark obsession with family honor. Scott Simmon noticed how in The Honor of His Family Griffith combined psychological study with wild melodrama and exciting spectacle to create an eerie, atmospheric film. The same is true of The Mountaineer’s Honor. But in A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, not only is Thorold something of a bore, even the melodrama is dull and the spectacle flat: a series of royal processions, a duel and a poison scene. The pity is that Charles Hill Mailes gives a remarkable, understated performance as Thorold that could have broken new ground had Griffith built his drama around him: a brother obsessed family tradition as a form of avoiding the present. As opposed to the preening father set up for a fall in The Honor of His Family, or the stoical, weather-beaten mother with a Biblical sense of family in The Mountaineer’s Honor, Mailes creates a quietly bookish character, taking refuge in his family’s past as a way of escaping the tedium of court life. Honor here is linked both to family tradition and a passion for reading. By banishing Thorold to the sidelines, Griffith lost an opportunity to create a new kind of family patriarch. As is, the film makes do with two colorless lovers, their assignations, and their demise. Of formal interest is Griffith’s increasing use of side lighting in his exteriors for shimmering pictorial effects. Strong side lighting make the shots on the estate property where Mertoun seduces Mildred particularly striking because of the shimmering light on Dorothy Bernard’s hair. Miriam Cooper, the Friendless One in the modern story of Intolerance (1916), has a detailed recollection of playing one of the scullery maids who clean up after a banquet in A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, and the entry for the actress in Who’s Who in the Film World (1914) also claims that she began film acting with Griffith in 1912, when A Blot in the ’Scutcheon was released. However, I have followed Graham et al. in omitting her from the cast because the scene she describes isn’t in the film, and none of the extras looks anything like her. Someone with sharper eyes, however, may be able to spot her. Russell Merritt

188

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

389 BIOGRAPH

THE TRANSFORMATION OF MIKE Filming date: started ca. 6 December 1911; finished December 1911 Location: New York Studio Release date: 1 February 1912 Release length: one reel Copyright date: 31 January 1912 Scenario purchase date: 6 December 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Wilfred Lucas Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Wilfred Lucas (Mike); Blanche Sweet (Tenement girl); Edna Foster (Her brother); William J. Butler (Their father); John T. Dillon, Frank Evans (Policemen); Kate Bruce (Neighbor); W. Christy Cabanne (The hallway masher); J. Jiquel Lanoe, W.C. Robinson, Joseph McDermott (In bar); ? (Girl’s friend); ? (Bartender); Grace Henderson, Gus Pixley, W.C. Robinson, Joseph McDermott, Robert Harron, John T. Dillon, J. Jiquel Lanoe (At dance) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) WHAT A PURE WOMAN’S LOVE CAN DO Mike, a gang leader, never before knew what power there was in a good woman’s persuasion, and when he met the little girl of the tenement he involuntarily exclaimed, “There’s a real girl.” At a dance given in the neighborhood, he hunts for her and despite the efforts of her friends to oppose it, she promises to be his girl. The next day, while in the corner saloon, he sees a bill collector with quite an amount of money. He attempts to get this money, and is about to succeed when he discovers that the collector is the father of the girl. He now fully realizes how despicable he is, and handing back the money, he goes with a promise to prove himself worthy of her. Biograph Bulletin, February 1, 1912

When Blanche meets a hoodlum named Mike at a dance hall, she agrees to be his girl despite warnings from her friends. True to his old ways, Mike later sees an older man count his money and, not knowing he is Blanche’s father, breaks into his apartment to rob him. Blanche, hearing the noise from behind the locked door of a kitchen, sends her younger brother down a dumbwaiter to fetch the police. Mike breaks down the kitchen door, discovers Blanche, and is dumbstruck. He pleads forgiveness; she covers for him while he escapes the police.

By now crime films featuring hoodlums reformed by the love of a good woman were starting to get on reviewers’ nerves. The Moving Picture World called The Transformation of Mike, “a melodrama of the underworld with incidents of the usual outworn kind” (March 30, 1912, 189

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

p. 1165). The scenes were “often pretty”, the reviewer admitted, “but not very new or vital”. The New York Dramatic Mirror liked it somewhat better, but thought the plot creaky and the formulaic reformation particularly weak: “The acquisition of a little culture and education would have been more convincing” (February 7, 1912, p. 83). Griffith had been flogging this theme for the better part of three years. The Transformation of Mike recalls The Purgation (1910), where Gertrude Robinson turns cracksman Joseph Graybill around, and it amounts to a remake of The Thief and the Girl (1911), where Wilfred Lucas, as here, plays a crook who is cold-cocked when he discovers the house he is robbing is occupied by a would-be sweetheart. More generally, the idea of the strong but primitive male redeemed by the sight of a righteous female goes back to the racial Biographs of 1908, where a non-white barbarian turns on his followers after a white woman shows him the light and transforms him into a worshipful penitent. As Scott Simmon wrote in his note for The Barbarian, Ingomar (DWG Project, #52), what keeps the couple apart in these films is not merely race: they each belong to different stages of civilization But what happens when the lady and the barbarian formula is stripped of race and transposed to the modern city? Many of the motifs survive intact. In the Griffith crime film as in the barbarian cycle, redemption starts when the protagonist assaults one or more fellow thugs in order to rescue the lady (here, it is a matter of slugging a masher and his cronies in a saloon; in the barbarian films it can be killing off tribesmen who have the woman tied to a stake). The lady is attracted, but she is separated from friends as she drifts into the barbarian’s orbit (anathematized if she goes willingly, as here); redemption is complete when the leader promises to reform, resigns from the gang, and goes off alone. But with no racial barriers to keep the sweethearts apart, can such a brutal hero end up in the heroine’s arms? In The Greaser’s Gauntlet (1908), the Mexican goes back to mother; in The Call of the Wild (1908), the Indian settles for the adored one’s scarf; and in The Zulu’s Heart (1908), the African simply stares helplessly into the veldt. But what happens in The Transformation of Mike when the thug turns around? Griffith keeps the matter unresolved, just as he had in The White Rose of the Wilds when the redeemed thug who turns on his gang was a cowboy claim-jumper. In The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), Griffith’s supreme gangster Biograph, he settles for having the heroine go off with the gangster’s rival. But here the barriers stay intact. Only in Intolerance, as J.B. Kaufman notices in his note to The Purgation (DWG Project, #266), does Griffith relent. When Bobby Harron resigns from his gang, he gets Mae Marsh. For us, The Transformation of Mike may feel like a rough draft of the better crime films to follow. Part of the problem is Wilfred Lucas who, with his doleful demeanor, looks less like a hoodlum than a constipated undertaker. Along with Blanche Sweet, he had become the chief beneficiary of the massive raids that robbed Griffith of what the trades were calling “the old Biograph Company”. It is as though Griffith was in a holding pattern, marking time with Lucas while awaiting the return of Walthall and the development of Bobby Harron and Walter Miller as leading players. In the meantime, Lucas was Griffith’s most important leading man, making a specialty of the forlorn, doleful miscreant. But he tends to illustrate the limits of the new Biograph school of acting that others were turning to such advantage. In his hands the quiet, understated, and introspective style becomes somewhat dull and lethargic. Despite an imposing and appealing physical presence, Lucas was probably the least resourceful of all Griffith’s leading men. And Griffith hadn’t found his footing with the crime story, either. He was in the midst of moving away from his powerful urban topicals of 1909 and 1910 toward the great genre pieces of 1912, but was still learning how to control, combine, and pump freshness into 190

