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The Griffith Project; -- reactivated! -- DVD 1
Topic Started: Jun 27 2009, 07:47 PM (883 Views)
panzer the great & terrible
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This section of the boards has been dead as the Charleston, so, having just gotten a stack of silents from Grapevine, I'm going to try to restart it.

In April of the year seven I started to collect the Grapevine releases of D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts, which chronicle the invention of storytelling in the movies. Somehow inertia set in and I got bogged down in the second DVD. Well, the sixth one just arrived and if don't get on with it I never will, so I'm going to strive for one short per day until I catch up. I'm going to post capsule reviews here because I need motivation to wade through all this, and I hope somebody will give me a hard time if I don't. The up side is, the movies are sure to get better as I go along.

1.) "The Adventures of Dollie." Griffith's first film, made in 1908, and damn poor by the standards he set a few years later; look at it this way, not only had he never made a movie before, but nobody else had either (despite how French critics rave about their boring early flicks). A little girl gets kidnapped by an evil Gypsy and put in a barrel with three X's on it. He loads the barrel into his covered wagon, but when he crosses the river it falls out and she floats downstream until a guy fishing at the very place she got kidnapped rescues her with the help of her father, who is there because...well, because the fisherman can't handle the barrel alone. This movie is about as interesting as it sounds. What IS interesting is the way it was restored. In the old days some genius at the Library of Congress figured out that they didn't want inflammable nitrate prints around the place -- good thinking so far -- and insisted on having a photo of each frame of each movie on one card per frame, never mind how much space they take up -- but no title cards, just the images. Thanks to this harebrained idea restorationists were able to re-photograph each frame and we now have an approximation of Griffith's first movie, which isn't really worth watching. Ain't technology the nuts?

2,) "A Calamitous Elopement" was made three weeks later. The story, told in four shots, is that the girl's father catches her hugging her boyfriend and has a litter of cows (shot 1), so the boyfriend comes to her balcony and presumably asks her to elope (the titles are gone, if there were any). She throws her suitcase down to him, and he goes off to find a ladder. A thief shows up, rigs his rope ladder to the balcony. The girl appears again, so he hides the suitcase and himself right under the balcony where everybody can see them. The boyfriend comes with his own wooden ladder and the girl slides a huge trunk down to him. He goes away for some reason, the thief gets in the trunk for some reason, which is empty for some reason, and then a cop shows up and seems to arrest the couple (shot 2). OK, so we're in the courtroom, right? The lovers appear before the judge and the trunk gets carried in by a cop and another guy. Everybody smiles and shakes the judge's hand; the couple walk. Huh? (shot 3) So now we're in the boyfriend's apartment. The trunk gets delivered and the couple is just thrilled so they leave the room, the thief gets out of the trunk, dresses up in the boyfriend's best clothes, and steals everything in sight. Just side-splitting. We never learn what happened to the suitcase. Billy Bitzer shares cinematography honors with Arthur Marvin.

3.) "Balked At the Alter" (sic). The worst yet. Made three weeks after the last, it's another comedy (never Griffith's strong suit). I don't want to go into detail. An ugly guy in a shotgun wedding to an ugly old maid flees the church, is pursued by the wedding party, and is brought back to the church where he appears to say he doesn't want her. Or something. Ignatz, there is a drunk who passes out and gets trampled by each and every pursuer, but I don't know if that qualifies for your drunk encyclopedia. It's hard to imagine movies like this ever captured public imagination, but when I compare them to Thanhousers of the same period they are better-photographed, and even if the acting is stagey, it's still acting, sort of. So yeah, I guess Griffith was on to something.

4.) "Betrayed By a Handprint" was made a week later. I don't expect a lot from these early pictures, but this one tells its story so poorly that I'm not at all sure what happens. Jealousy drives a young woman to extreme overacting, jewel theft, and I dunno, maybe sloth. In a close-up which looks startlingly modern (as Griffith shots sometimes do), she conceals the stolen necklace in a bar of soap, which does no good whatever as the lady who owns the necklace wakes up, goes straight to the girl's room because of that there handprint in the title, and finds the necklace right away. I guess the handprint said bar of soap in code. Then the next day, the lady I think forgives the girl and tries to give her money, which the girl refuses. I don't know what to make of it except that I sure miss the title cards, which probably means I'm still watching rephotographed stills. Besides the fine close-up, which is a real close-up, not a medium shot as in The Great Train Robbery, there's a trace of almost creative editing here. The shot count is up to about 20. Despite the flaws, progress: we're still only two months into the guy's career, and remember, there was nobody to show him the way. He was once my favorite director, and I'm beginning to remember why.

