Viewing Single Post From: The Griffith Project

Viewing Single Post From: The Griffith Project
panzer the great & terrible	Jul 13 2009, 01:12 PM
Mouth Breather Posts: 10,352 Group: Members Member #13 Joined: September 3, 2005	Volume 3: 1.) The Violin Maker of Cremona is famous as Mary Pickford's first Biograph, and her appearance signals the beginning of rapid change. She seems born with a hunger to find a better form of screen acting than all the flailing about, eye-rolling and arm-waving we've seen up to now. The difference is apparent from the start. He uses her whole body expressively to make you understand what her character is feeling, something nobody has done up to now. It's a great leap forward, and believe me, it got her noticed. She plays a violin maker's daughter, in love with a handsome and rather plump young fellow, and there's also a skinny apprentice in love with her. A competition is announced: whichever apprentice can make the best violin will win a gold chain, and, in all the excitement, Mary's father throws in her hand in marriage, making her very unhappy because her boyfriend isn't the best violin maker, the skinny guy is. The skinny guy gets excited and begins to pledge his love, but she shrinks away. So, seeing how the land lies, skinny swaps his good violin for plumpy's fair violin, so plumpy will win the fair maiden. Now comes the surprise, and I won't spoil it. Thanks mainly to Pickford's restraint and communication skills, a pretty good little movie, slightly marred by sloppy editing, and unfortunately the print is somewhat deteriorated, but not so much that you can't tell what's happening. 2.) The Lonely Villa is the first famous Biograph because here's Griffith's first last-minute rescue. He liked the story so much that he used it at least twice more, with slight variations (An Unseen Enemy and The Lonedale Operator). A mother and father live out in the boonies with their three little girls and there are four burglars lurking outside. The servants leave for their day off, and one of the burglars knocks at the front door with a fake message calling the father away, so he goes, and then the burglars knock the front door down. The mother barricades herself in a room with the children and calls the store where she somehow knows her husband is. Just after she's told him the situation, a burglar on the roof cuts the phone wire. Gulp. The father commandeers a wagon and goes tearing back home. For the first time we see crosscutting: first the husband racing in the wagon, then the mother and the little girls vainly trying to keep the bad guys out. The sequence doesn't go on long enough to generate much excitement by our standards, but it must have seemed revolutionary in 1909 for its complete departure from stage technique. Mary plays the oldest of the three girls, and once again we know just what she's thinking from her body language. As far as I know, this is the first film with creative editing; but better is to come. 3.) The Son's Return. The Son is Pickford's boyfriend; he goes away to make a name for himself, and as it says in the title, "Success is his lot." His parents write him that they're in huge financial trouble & about to be evicted, so he goes home, but "to surprise his parents" he goes in disguise. He goes to their house as a roomer and they bap him on the head and, thinking they've killed him, take him out to the garden and go back to the house to see what they've succeeded in stealing. Well, lo and behold, among the loot is a cameo of his mother so they realize what they've done. In the meantime Mary has discovered him in the garden and he's not really dead so they take him off to the doctor. Then there's an incomprehensible final scene involving the parents, and that's the end. I'll try watching it again but I'm not optimistic. It starts well but becomes incoherent. Well, if you make two movies a week, every week, they won't all be wonderful. 4.) Her First Biscuits -- awful movie about an awful thing, the bride's first biscuits, a long-time staple of hillbilly humor. Let's not go into detail. Tinted sepia. Pickford is here, billed as a "biscuit victim." We are expected to laugh merrily because biscuits poison people. I mean, hell, what can go wrong? They can be tough. Big friggin' deal.. 5.) The Way of a Man -- I have tried, God knows I have tried. I watched this thing all the way through twice: the first time ever and the last time ever. I still have no clue what it's about. There's a heap of kissing and hugging, and then somebody catches her boyfriend making love to her sister, so she joins their hands and gives them her blessing, but the sister rushes out weeping and the boyfriend stays with the somebody. Next thing you know the somebody goes to the New Joisey palisades and leaves her coat on the precipice but does not throw herself off -- and then there's a tableaux of kids surrounding Mary Pickford with flowers. Missing footage? Missing titles? I dunno. The interiors are tinted the ugly green they sometimes used in early silents, it's a jumpy print, and this is one of those dupes where the actors' heads look like light bulbs so the tinting may not be original. I'm baffled by the whole thing. Hopefully someday MOMA will let people see their original and we'll find out what was going on, but don't hold your breath. MOMA, like the Eastman House, is protective of the films it holds. Sharing them with the public doesn't seem to be one of their priorities. On the positive side, in the first half all the actors act in a more restrained style than they did three months ago, but then the women go absolutely apeheck and spin around like tops. Who knows? 