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

crime story conventions. What reviewers found stale in The Transformation of Mike – the perfunctory reformation, the escape down the dumbwaiter, the gratuitous cynicism of big city cops, the regulation behavior of the saloon toughs, and the trick ending – all seem undigested holdovers from the O. Henry school of the tenement romance. What is remarkable is how quickly Griffith learned how to rework the formulas to such powerful effect within a few months. The saloon on the first floor of the tenement apartment may be worth noticing. Tenements and saloons went together in Griffith Biographs like wayward fathers and drink. But this is the first appearance of a saloon as a part of the tenement. It is not simply a matter of spatial compression for dramatic effect, as I had originally supposed. When in the 1990s the Tenement Museum in New York began restoring a tenement building on the Lower East Side at 96 Orchard Street, one of their discoveries was a first-floor saloon with an entranceway out into the apartment’s main foyer. This was the ultimate form of the neighborhood bar, and the doorway made it possible for the bar’s customers to share the tenement’s single toilet. Nor were first-floor saloons unusual, according to Meyer Berger in McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (pp. 124-126), at least until the Tenement House Act of 1901. Landlords often enhanced their income by doubling as owners or co-owners of in-house barrooms. Russell Merritt

191

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

390 BIOGRAPH

THE ROOT OF EVIL Filming date: started ca. 7 December 1911; finished December 1911 Location: New York Studio Release date: 18 March 1912 Release length: 999 feet Copyright date: 15 March 1912 Scenario purchase date: 7 December 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: George Hennessy Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Dorothy Bernard (Rich man’s daughter); J. Jiquel Lanoe (Duplicitous weaseler); Inez Seabury (Granddaughter); William J. Butler (Wealthy father); Edward Dillon (Secretary/husband); Harry Hyde (Faithful servant); Alfred Paget (Landlord); Charles Hill Mailes (Doctor); John T. Dillon (Estate lawyer) Archival Sources: Library of Congress, 35mm paper print; The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A CHILD AVERTS THE PURPOSE OF A DESPICABLE VILLAIN The daughter of a wealthy man has clandestinely married his secretary. Their secret is discovered by the man’s confidential adviser, an unscrupulous, designing villain, who hoped to marry her himself, simply to obtain her father’s wealth. Of course, he makes known his discovery, and is effusive in his sympathy for such a misalliance, delicately urging the father on to extreme measures, which resulted in his disowning his daughter and making a new will in favor of the adviser. In their new home, the young husband contracts an incurable disease, and five years after her departure from her father’s home, we find her the widowed mother of a small child. Meanwhile, the schemer has more strongly ingratiated himself in the esteem of the father. The daughter in desperation makes a vain appeal to her father, but is repulsed. The shock, however, is too much for the old man, and he is stricken dangerously ill. His trusted servant feels that now is the time to effect a reconciliation and goes after the daughter. The adviser, fearing for his own chances, poisons the wine the doctor leaves as a tonic for the sick man, and his plan would have succeeded had not the little granddaughter seen the act, and by imitating him, poisoned the villain’s own drink, thereby reversing the result of his design. Biograph Bulletin, March 18, 1912

When a rich man’s daughter marries his poor but worthy employee, she is disinherited. The couple lives in poverty, the husband dies, and his wife becomes destitute. The daughter’s loss has become an unscrupulous legal advisor’s gain. A vindictive manipulator, the attorney has contrived to keep the rich man poisoned against his daughter in order to make himself heir. When the rich man becomes seriously ill and considers reconciling with his daughter, the lawyer contrives to poison his medicinal wine. His plan is foiled by the rich man’s small granddaughter, who, developing a taste for wine, pursues the attorney’s decanter and, imitating what she sees the lawyer do, innocently spikes his drink with the poison. 192

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

What a sly little film this is. In the guise of a moral preachment, Griffith creates a truly perverse infant heroine: a little girl who steals sips of wine when mother’s back is turned and saves the day when her longing for another drink leads her to kill the man who wants to disinherit mother. It is all done in the style of an adorable kids-do-the-darnedest-things misunderstanding. But in the heat of growing enthusiasm for Prohibition and moral uplift in the movies, The Root of Evil is yet another example of Griffith tormenting censors with a gleefully perverse film. Unhappily, it doesn’t quite come off. The scenes building up to the appearance of Dorothy’s daughter are sketchy and formulaic, and the denouement, with its overly elaborate crosscutting, falls flat because the editing is so fast that the actors don’t have time to make their actions clear. But Griffith is plainly having great fun directing little Inez Seabury and shows his customary flair in creating a quiet, understated villain out of the debonair J. Jiquel Lanoe. If Lanoe’s agony in the poison scene returns us to the hilarities of a 1908 Charles Inslee display, Lanoe in the rest of the film provides a marvelous example of a new kind of menace: quiet, introspective, and suave. Although Lanoe had been showing up in Biographs for two years, this was his first important part, and he is a find. He belongs to the new school of Griffith character actors, moving away from emotional trumpeting and larger-than-life techniques in order to give his villainy an aura of calculation and intelligence. He is especially good in the early scenes, virtually motionless as he watches Dorothy plead with her father to find herself disowned. Lanoe’s trick of standing stock still, revealing distress with the small tightening of his hand, was something George Siegman had used as the sadistic prison guard in A Convict’s Sacrifice (1909). But, unlike Siegman (and the other great Biograph heavies including Alfred Paget and George O. Nicholls), he never glares. The reviewer for The Moving Picture World (March 30, 1912, p. 1165) thought him the best thing in the film: “The man who plays this schemer seems to be a new player among the Biograph people and, if so, he is a noteworthy addition to their forces.” For those interested in Griffith the formalist, The Root of Evil has special pleasures. As early as 1908 (with The Greaser’s Gauntlet, to be precise), Griffith had discovered the usefulness of the hallway as an interior crossroads marked by doorways, staircases, and corridors. As Griffith used it, the vestibule was both a playing area and a proleptic space, a gateway that always denoted space beyond the margins of the frame. It was the master staging area for entry into adjacent rooms (including that Biograph specialty, the forced entry), a site for eavesdropping or spying, a space for greetings and farewells, and above all, a space for chance encounters between characters headed in opposite directions. By the end of 1910 it is the master image of the Griffith tenement neighborhood. But by 1911 Griffith is also using his hallway to pace the action and create dramatic vraisemblance. The hall becomes crucial in breaking away from the forced propinquity of Griffith’s 1908–1909 staging (the spatial absurdity of having one actor, apparently unnoticed, spying on others when only inches away). The spy increasingly observes from this space next door. Actors are also now encouraged to pause in this space before entering a crowded room, or retreat into it in order to act apart. And as the space between – the room that separates sharply defined living spaces such as dining rooms, bedrooms, one-room apartments and barrooms – it functions as a spatial obstacle that has to be penetrated to get from one destination to another. It is disposable space: when it suits Griffith’s purpose, as in the final sequence in The Root of Evil, characters can move directly from one side of the house to the other without passing through it. And in chases where Griffith is crosscutting between 193