5.) "Father Gets Into the Game" sounds pretty dire, doesn't it? It does, and it is. Mack Sennett plays father and he tries real hard to be funny, and maybe he was, in 1908, but I doubt it. The whole family goes out but nobody will take father along, so a guy shows up and cuts off father's beard and dyes his hair, mustache and eyebrows with his back to the camera. Ho hum. Now a young guy, he proceeds to Central Park where he picks up a girl at the fountain and takes her to a private room at a restaurant that for some reason employs a really, really clumsy waiter. I may have gone to sleep or something about here, because the next thing I knew the movie was over and I'm not watching it again no matter what. From a tech point of view, another advance: the earliest example of intercutting I've seen. The whole first half of the film is just two shots, but we go back and forth between them several times (not just once as in Life of an American Fireman) so things don't get as dull as they could have. A small breakthrough, but we're starting to make progress. Too bad the movie's such a bore -- you couldn't show it to a film class. Ignatz, champagne is served but nobody drinks any. This is the first film in the collection entirely shot by the great Billy Bitzer, but he wasn't great yet. In any case, Arthur Marvin is out of the picture from here on.

6.) "The Romance of a Jewess," starring Florence Lawrence, aka the Biograph girl (later known as the IMP girl). No masterpiece, but the first that tells a coherent story in a somewhat movielike way, and only 13 weeks after Griffith started. My admiration for him grows; that's a damn good learning curve. There's this girl. Her mother dies, so she's working for her Dad in a pawnshop, and a guy comes courting. The Dad ain't having any of him, so she runs off. Next shot, they have a six year old girl and own a bookstore. I hate to tell you this, but he falls off a ladder and dies, so she has to sell the store. Next thing you know they're poor, so she sends the little girl to pawn the watch the mother left her, and where do you reckon the kid goes? Right the first time. Father and daughter are reunited but too late -- she dies. At least the kid has a granddad to take care of her. So much better than the earlier movies, you wouldn't believe it. I didn't find myself thinking about tech stuff or director stuff, I was just caught up in the story. Oh, and there were titles, which helped.

7.) "Song of the Shirt," from a poem by Thomas Hood I know I'll never read. It's 11/17/08, Griffith's been making a movie every week for four months and he's starting to feel his oats, so what should he try his hand at? Social criticism. The "story" of this little movie is, Linda Arvidson is dying, and Florence Lawrence desperately needs money to save her life, I guess, so she goes to, well, maybe it's some kind of shirt repair place, gets a shirt, takes it home and repairs it with her sewing machine, then takes it back but they reject it. In the meantime Griffith intercuts this with shots of the rich people who own the repair place living it up, toasting each other in restaurants. The point is forcefully made: rich people are rich and poor people are poor. I kid Griffith, but here we have a radical departure: intercutting to make a specific point that isn't in either shot, but is in the relationship between the shots, if that makes any sense. Put it this way: Shot A + Shot B = Idea C. We take this for granted today. I'm sure Griffith was just filming the poem as written, but in the process he accidentally discovered montage and was smart enough to know he had something. The language of film begins, and it's cool that we can watch the exact moment where it does.

8.) "Money Mad" starts off unpromisingly. An old man is begging on the street; Griffith himself walks by and throws money in his hat. Then I'm not sure exactly what happens, but the old guy seems to steal a young woman's wallet; then he goes home, and in a shot that seems to last forever, puts the money he stole in with a bunch more money in a bag and gloats over it. A miser, he is. So then he goes to a bank and withdraws a lot more money, but alas, two bad guys see him do it and follow him home in a fairly-well-paced if silly sequence. So he's at home, gloating some more, and the bad guys bust in, kill him and take the money home with them. They divide the money and go to sleep -- not! -- because one has a gun and the other has a knife. To make a short story even shorter, they kill each other, and the landlady comes in, somehow starts a fire while she finds the money, and everybody burns up. Whew! Money Mad is right! This one's a little smoother that all that has gone before, but you still have that three-minute take of the miser gloating, with about as much dramatic interest as a dead fish. So I dunno. Three steps forward, two steps back.

9.) "Those Awful Hats" isn't really a story, more like a Public Service Announcement. If the ladies don't take their great big hats off, a giant metal crane will come and lift them to the skies. I am not making this up; Gravy has seen it too. We get the only use of a traveling matte in any Griffith Biograph: the film used is "At the Crossroads of Life." The whole stock company is in this one, plus the famous stage comedienne Flora Finch, but we only see their backs so who cares? An oddity, but when projected on a big screen at the Silent Film Festival at the Capri Theater in Sacramento, the audience loved it, so who am I to carp?

10.) The Cord of Life. There's a couple that has a little tiny girl kid, and this furrin guy shows up at their apartment, and I'm not at why, but the Daddy throws him out, and boy, is that there furriner mad! The Daddy leaves, and the Mommy leaves too. Wouldn't you leave you arpartment unlocked if you just hecked off some sinister guy in a Chico Marx hat? The bad guy gets back in, puts the kid in a basket, ties the basket to a cord and puts it out the window and then shuts the window so the cord will be released if anybody opens the window again and the kid in the basket will plummet like a mad thing. Got that? So of course the Evil One follows the Daddy into the wilds of Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Tells Him That He Did It! No heck! The Daddy races back to town in the first-ever example of a Griffith last minute rescue, pursued by two cops. In the meantime, there's an extraordinarily tedious sequence where the Mom almost opens the window a zillion times. Finally she burns a roast so she really has to open the window or die, but the husband rushes in at the last second followed by the two cops, he explains the situation so they dangle him by his ankles out of the top half of the window and he rescues the kid, the cops leave, and everybody crosses themselves again and again. I near about wet my pants.