6.) The Country Doctor -- Released July 8, 1909, this is a transitional film exploring an idea that would come to fruit in A Corner In Wheat. There's a long pan across the countryside that ends at the doc's house. He and His wife, Florence Lawrence, and their little girl go for a walk in the country among the flowers. Then he gets summoned to the bedside of a little girl who is obviously dying (haunting image), but he is called away from her bedside by the relatives of another patient, whom he saves. Returning to the little girl, he finds her dead, and we get the same long pan backwards, from his house out to the countryside. Arty, but powerful. I mean, heck, was there a picture before this you could possibly call arty? Pretty good. 7.) The Cardinal's Conspiracy, released on July 12, 1909, exactly a hundred years ago, takes us to Dumas country, where it's fun to be. If you haven't read him, start with Twenty Years After or The Count of Monte Cristo, though I prefer the first. Forget that Twenty is a sequel. Trust me... The film itself is pretty silly. The girl doesn't want to marry the king, so the Cardinal has a barber turn the king into a cool guy and hires dumb pretend thugs to attack the girl -- which they do in a severely underexposed shot. The king of course defeats them and then there's about five minutes of tedious heck while the girl makes up her mind. There are a number of titles missing, which I know because every so often there is some black leader with the word 'title' scratched on it. 8.) The Renunciation. Two boyhood friends quarrel over Mary Pickford, who doesn't like either one of them. They drink a lot too. A lot of the plot turns on a handwritten note that's unreadable. Let's just say we won't watch this again anytime soon. 9.) A Strange Meeting takes the Ratzywatsky prize for carousal above and beyond the call of duty. The first shot lasts about two minutes, and in it a large crowd of actors stumble around in an aimless drunken stupor. Then we cut to a church where a preacher (Arthur Johnson) preaches, and then he's asked to go rescue one of the carousers. We then return to the first shot; the preacher walks in and extricates the carouser in question. I don't know why, but a lady carouser comes to church. In the next shot she's back at the party place and goes out with two fellow partiers. Next shot they're in the lobby of an apartment house, and then they've broken into one of the apartments, where she steals a watch or something. The the preacher comes in, and that's the strange meeting -- it's his apartment. So the girl and the two hoods flee, but then, remorsefully, she goes back and returns the watch. Racked by conscience, she ends up back at the church where the preacher welcomes her to the fold. Or something. There are titles, but they're just religious platitudes. Not a terrible movie, but certainly no advance on Griffith's part. I wonder if he actually directed this and several of the preceding: there's certainly no sign of the craftsmanship and editing skills we saw in The Lonely Villa. BTW, one of the thieves is Henry B. Walthall. 10,) The Broken Locket is the last short in Volume 3. It has missing titles and is impossible to follow. Pickford sees her drunken husband with his friend and falls to the pavement, weeping. The husband vows to quit drinking. So they're at home and she pulls out the broken locket of the title. He takes it, presumably to get it fixed, but she knows he's just going out to get loaded again, which he does. Then she gets a letter that upsets her and does what any girl would do, goes blind. At the end she meets him in front of the house, touches his hand, knows it's him, and he goes away. The End. You would expect a blind gal in a 1909 movie to overact like mad, but Pickford mostly doesn't. It's her picture for sure, and worth seeing. An effort should be made to restore this one, particularly if somebody would add a title explaining what's in the letter. Again, we know where the two titles belong because there's black leader with the word "title" scratched in. After the startling advance of The Lonely Villa and the beginnings of huge advances in screen acting by Mary Pickford, the Biograph didn't show much progress. The next volume has four of Griffith's best-known shorts, including the first great one, so we can expect things to liven up.
	We Wear Short Shorts Flying Purple People Eater

The Griffith Project · Silents, Please