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

pursuer and pursued, it can be added or subtracted to help regulate tempo. In other films of the month, notably The Transformation of Mike, The Sunbeam, and The String of Pearls, Griffith makes a spectacle of crosscutting between parlors, kitchens, bedrooms, stairwells, and dumbwaiters, using the hallway as his spatial anchor. The Root of Evil is not quite so interesting in this regard, and if anything, the crosscutting is too busy. But what sets this hallway apart is its design. As a self-contained set, it is the most complicated interior that Biograph’s extraordinary set designer, the unsung William G. Smart, had yet come up with. The room prefigures the kind of baroque design that Griffith would find so useful in his features. In the foreground, Smart creates a sense of absolute symmetry with draped entryways on either side of the frame (with matching vases of large chrysanthemums). A third vase of mums sits on a small desk dead center at the rear to provide the fulcrum point, just below a framed seascape. But as we penetrate the room, the set swivels as Smart curves the left wall to meet the back wall, with a bedroom door placed at the joint. On stage left, an imposing, carpeted staircase comes in at a 45-degree angle, creating a strong diagonal, and the rest of the furnishings are obliquely oriented toward those stairs. Matching armchairs face each other on either side of the staircase, but the angle of the staircase means that one chair is closer to us in the foreground, and that the pair of them are kited away from us. The carpets create a similar tension: the larger one is oriented toward us, flush against the back wall. The smaller one sits at the foot of the stairs, oriented toward the staircase and to the chairs, but angled away from us. The stairs provide one entry point and conceal another. When characters enter the house, they proceed from behind the staircase down to stage center. This means Griffith has no fewer than five separate entryways in his vestibule, enabling him to orchestrate comings and goings in a rich variety of ways. At one point, little Inez – looking for some wine to sip – enters from the bedroom door, starts up the staircase, hesitates, looks back toward the parlor entryway, and then exits into the lawyer’s study. When her mother goes to find her, she has a rich assortment of entry points to try, including the space behind the steps. 1911 is notable for the outdoor spectacles Griffith created, but the principles of elaboration did not evaporate when he was forced indoors by the winter weather. Swanky homes and tenement interiors provided opportunities for dramatic variety and surprise of their own. Griffith and Smart would trump their ace in The Root of Evil a few days later, when they designed the even more remarkable hallway for A String of Pearls. Russell Merritt

194

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

391 BIOGRAPH

THE SUNBEAM Filming date: started ca. 11 December; finished December 1911 Location: New York Studio Release date: 26 February 1912; reissued by Biograph, 25 September 1916 Release length: 1000 feet Copyright date: 27 February 1912 Scenario purchase date: 11 December 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Script: George Hennessy [“Little Sunbeam”] Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Inez Seabury (Little Sunbeam); Claire McDowell (Spinster); Dell Henderson (Bachelor); Kate Bruce (Sunbeam’s mother); Joseph McDermott and John T. Dillon (Policemen); Adolph Lestina and W. Christy Cabanne (Health inspectors); Edna Foster, Gladys Egan and two unidentified performers (Children in hallway); W. Christy Cabanne and unidentified actress (Sweethearts in hallway); Charles Hill Mailes (Janitor); W. Chrystie Miller (Old man in hallway) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative A LITTLE CHILD WHO BROUGHT SUNSHINE WHEN IT SEEMED THE DARKEST The little one is playing with her doll while her mother lies sick. The poor woman dies, and the child, thinking her asleep, goes downstairs in search of a playmate. First she visits an austere old maid, and by her artlessness soon melts her coldness. Next she goes across the hallway to a crabbed old bachelor and affects him the same way. The old maid misses one of her hair puffs and goes after the child, thinking she took it. While she is in the bachelor’s room talking to the child, several tenement-house youngsters steal a “scarlet fever” notice and stick it on the bachelor’s door. This quarantines the three until the Health Officer appears and releases them. They then take the child to find its mamma and are horrified at finding her dead. As each wants to take the child they end the argument most logically – a wedding results. Biograph Bulletin, February 26, 1912

A small girl, freshly orphaned, searches for a playmate in the apartments below, intruding first upon an austere spinster and then a lonely bachelor. The spinster trying to recover a missing hair accessory trails the girl into the man’s apartment, just as pranksters stick a “Scarlet Fever” quarantine sign on the bachelor’s door. The police refuse to let anyone leave the room; in forced proximity the couple fall in love and agree to adopt the girl who brought them together.

The Sunbeam is one of the most charming films Griffith ever made, and yet another reminder of what a great director of situation comedy he could be. In the hands of a lesser craftsman, child actress Inez Seabury would all but steal the show as the terminally adorable little Sunbeam. Her scenes with Biograph veteran Claire McDowell rank among the comic highlights 195

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

in Griffith’s early career. But the film also reveals a wonderful formal symmetry that creates a true ensemble piece. While the narrative may appear simple, the economy of its composition and form are crucial to the film’s comic appeal. No cut seems gratuitous: each shot is timed for maximum effect. This was the second of Griffith’s three December tenement films (falling between The Transformation of Mike and The String of Pearls); spatially it is his simplest. Griffith uses only five setups (fewer than half what he works with in The Transformation of Mike and The String of Pearls), but far from feeling cramped or monotonous, the three rooms and two hallway spaces seem perfectly designed for the playful romps, the practical jokes, and the unfolding of the gentle love story. By 1911, the Griffith apartment set had developed a personality of its own, or more precisely, had become both distinctive and flexible enough to accommodate a broad range of narratives. Griffith’s planimetric style, with the camera always aimed straight on into the back wall with at least one side of the room aligned to the margin of the frame, had become as much a Biograph signature as the last-minute rescue, the fade-out, parallel editing, and the stock company of actors. In his dramatic films, the juxtaposition of contiguous spaces provided a remarkable sense of compression; in films like A Woman Scorned (1911), the blocks of contiguous spaces become obstacles that intruders try to penetrate, until they press against the heroine’s innermost sanctum. But in The Sunbeam, the familiar hallway and oneroom apartments turn into something resembling a row of a child’s wooden blocks or the rooms in a child’s dollhouse, albeit with a dead mother in the garret. In each space, whether the hallway, the spinster’s apartment or the bachelor’s one-room across the hall, there is something to play with or play upon. The prank with the string stretched across the hallway literally links the two apartments and provides the perfect center of the film – a gag that depends upon the mirror symmetries of the rooms and the tug-of-war actions of the two incipient sweethearts. By now, Griffith’s fascination with order, symmetry, and balance had spiraled out into many different creative forms. Graphic and structural rhymes fired Griffith’s imagination, and part of the fun of watching The Sunbeam is seeing how subtly they are integrated. Even the clothes Griffith assigns Henderson and McDowell are part of the way he compares them and sets them apart from the others in the apartment. The frock coat, the dress with the lace choker collar, and the high button shoes are slightly arcane and more formal than the tenement norm. The clothes and outdated style, markers here of the social obtuseness of our protagonists, are linked to what bring the couple together: Claire’s search for a missing hair puff that she thinks Sunbeam has stolen. But the order and balance provided by the spatial arrangements play off the grim undertone of this sunshine comedy. This is what the man at The Moving Picture World hinted at when describing the film’s unusual mood in terms of graphic design. A reviewer signing himself “H.C.J.” sensed that Griffith had done something remarkable in The Sunbeam, but wondered how a story so implausible, so slight, and so farcical could appear so moving. H.C.J. concluded that the film worked like an illustration, blending three distinct “tones of life” by manipulating three levels of space: The picture is a picture of vivid life, centered on the child with all her special needs and budding ideas. And how true a picture of life it is. In the foreground, there are plenty of children, just “kids” of the tenement, brim full of life and up to all kinds of pranks. In the middle distance are the two middle-aged lovers, and in the background, there is death... a wonderfully, but calmly, quietly, suggestive picture of death. It isn’t at all tragic and in this lies its remarkable freshness. As for that, this picture of death is something new. We don’t know what to call it. The producer doesn’t comment on this death or criticize it in any way; he merely shows it to us simply. (The Moving Picture World, March 9, 1912, p. 868)

