Viewing Single Post From: The Griffith Project

Viewing Single Post From: The Griffith Project
panzer the great & terrible	Jul 22 2009, 07:17 PM
Mouth Breather Posts: 10,340 Group: Members Member #13 Joined: September 3, 2005	OK! Here's Volume Four! 1.) Little Darling (no relation to the song by The Diamonds): Another wretched attempted comedy. Mary Pickford's aunt is notified that Mary's coming to visit, and for some reason (probably brain damage) the aunt thinks Mary's still little, so all her friends go out and buy her kid presents -- then when Mary appears, surprise! She's all grownup. Just as bad as it sounds, and a lousy print. 2,) The Sealed Room. Suffocation makes its first appearance in this Poe homage, my least favorite Griffith picture except The Idol Dancer, which I hated and will never review . This one's grim, morbid and silly. A creepy though tall aristocrat finds his wife dallying with a ukulele player(!) so he walls 'em up in the dallying room, which has no windows, and they can't break the wall down even though the mortar's still wet. Dumb, dumb, dumb, and creepy too. On the other hand, it looks like it was shot yesterday, so this is the oldest Biograph I've seen that looks good. 3.) 1776, or the Hessian Renegades. The house I grew up in was on a site where captured Hessian mercenaries were imprisoned during the American Revolution, so this movie was always special to me and I love it without much reason. It has a huge cast for a one-reeler, including Pickford and the other usual suspects, which may be why it's relatively well-known. 4.) Getting Even. Plain awful, with not a trace of Griffith style. We'll never know of course, but maybe somebody else did this while Griffith was busy elsewhere. A fantastic cast utterly wasted. Mary Pickford, James Kirkwood, Mack Sennett, Henry B. Walthall, and Pickford's sister Lottie in a witless comedy I couldn't even follow. 5.) The Awakening. This whole picture seems to turn on what looks like an interesting and nuanced performance by Mary Pickford, but the print quality is such that you can't really see what's going on. It's soft, looks like it's shrunk from age (so the image swims around), and not first generation either, so the heads look like light bulbs and you can't really make out what Pickford's face is doing. Too bad because it's apparently doing a lot. Now we start to get into the famous ones. 6.) Pippa Passes. This young girl is on holiday, so she walks around town singing a song that says, among other things, "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world:" and you know what? Everybody who hears it stops doing whatever evil thing they are doing and does the right thing instead, we get six typically opaque lines of Browning, and the movie sputters out. Actually I'm just being snarky: it's pretty good and certainly held my attention. Lewis Jacobs spilled some ink about this one in his Rise of the American Film, an early and frequently lame book about, um, the Rise of the American Film. I seem to remember he claimed some sort of technical advances for this film, but I 'spect Griffith was just following the poem as best he could. One of the better early Biographs, anyway. Either the DVD is from two different prints, or Bitzer wasn't in charge on the first day of shooting; I can't tell. I can believe that the Biograph people were too cheap to reshoot overexposed footage, or it might be that whoever made the dupe did it the old-fashioned way, but in any case the last ten minutes are better to watch than the first five. 7.) Fools of Fate. Decent melodrama-tragedy. Griffith's on a roll now. 8.) Lines of White on a Sullen Sea. Pretty much the Madam Butterfly story set in a fishing village. A fisherman loves her and leaves her to take up with a woman in another port. She scans the sea endlessly waiting for him to come back, and Griffith tells this part of the story by taking a single shot of her watching the waves, and doing the slowest fade to black in film history, so the audience's hopes die with hers. Genius! The first real masterpiece since the one about the doctor, but there's even greater to come. By this point he's the world's best filmmaker, and he's still experimenting! 9.) The Gibson Goddess. Lord, lord. Another attempt at comedy. I just don't want to go into what "Gibson Girl" meant, so I'll just say this is dreck about a girl trying to elude "mashers." 10.) A Corner In Wheat is the first Griffith movie that many call a masterpiece, and I really think it is, despite one awful performance. I watched the Grapevine version and then I watched the Kino version: the title cards are quite different, and the Kino version had a couple more shots, one of which matters to the plot. I go with the Kino, but that is not to say that the Grapevine isn't vital too. We're talking incunabula here, and all information is important. I'm beginning to wonder if some of the Grapevines don't come from pre-release versions that aren't quite complete. If so, they are more valuable than I first thought. 11.) The Light That Came: there are these three sisters, see, Gertrude, Heathcliff and...wait a second, wrong story. Two pretty sisters and another one that they use to scare the bugs away. The two pretty ones are dressing to go to the ball, and before you can say "Cinderella" the Mom appears with a dress for the homely one. So here she is, a wallflower at the big dance, and who should come along but a blind musician. Then they're "sweethearts" a few days later. A doctor appears who can restore the musician's sight, but there is the matter of money, something blind musicians aren't known for having. So, should she spend her life's savings on restoring his sight, knowing he'll dump her as soon as he sees her? I don't know why this little gem isn't better-known -- it's slick storytelling, well shot and edited. The girl who's supposed to be ugly isn't, very, but what the hell, it's a movie. And that, dear children, is Volume Four. Two more to go, which will take us to September, 1910, and then we'll have to wait maybe a year for vol. 7. If you're only going to spring for one, I'd suggest 4 -- it shows Griffith's range and abilities at this early stage, and gives an idea of how movies developed.
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