196

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

But it is not just the corpse of mother moldering in her bed upstairs that creates the dark background. The scarlet fever quarantine (New York had had a terrible epidemic the summer of 1911), the police with clubs as enforcers, and the abiding theme of three lonely people being ridiculed and ignored, all are part of the film’s bleak undercurrent. My own idea is that the symmetries, balances, and repetitions – as much as the funny exchanges between Inez Seabury and her guardians, and the gleeful sadism of the neighborhood brats – counterbalance and marginalize the dark undertone. The mother’s death, like the quarantine, doesn’t register as loss, but as an opportunity for adventure. A word about five-year-old Inez Seabury, the last and arguably most winsome of the Biograph children. She worked at Biograph for only about four months, starting as a foil to tomboy Edna Foster (in The Sunbeam, Edna is Inez’s tormentor-in-chief). But Inez came into her own in A Woman Scorned, where she was cast for the first time as Claire McDowell’s baby, tossed and nuzzled in her trundle bed. McDowell’s special rapport with Seabury became one of the film’s highlights, and Griffith worked it for all it was worth when he reused them here. What was true for the adults was becoming true for Griffith’s juveniles. As far as we know, Seabury was the first of the Biograph children who came with prior stage experience. She began when she was four, playing Cio-Cio-San’s ill-fated son in Belasco’s Madame Butterfly; then she was cast opposite full-size marionettes in one of Winthrop Ames’s children’s plays at the Little Theater. After three months with Biograph, she was left behind when the company went to California. But Seabury returned to Broadway in December 1912 in another children’s play, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Racketty-Packetty House. She never left show business. Although she never became a prominent player, Seabury was seldom out of work as she went into her teens and twenties. She became the quintessential journeyman actress, appearing in movies, radio, and later television. As a teenager she specialized in Indian and Chinese maidens (she would later play the Indian servant Wowkle in MGM’s 1938 musical version of Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West). Then Cecil B. DeMille discovered her, and she played small roles, usually servants and slaves, in almost every film DeMille made – starting with Dynamite in 1929, Madame Satan, and The Sign of the Cross on through Reap the Wild Wind and Samson and Delilah in 1949. DeMille also featured her regularly on his Lux Radio Theater series. Pickford used her in radio too, giving her work on The Mary Pickford Show. And to complete the Griffith circle, Seabury could be heard as a regular with Lionel Barrymore on the radio version of MGM’s popular Dr. Christian series. When she finally retired from acting in the early 1950s, she became an agent and a founding member of the radio/ television actors’ guild, AFTRA. Russell Merritt

197

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

392 BIOGRAPH

A STRING OF PEARLS Filming date: started ca. 18 December 1911; finished December 1911 Location: New York Studio Release date: 7 March 1912 Release length: 998 feet Copyright date: 8 March 1912 Scenario purchase date: 17 December 1911 Director: D.W. Griffith Author: Bernardine R. Leist Source: none known Camera: G.W. Bitzer Cast: Charles H. West (Neurasthenic worker); Dorothy Bernard (His sister); Blanche Sweet (His sweetheart); J. Jiquel Lanoe (Italian shoemaker); Claire McDowell (Shoemaker’s wife); Inez Seabury (Shoemaker’s daughter); Edward Dillon (Sour neighbor); Kate Toncray (His wife or sister); Robert Harron (Neighbor with unbuttoned cuffs); Unidentified actress (His sister); Unidentified actor (Their father); Kate Bruce (Sickly worker’s mother); Adolph Lestina (Doctor); William J. Butler (Sweetheart’s father); Dell Henderson (Millionaire); Grace Henderson (His wife); Charles Hill Mailes (Her doctor); Unidentified actor (Entertainer with guitar); W. Christy Cabanne, Harry Hyde, Edward Dillon, Alfred Paget and John T. Dillon (At millionaire’s banquet) Archival Sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate negative; a 35mm nitrate positive at the National Film and Television Archive was destroyed in 1952 SHOWING THEIR ONLY VALUE IS TO SATISFY VANITY This Biograph subject shows the difference between the material string of pearls and the spiritual. A multi-millionaire presents his wife with a string of pearls worth a quarter of a million dollars; so doing he pampers the vanity of his spouse. But of what use is this string of material pearls when sorrow comes – will it save her from the grave? No. On the other hand is shown the spiritual string of pearls in the form of charitable, loving souls, following the Christian injunction: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Among these we find a young man, who is in the employ of this multi-millionaire, stricken with a serious illness, and doomed to die if not given the beneficial influence of the country. This requires money, which the young man has not, and his employer turns a deaf ear on his sister’s appeal for help with which to send him away. The real pearls, his poor neighbors, gather together o[f] their Christmas savings sufficient to defray the expenses of his trip, and are delighted with the result of their selfdenial when he returns later thoroughly cured. Biograph Bulletin, March 7, 1912

When a young man living in a tenement becomes seriously ill, his millionaire employer will do nothing for him. Instead, the millionaire spends his money on an expensive pearl necklace for his wife. By contrast, the young man’s downstairs neighbor, a kindly Italian shoemaker, hears the news and persuades other families in the apartment to give up their Christmas savings to provide the boy with a warm coat and a rest cure. The neighbors’ gen198

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

erosity is rewarded. While the millionaire’s wife struggles on her deathbed, her pearl necklace now useless, the boy returns from the country fully recovered and eats a nourishing turkey dinner.

Griffith ends the year with a strangely atypical film. Nothing in Griffith’s other one-reelers, I think, quite prepares us for the bonhomie of these tenants, a collection of fathers, husbands, wives, and children who provide money for the sickly Charles West and express communal delight in welcoming him home, rejoicing at his new-found health and prosperity. This is likely the sweetest portrait of tenement life that Griffith ever created, the closest he ever got to the spirit of a working-class collective. We need only look at the other tenement films Griffith made in December to see how tenants are usually portrayed. As extras who drift through corridors and hallways, they are at best polite, but generally indifferent to the protagonists, caught up in conversations of their own. As figures who actually make contact with the main characters, they are more often than not openly obnoxious, like the masher in The Transformation of Mike or the brats in The Sunbeam. But for all his reputation as a Progressive, I can’t think of any Griffith Biograph that shows minor characters demonstrating casual acts of altruism toward the leads. The closest we get are the exuberant well-wishers in A Child’s Faith (1910), who, in a single shot, gleefully throw rice and shoes at impoverished newlyweds (Florence Barker and Mack Sennett) in a tenement hallway. But ordinarily, Griffith’s urban heroes work within the orbit of a family and small clusters of friends, insulated from the flotsam around them. Neighbors at most cast fleeting glances or go about their business uncaring. The story was written by Bernadine Leist, which makes it even more of a surprise. Leist was an anonymous film reviewer for The New York Dramatic Mirror, who wrote at least fifteen stories for Biograph, six of which were turned into films. The most class-conscious of all Biograph screenwriters, Leist’s pre-Pearls stories were studies of the poor meant as object lessons for the affluent. The stories exposed the neediness of the poor, their weaknesses (particularly their fondness for drink) and their dependence upon guardians for responsible guidance. In her earliest stories, the poor are either victims or wastrels; the well-to-do are kindly and misunderstood men of principle. The Iconoclast (1910), her first Biograph, sets the tone: a bitter alcoholic becomes a militant Socialist who is shamed into reforming when he discovers that his hated boss has a human side (i.e., a daughter with an incurable disability) and is willing to give him his job back. In Waiter No. 5 (1910) and Dan, the Dandy, one Leist hero is a Czarist police commissar who flees Russia to save his Socialist wife, the other a wealthy club-man who pretends to be a tramp to see how the other half live. The waiter is humiliated by his social fall, rescued by the Czar’s willingness to restore his social rank; thanks to his disguise, the club-man is able to “cure [a college student] of his present milksop nature” and make him worthy of his plutocrat father. A String of Pearls turns all this on its head: energetic working families are fully capable of looking after each other on their own; their generous spirit a reproach to the indifference of a callous millionaire employer. The film reverses the 1910 Christmas film, What Shall We Do With Our Old, which dramatized the inadequacy of voluntarism; this 1911 Christmas film, which could have been subtitled “What Shall We Do With Our Ill”, is Griffith’s unqualified (and unique) tribute to impromptu charity work by the poor themselves. We can see in it distant echoes of A Corner in Wheat (1909), particularly the way in which Griffith tries to reach for social and moral symbolism with the pearls of the title, turning them into icons as he had the flowing grain of wheat. And just as he experimented with the placement of his tableau in A Corner in Wheat, creating fresh associations by inserting it in 199

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

the middle of the film rather than at the end, here he tries for dramatic surprise by creating his first fade-out five shots before the film ends. Like the tableau, this fade-out is meant to resonate, as we focus on the pearl necklace the millionaire impotently holds over his dying wife. The fade itself is meant to represent both a physical and ethical failure. Tom Gunning (in D.W. Griffith and the Origins of the American Narrative Film) has noticed that up through 1910, at least, Griffith reserved his special lighting effects for scenes that are meant to convey spiritual uplift. These are the associations he brings to bear on another mid-film fade created for The Usurer (1910), when a dispossessed couple is reunited with their daughter. Griffith drifted away from making those associations, particularly in his atmospheric California films, but he returns to them here. The final fade-out is meant as more than a simple closing device. A String of Pearls was Griffith’s final film in 1911, and the last one he made before leaving New York for California. It has the feel of a Christmas card, with the presentation of virtually the entire company (Wilfred Lucas is the only leading player who is missing) in a film that ends with gifts, a turkey dinner, and the back-slapping good cheer of self-sacrificing neighbors. It is even possible to tease out of this a metaphor for Biograph itself as a company of good fellows. The reading is not terribly flattering to management, but it suggests a troupe – the trades notwithstanding – cheerfully recovering from the loss of key players like Mary Pickford, Henry B. Walthall, Florence Lawrence, Arthur Johnson, Marion Leonard and James Kirkwood, and ready to face the new year stronger than ever. Their optimism, as we’ll learn next year, was not ill-founded. Russell Merritt

200

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARVIDSON, Linda (Mrs. D.W. Griffith). When the Movies Were Young (New York: Dutton, 1925; reprinted by Dover Publications, 1969) AUMONT, Jacques. “Griffith, le cadre, la figure”, in Raymond Bellour (ed.), Le cinéma Américain: Analyses de films (Paris: Flammarion, 1980) BANTA, Martha. Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) BERGER, Meyer. McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943) BOWSER, Eileen (ed.). Biograph Bulletins, 1908–1912 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973) BOWSER, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990 [Volume 2 of the History of American Cinema series, edited by Charles Harpole]) BREWSTER, Ben. “A Scene at the ‘Movies’”, Screen vol. 23 no. 2, July–August 1982 BREWSTER, Ben and Lea JACOBS. Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) CHERCHI USAI, Paolo (ed.) The Griffith Project, vols 1–3, 4 (London: British Film Institute/Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1999, 2000) COOPER, Miriam (with Bonnie Herndon). Dark Lady of the Silents (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973) EVERSON, William K. American Silent Film (New York: Oxford, 1978) GISH, Lillian (with Ann Pinchot). The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (London: Columbus Books, 1969) GRAHAM, Cooper C., Steven HIGGINS, Elaine MANCINI, João Luiz VIEIRA. D.W. Griffith and the Biograph Company (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985) GRIFFITH, D.W. in James Hart (ed.), The Man who Invented Hollywood: The Autobiography of D.W. Griffith (Louisville, KY: Touchstone Publishing Company, 1972) GUNNING, Tom. D.W. Griffith and the Origins of the American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Champaign/Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991) HENDERSON, Robert M. D.W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970) LANG, Robert. “Biographical Sketch”, in Robert

Lang (ed.), The Birth of a Nation/D.W. Griffith, Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994) LINDSAY, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Livewright, 1970, originally published in 1915) MAYER, David. “Opening a Second Front: the Civil War, the Stage, and D.W. Griffith”, in Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi (eds), The Tenth Muse: Cinema and the Other Arts (Domitor Conference Papers 2000) (Udine: Forum, 2001) MERRITT, Russell. “Mr. Griffith, The Painted Lady and the Distractive Frame” in Image vol. 19 no. 4, December 1976, reprinted in Marshall Deutelbaum (ed.), ‘Image’: On the Art and Evolution of the Film (New York: Dover Publications and International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1979) MERRITT, Russell. “Rescued from a Perilous Nest: D.W. Griffith’s Escape from Theatre into Film”, Cinema Journal vol. 21, Fall 1981: 2–30 MOTTET, Jean. L’invention de la scène américaine: cinéma et paysage (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998) PEARSON, Roberta. Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) PRATT, George. Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973) SALT, Barry. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 2nd edition (London: Starword, 1992) SCHICKEL, Richard. D.W. Griffith and the Birth of Film (London: Pavilion Books Ltd, 1984; New York: Limelight Editions, 1996) SIMMON, Scott. The Films of D.W. Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) SINGER, Ben. “Female Power in the SerialQueen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly”, Camera Obscura vol. 22, January 1990 SMITH, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (London: Oxford University Press, 1995) SPADONI, Robert. “The Figure Seen from the Rear: Vitagraph and the Development of the Shot/Reverse Shot”, Film History vol. 11, 1999

201

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

INDEX OF TITLES: 1911 Note: Release dates are given after each title. Numbers refer to program sequence.

ADVENTURES OF BILLY, THE

HEART OF A SAVAGE, THE

(19 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .368 AS IN A LOOKING GLASS

(2 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .322 HER AWAKENING

(18 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .378 BABY AND THE STORK, THE

(28 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .366 HER SACRIFICE

(1 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .382 BATTLE, THE

(26 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .346 HIS DAUGHTER

(6 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .370 BILLY’S STRATAGEM

(23 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .321 HIS MOTHER’S SCARF

(12 February 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .387 BLIND PRINCESS AND THE POET, THE

(17 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .348

(24 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .332 HOW SHE TRIUMPHED

(27 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .333 IN THE DAYS OF ’49

(8 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .335

BLOT IN THE ’SCUTCHEON, A

(29 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .388

INDIAN BROTHERS, THE

(17 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .345

BOBBY, THE COWARD

(13 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .351

ITALIAN BLOOD

(9 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .363

BROKEN CROSS, THE

(6 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .328

JEALOUS HUSBAND, THE

(10 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .344

CHIEF’S DAUGHTER, THE

(10 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .329

KNIGHT OF THE ROAD, A

(20 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .330

CONSCIENCE

(9 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .323

LAST DROP OF WATER, THE

(27 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .350

COUNTRY CUPID, A

(24 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .352

LONEDALE OPERATOR, THE

(23 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .326

CROOKED ROAD, THE

(22 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .341

LONG ROAD, THE

(26 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .369

DAN, THE DANDY

(18 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .359

LOVE IN THE HILLS

(30 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .371

ENOCH ARDEN – PART ONE

(12 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .336

MADAME REX

(17 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .331

ENOCH ARDEN – PART TWO

(15 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .337

MAKING OF A MAN, THE

(5 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .365

ETERNAL MOTHER, THE

(11 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .362

MISER’S HEART, THE

(20 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .375

FAILURE, THE

(7 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .376

NEW DRESS, THE

(15 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .338

FIGHTING BLOOD

(29 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .349

OLD BOOKKEEPER, THE

(18 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .385

FISHER FOLKS

(16 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .320 FOR HIS SON

OLD CONFECTIONER’S MISTAKE, THE

(22 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .384

(7 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .364 202

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

OUT FROM THE SHADOW

SUNSHINE THROUGH THE DARK

(3 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .353 PRIMAL CALL, THE

(27 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .377 SWORDS AND HEARTS

(22 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .343 REVENUE MAN AND THE GIRL, THE

(28 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .358 TALE OF THE WILDERNESS, A

(25 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .361 ROMANY TRAGEDY, A

(8 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .381 TEACHING DAD TO LIKE HER

(29 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .340 ROOT OF EVIL, THE

(20 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .325 TERRIBLE DISCOVERY, A

(18 March 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .390 ROSE OF KENTUCKY, THE

(21 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .380 THIEF AND THE GIRL, THE

(24 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .356 RULING PASSION, THE

(6 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .347 THROUGH DARKENED VALES

(7 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .355 SAVED FROM HIMSELF

(16 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .373 TRAIL OF BOOKS, THE

(11 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .379 SISTER’S LOVE, A

(9 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .372 TRANSFORMATION OF MIKE, THE

(8 February 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .386 SMILE OF A CHILD, A

(1 February 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .389 TWO SIDES, THE

(5 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .342 SORROWFUL EXAMPLE, THE

(1 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .334 UNVEILING, THE

(14 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .354 SPANISH GYPSY, THE

(16 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .367 VOICE OF THE CHILD, THE

(30 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .327 SQUAW’S LOVE, THE

(28 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .383 WAS HE A COWARD?

(14 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .360 STRING OF PEARLS, A

(16 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .324 WHITE ROSE OF THE WILDS, THE

(7 March 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .392 STUFF HEROES ARE MADE OF, THE

(25 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .339 WOMAN SCORNED, A

(4 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .357

(30 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .374

SUNBEAM, THE

(26 February 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .391

203

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

CUMULATIVE INDEX OF TITLES: 1907–1911 Note: Release dates are given after each title. Numbers refer to program sequence: 1–90: Vol. 1, 1907–1908. 91–168: Vol. 2, January–June 1909. 169–233: Vol. 3, July–December 1909. 234–319: Vol. 4, 1910. 320–392: Vol. 5, 1911.

“1776” or, THE HESSIAN RENEGADES

BATTLE, THE

(6 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .181 ADVENTURES OF BILLY, THE

(6 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .370 BEHIND THE SCENES

(19 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .368 ADVENTURES OF DOLLIE, THE

(11 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .44 BETRAYED BY A HANDPRINT

(14 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27 AFTER MANY YEARS

(1 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .46 BETTER WAY, THE

(3 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .62 “AND A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM”

(22 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115

(12 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .173 BILLY’S STRATAGEM

(12 February 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .388 BLACK VIPER, THE

(21 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28

ARCADIAN MAID, AN

(1 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .275 AS IN A LOOKING GLASS

BLIND PRINCESS AND THE POET, THE

(18 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .378 AS IT IS IN LIFE

(17 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .348 BLOT IN THE ’SCUTCHEON, A

(4 April 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .245 AS THE BELLS RANG OUT!

(29 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .387 BOBBY, THE COWARD

(21 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .273 AT THE ALTAR

(13 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .351 BRAHMA DIAMOND, THE

(25 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .106 AT THE CROSSROADS OF LIFE

(4 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .98 BROKEN CROSS, THE

(3 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 AT THE FRENCH BALL

(6 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .328 BROKEN DOLL, THE

(30 June 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 AWAKENING, THE

(17 October 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .292 BROKEN LOCKET, THE

(30 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .188 AWFUL MOMENT, AN

(16 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .187 BURGLAR’S MISTAKE, A

(18 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 BABY AND THE STORK, THE

(25 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .121 CALAMITOUS ELOPEMENT, A

(1 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .382 BABY’S SHOE, A

(7 August 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 CALL, THE

(13 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .136 BALKED AT THE ALTAR

(20 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .226 CALL OF THE WILD, THE

(25 August 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39 BANDIT’S WATERLOO, THE

(27 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58 CALL TO ARMS, THE

(4 August 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31 BANKER’S DAUGHTERS, THE

(25 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .274 CARDINAL’S CONSPIRACY, THE

(20 October 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .293 BARBARIAN, INGOMAR, THE

(12 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .160 CAUGHT BY WIRELESS

(13 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52

(21 March 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 204

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

CHANGE OF HEART, A

CROOKED ROAD, THE

(14 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .194 CHIEF’S DAUGHTER, THE

(22 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .341 CUPID’S PRANKS

(10 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .329 CHILD OF THE GHETTO, A

(Edison, 19 February 1908) . . . . . . . .5 CURTAIN POLE, THE

(6 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .260 CHILDREN’S FRIEND, THE

(15 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66 DAN, THE DANDY

(13 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .186 CHILD’S FAITH, A

(18 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .359 DANCING GIRL OF BUTTE, THE

(14 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .270 CHILD’S IMPULSE, A

(6 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .224 DAY AFTER, THE

(27 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .265 CHILD’S STRATAGEM, A

(30 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .220 DEATH DISC, THE

(5 December 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .303 CHOOSING A HUSBAND

(2 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .212 DECEIVED SLUMMING PARTY

(30 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .222 CHRISTMAS BURGLARS, THE

(31 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34 DECEPTION, THE

(22 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .79 CLASSMATES

(22 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .105 DECREE OF DESTINY, A

(1 February 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 CLOISTER’S TOUCH, THE

(6 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .317 DEVIL, THE

(31 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .230 CLUBMAN AND THE TRAMP, THE

(2 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54 DIAMOND STAR, THE

(27 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .72 COMATA, THE SIOUX

(20 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .315 DRIVE FOR A LIFE, THE

(9 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .184 CONCEALING A BURGLAR

(22 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .133 DRUNKARD’S REFORMATION, A

(30 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59 CONFIDENCE

(1 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .118 DUKE’S PLAN, THE

(15 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .131 CONSCIENCE

(10 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .232 EAVESDROPPER, THE

(9 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .323 CONVERTS, THE

(3 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123 EDGAR ALLEN POE

(14 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .242 CONVICT’S SACRIFICE, A

(8 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .86 ELOPING WITH AUNTY

(26 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .163 CORD OF LIFE, THE

(24 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .139 ENGLISHMAN AND THE GIRL, THE

(28 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .96 CORNER IN WHEAT, A

(17 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .234 ENOCH ARDEN – PART ONE

(13 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .216 COUNTRY CUPID, A

(12 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .336 ENOCH ARDEN – PART TWO

(24 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .352 COUNTRY DOCTOR, THE

(15 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .337 ERADICATING AUNTY

(8 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .158 CRICKET ON THE HEARTH, THE

(31 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .143 ETERNAL MOTHER, THE

(27 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .142 CRIMINAL HYPNOTIST, THE

(11 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .362 EXAMINATION DAY AT SCHOOL

(18 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85

(29 September 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .290

205

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

EXPIATION, THE

FRIEND OF THE FAMILY, THE

(21 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .197 FACE AT THE WINDOW, THE

(15 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .152 FUGITIVE, THE

(16 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .263 FADED LILLIES, THE

(7 November 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .298 GETTING EVEN

(17 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .151 FAILURE, THE

(13 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .185 GIBSON GODDESS, THE

(7 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .376 FAIR EXCHANGE, A

(1 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .198 GIRL AND THE OUTLAW, THE

(23 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .190 FAITHFUL

(8 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 GIRLS AND DADDY, THE

(21 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .243 FALSELY ACCUSED!

(1 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97 GOLD IS NOT ALL

(18 January 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 FAMOUS ESCAPE, A

(28 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .246 GOLD-SEEKERS, THE

(7 April 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 FASCINATING MRS. FRANCIS, THE

(2 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .253 GOLDEN LOUIS, THE

(21 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .93 FATAL HOUR, THE

(22 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .102 GOLDEN SUPPER, THE

(18 August 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 FATE’S TURNING

(12 December 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .304 GREASER’S GAUNTLET, THE

(23 January 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .314 FATHER GETS IN THE GAME

(11 August 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 GUERRILLA, THE

(10 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51 FEUD AND THE TURKEY, THE

(13 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .64 HEART BEATS OF LONG AGO

(8 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69 FIGHT FOR FREEDOM, THE

(6 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .318 HEART OF A SAVAGE, THE

(17 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29 FIGHTING BLOOD

(2 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .322 HEART OF AN OUTLAW, THE

(29 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .349 FINAL SETTLEMENT, THE

(not released) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .180 HEART OF O YAMA, THE

(28 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .236 FISHER FOLKS

(18 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .45 HELPING HAND, THE

(16 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .320 FLASH OF LIGHT, A

(29 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .77 HER AWAKENING

(18 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .272 FOOLS OF FATE

(28 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .366 HER FATHER’S PRIDE

(7 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .192 FOOL’S REVENGE, A

(4 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .276 HER FIRST ADVENTURE

(4 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .108 FOR A WIFE’S HONOR

(18 March 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 HER FIRST BISCUITS

(28 August 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40 FOR HIS SON

(17 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .138 HER SACRIFICE

(22 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .384 FOR LOVE OF GOLD

(26 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .346 HER TERRIBLE ORDEAL

(21 August 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37 FRENCH DUEL, THE

(10 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .225 HINDOO DAGGER, THE

(10 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125

(18 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .90

206

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

HIS DAUGHTER

IN THE BORDER STATES

(23 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .321 HIS DUTY

(13 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .262 IN THE DAYS OF ’49

(31 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .149 HIS LAST BURGLARY

(8 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .335 IN THE SEASON OF BUDS

(21 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .235 HIS LOST LOVE

(2 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .259 IN THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT

(18 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .196 HIS MOTHER’S SCARF

(25 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .200 IN THE WINDOW RECESS

(24 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .332 HIS SISTER-IN-LAW

(29 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .211 INDIAN BROTHERS, THE

(15 December 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .302 HIS TRUST

(17 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .345 INDIAN RUNNER’S ROMANCE, THE

(16 January 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .310 HIS TRUST FULFILLED

(23 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .171 INGRATE, THE

(19 January 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .311 HIS WARD’S LOVE

(20 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .68 INVISIBLE FLUID, THE

(15 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .103 HIS WIFE’S MOTHER

(16 June 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20 ITALIAN BARBER, THE

(1 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101 HIS WIFE’S VISITOR

(9 January 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .309 ITALIAN BLOOD

(19 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .174 HONOR OF HIS FAMILY, THE

(9 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .363 JEALOUS HUSBAND, THE

(24 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .229 HONOR OF THIEVES, THE

(10 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .344 JEALOUSY AND THE MAN

(11 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81 HOUSE WITH CLOSED SHUTTERS, THE

(8 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .277

(22 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .161 JILT, THE

(17 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .137 JONES AND HIS NEW NEIGHBORS

(29 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .116

HOW SHE TRIUMPHED

(27 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .333

JONES AND THE LADY BOOK AGENT

(10 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .100

HULDA’S LOVERS

(22 April 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14

JONES’ BURGLAR

(9 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .169

I DID IT, MAMMA

(15 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .109 ICONOCLAST, THE

JONESES HAVE AMATEUR THEATRICALS, THE

(3 October 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .289 IMPALEMENT, THE

(18 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83 KENTUCKIAN, THE

(30 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .258 IN A HEMPEN BAG

(7 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 KING OF THE CANNIBAL ISLANDS

(16 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .215 IN LIFE’S CYCLE

(15 April 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12 KING’S MESSENGER, THE

(15 September 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .286 IN LITTLE ITALY

(29 April 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 KNIGHT OF THE ROAD, A

(23 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .219 IN OLD CALIFORNIA

(20 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .330 LADY HELEN’S ESCAPADE

(10 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .240 IN OLD KENTUCKY

(19 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .107 LAST DEAL, THE

(20 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .183

(27 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .228 207

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

LAST DROP OF WATER, THE

MEDICINE BOTTLE, THE

(27 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .350 LEATHER STOCKING

(29 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110 MENDED LUTE, THE

(27 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .191 LESSON, THE

(5 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .170 MESSAGE, THE

(19 December 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .306 LIGHT THAT CAME, THE

(5 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .157 MESSAGE OF THE VIOLIN, THE

(11 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .203 LILY OF THE TENEMENTS, THE

(24 October 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .294 MEXICAN SWEETHEARTS, THE

(27 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .319 LINES OF WHITE ON A SULLEN SEA

(24 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .156 MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE, A

(28 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .199 LITTLE ANGELS OF LUCK

(18 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .205 MIDNIGHT CUPID, A

(8 September 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .284 LITTLE DARLING, THE

(7 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .268 MILLS OF THE GODS, THE

(2 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .182 LITTLE TEACHER, THE

(30 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .176 MISER’S HEART, THE

(11 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .195 LONEDALE OPERATOR, THE

(20 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .375 MIXED BABIES

(23 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .326 LONELY VILLA, THE

(12 June 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 MODERN PRODIGAL, THE

(10 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .150 LONG ROAD, THE

(29 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .282 MOHAWK’S WAY, A

(26 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .369 LOVE AMONG THE ROSES

(9 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .254

(12 September 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .285 MONDAY MORNING IN A CONEY ISLAND POLICE COURT

(4 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .42

LOVE FINDS A WAY

(11 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .91

MONEY MAD

(4 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73

LOVE IN THE HILLS

(30 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .371

MOUNTAINEER’S HONOR, THE

(25 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .209

LUCKY JIM

(26 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .128

MR. JONES AT THE BALL

(25 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .56

LURE OF THE GOWN, THE

(15 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .112

MR. JONES HAS A CARD PARTY

(21 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87

MADAME REX

(17 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .331

MRS. JONES ENTERTAINS

(7 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67

MAKING OF A MAN, THE

(5 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .365 MAN, THE

MRS. JONES’ LOVER; OR, “I WANT MY HAT”

(12 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .241 MAN AND THE WOMAN, THE

(19 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .165 MUGGSY’S FIRST SWEETHEART

(14 August 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36 MAN IN THE BOX, THE

(30 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .267 MUSIC MASTER, THE

(19 June 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 MANIAC COOK, THE

(6 May 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 NECKLACE, THE

(4 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78 MARKED TIME-TABLE, THE

(1 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .155 NEW DRESS, THE

(23 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .264

(15 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .338

208

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

NEW TRICK, A

PRANKS

(10 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .148 NEWLYWEDS, THE

(30 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .179 PRIMAL CALL, THE

(3 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .238 NOTE IN THE SHOE, THE

(22 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .343 PRINCESS IN THE VASE, THE

(6 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .127 NURSING A VIPER

(27 February 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 PROFESSIONAL JEALOUSY

(4 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .202 OATH AND THE MAN, THE

(4 January 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 PRUSSIAN SPY, THE

(22 September 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .287 “OH, UNCLE”

(1 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .104 PURGATION, THE

(26 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .177 OLD BOOKKEEPER, THE

(4 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .266 RAMONA

(18 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .385 OLD CONFECTIONER’S MISTAKE, THE

(23 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .255 RECKONING, THE

(7 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .364 OLD ISAACS, THE PAWNBROKER

(11 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .70 RED GIRL, THE

(28 March 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 ON THE REEF

(15 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .43 REDMAN AND THE CHILD, THE

(17 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .227 ONE BUSY HOUR

(28 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30 REDMAN’S VIEW, THE

(6 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .134 ONE NIGHT, AND THEN—

(9 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .214 RENUNCIATION, THE

(14 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .233 ONE TOUCH OF NATURE

(19 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .166 RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE’S NEST

(1 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .74 OPEN GATE, THE

(Edison, 16 January 1908) . . . . . . . . .3 RESTORATION, THE

(22 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .207 ’OSTLER JOE

(8 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .204 RESURRECTION

(9 June 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 OUT FROM THE SHADOW

(20 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .140 REVENUE MAN AND THE GIRL, THE

(3 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .353 OUTLAW, THE

(25 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .361 RICH REVENGE, A

(23 June 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22 OVER SILENT PATHS

(7 April 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .247 ROAD TO THE HEART, THE

(16 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .257 PEACHBASKET HAT, THE

(5 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .122 ROCKY ROAD, THE

(24 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .146 PIPPA PASSES or, THE SONG OF CONSCIENCE

(4 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .189 PIRATE’S GOLD, THE

(3 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .223 ROMANCE OF A JEWESS

(23 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 ROMANCE OF THE WESTERN HILLS, A

(6 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .63 PLAIN SONG, A

(11 April 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .249 ROMANY TRAGEDY, A

(28 November 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .301 PLANTER’S WIFE, THE

(29 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .340 ROOT OF EVIL, THE

(20 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53 POLITICIAN’S LOVE STORY

(18 March 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .390 ROSE O’ SALEM-TOWN

(22 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .99

(26 September 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .288 209

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

ROSE OF KENTUCKY, THE

(24 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .356

SORROWS OF THE UNFAITHFUL, THE

(22 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .279

ROUE’S HART, THE

(8 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88

SOUND SLEEPER, A

(12 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .129

RUDE HOSTESS, A

(8 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .120

SPANISH GYPSY, THE

(30 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .327

RULING PASSION, THE

(7 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .355

SQUAW’S LOVE, THE

(14 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .360

RURAL ELOPEMENT, A

(14 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .82

STAGE RUSTLER, THE

(10 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26

SACRIFICE, THE

(14 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .84

STOLEN JEWELS, THE

(29 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .55

SALUTARY LESSON, A

(11 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .278

STRANGE MEETING, A

(2 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .164

SALVATION ARMY LASS, THE

(11 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111

STRING OF PEARLS, A

(7 March 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .392

SAVED FROM HIMSELF

(11 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .379 SCHNEIDER’S ANTI-NOISE CRUSADE

STUFF HEROES ARE MADE OF, THE

(4 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .357 SUICIDE CLUB, THE

(8 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .124 SCULPTOR’S NIGHTMARE, THE

(3 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .132 SUMMER IDYL, A

(6 May 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16 SEALED ROOM, THE

(5 September 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .283 SUNBEAM, THE

(2 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .178 SERIOUS SIXTEEN

(26 February 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .391 SUNSHINE SUE

(21 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .271 SEVENTH DAY, THE

(14 November 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .299 SUNSHINE THROUGH THE DARK

(26 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .159 SIMPLE CHARITY

(27 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .377 SWEET AND TWENTY

(10 November 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .297 SISTER’S LOVE, A

(22 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .167 SWEET REVENGE

(8 February 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .386 SLAVE, THE

(18 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .208 SWORDS AND HEARTS

(29 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .168 SMILE OF A CHILD, A

(28 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .358 TALE OF THE WILDERNESS, A

(5 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .342 SMOKED HUSBAND, A

(8 January 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .381 TAMING A HUSBAND

(25 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .48 SONG OF THE SHIRT, THE

(24 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .237 TAMING OF THE SHREW

(17 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .65 SONG OF THE WILDWOOD FLUTE, THE

(10 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .61 TAVERN-KEEPER’S DAUGHTER, THE

(21 November 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .300 SON’S RETURN, THE

(24 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33 TEACHING DAD TO LIKE HER

(14 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .147 SORROWFUL EXAMPLE, THE

(20 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .325 TENDER HEARTS

(14 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .354

(19 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .162

210

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

TERRIBLE DISCOVERY, A

TWO BROTHERS, THE

(21 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .380 TEST, THE

(12 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .256 TWO LITTLE WAIFS

(16 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .217 TEST OF FRIENDSHIP, THE

(31 October 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .295 TWO MEMORIES

(15 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 THAT CHINK AT GOLDEN GULCH

(24 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .145 TWO PATHS, THE

(10 October 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .291 THEY WOULD ELOPE

(2 January 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .312 TWO SIDES, THE

(9 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .175 THIEF AND THE GIRL, THE

(1 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .334 TWO WOMEN AND A MAN

(6 July 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .347 THOSE AWFUL HATS

(15 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .206 UNCHANGING SEA, THE

(25 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .94 THOSE BOYS!

(5 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .252 UNEXPECTED HELP

(18 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92 THOU SHALT NOT

(28 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .248 UNVEILING, THE

(18 April 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .250 THREAD OF DESTINY, THE

(16 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .367 USURER, THE

(7 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .239 THREE SISTERS

(15 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .280 VALET’S WIFE, THE

(2 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .313 THROUGH DARKENED VALES

(1 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71 VAQUERO’S VOW, THE

(16 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .373 THROUGH THE BREAKERS

(16 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50 VICTIM OF JEALOUSY, A

(6 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .213 ’TIS AN ILL WIND THAT BLOWS NO GOOD

(9 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .261 VIOLIN MAKER OF CREMONA, THE

(29 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .135 TO SAVE HER SOUL

(7 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .141 VOICE OF THE CHILD, THE

(27 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .221 TRAGIC LOVE

(28 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .383 VOICE OF THE VIOLIN, THE

(11 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .95 TRAIL OF BOOKS, THE

(18 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114 WAITER NO. 5

(9 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .372 TRANSFORMATION OF MIKE, THE

(3 November 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .296 WANTED, A CHILD

(1 February 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .389 TRAP FOR SANTA CLAUS, A

(30 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .193 WAS HE A COWARD?

(20 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .218 TRICK THAT FAILED, THE

(16 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .324 WAS JUSTICE SERVED?

(29 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .210 TROUBLESOME SATCHEL, A

(21 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .154 WAY OF MAN, THE

(19 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130 TRYING TO GET ARRESTED

(28 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .153 WAY OF THE WORLD, THE

(5 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .117 TWIN BROTHERS

(25 April 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .251 WELCOME BURGLAR, THE

(26 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .126 TWISTED TRAIL, THE

(25 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89 WHAT DRINK DID

(24 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .244

(3 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .144 211

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT: VOLUME 5

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR OLD

WITH HER CARD

(13 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .316 WHAT’S YOUR HURRY?

(16 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .172 WOMAN FROM MELLON’S, THE

(1 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .201 WHAT THE DAISY SAID

(3 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .231 WOMAN SCORNED, A

(11 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .269 WHEN A MAN LOVES

(30 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .374 WOMAN’S WAY, A

(5 January 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .305 WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD

(24 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .60 WOODEN LEG, THE

(20 May 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 WHERE THE BREAKERS ROAR

(8 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113 WREATH IN TIME, A

(22 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .47 WHITE ROSE OF THE WILDS, THE

(8 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 WREATH OF ORANGE BLOSSOMS, A

(25 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .339 WILFUL PEGGY

(30 January 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .308 YELLOW PERIL, THE

(25 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .281 WINNING BACK HIS LOVE

(7 March 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 ZULU’S HEART, THE

(26 December 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .307

(6 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49

WINNING COAT, THE

(12 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119

212