11.) The Curtain Pole. Bet that title pulled 'em in! If Griffith made anything worse I haven't seen it. Mack Sennett, with a ball on the end of his nose, is drunk and breaks a curtain rod at a party, so he goes to find a new one. At a hardware store he buys a pole abot twice as long and four times as thick as he needs, and he then goes around town bopping people with it accidentally, and they chase him. When he finally gets back to the party they've already replaced the curtain rod. How jolly is that?

OK. folks, that's the end of Volume 1 and I'll start a new post tomorrow. Lucky you.
Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Jun 29 2009, 08:41 PM.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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marlin lee
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panzer the great & terrible
Jun 27 2009, 07:47 PM
What IS interesting is the way it was restored. In the old days some genius at the Library of Congress figured out that they didn't want inflammable nitrate prints around the place -- good thinking so far -- and insisted on having a photo of each frame of each movie on one card per frame, never mind how much space they take up -- but no title cards, just the images. Thanks to this harebrained idea restorationists were able to re-photograph each frame and we now have an approximation of Griffith's first movie, which isn't really worth watching. Ain't technology the nuts?

According to the Kino Edison Invention of the Movies set the reason for saving the images as photos was because there wasn't any legal way to copyright a motion picture. The only way to copyrright the film was to copyright each image as a photo. Also at least in the Edison submissions all the images were printed on a strip of photographic paper.
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panzer the great & terrible
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I stand corrected -- glad somebody's reading this. I may get to the Jewess this evening. I'm actually enjoying these more than I did the first time -- they're a movie record of a vanished world for sure, and Robert Harron's going to appear for the first time soon. Harron was highly charismatic and became one of the silent movies' finest actors before his tragic death (he shot himself, the press said accidentally, in the left lung the same day as the premiere of Way Down East, in which Griffith passed him over to give the lead to Richard Barthelmess, who was enjoying huge popularity from Henry King's masterpiece, Tol'able David). Speaking of actors, Griffith's wife Linda Arvidson is in a lot of these. She played Dollie's mother, the girl who eloped, and all kinds of bit parts.
Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Jun 28 2009, 04:55 PM.
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Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer
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Whether you're correct or not Paul. I readin' these posts.
It's like Rodney King used to say, "Can't we all get a bong."
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panzer the great & terrible
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Thanks Stonemason. I do this stuff for guys with curiosity like you. If I ever get done with the Griffiths, I'll do some other silents, but not those Thanhouser shorts. Life is too short to endure them again.
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Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer
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Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer
Jun 28 2009, 06:59 PM
Whether you're correct or not Paul. I readin' these posts.
Yep, I be readin' the posts, and I be drinkin' and postin' again. I was going to edit that post, but I'll leave it as a reminder as to why I don't drink and post. Like it'll do any good. Once again Paul ... I'm readin' the posts. ALL of the posts. Stonemason ... my favorite one of your nicknames for me, by far!
It's like Rodney King used to say, "Can't we all get a bong."
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panzer the great & terrible
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Now we start Volume 2, and I'd like to tell you we hit a high note right away, but alas, no, we begin with a total stinker:

1.) The Joneses Have Amateur Theatricals. My Mama said if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all, so I will say Florence Lawrence plays Mrs. Jones, and I once had a cat named Mrs. Jones. Florence is a better actress than my cat was. An amateur theater group comes over to the Joneses house, and all kind of stuff goes on, but then Mr. Jones throws them out. Yawn. Nice print though.

2.) A Politician's Love Story. Mack Sennett plays the lead again. I wish he wouldn't. No wonder I bogged down the first time, this is torture. He's a politician and he gets his panties in a wad because of a caricature of him in the paper that's all hat, so he goes to the paper to shoot the artist, as in with a pistol, but finds that it's a pretty girl, so he goes to the park and picks up another pretty girl and that's the story. Jesus.

3.) Have I mentioned we're in 1909 now? A hundred years ago, just think, and my Dad was 15 (He was 50 when I was born, I'm not that old.). The film is "The Golden Louis," and I suspect somebody was reading Dumas. It's Carnival time in Paris, cold and snowy unlike New Wallins. A little girl is fixed up to look pitiful by her parents, to beg, but after begging for about a minute falls asleep in the snow. While she's unconscious, a rich guy (Owen Moore, looking like the star he will be) lays a golden Louis at her feet, but she sleeps on. This other guy (Charles Inslee) is losing at pool, so he goes out and what does he see but the golden Louis? He does a lot of conscience stuff but takes it, goes back to the pool hall and wins. He wants to give the little girl her share. Been a pretty fair story so far, but now she gets up and starts wandering around for no reason, just so he can't find her -- tedious -- then goes back to the same place and dies of the cold -- and NOW he finds her. Oh heck. What's cool about these tragic endings is they aren't emphasized. You just get the AB (American Biograph) logo and that's it. No 'The End' or anything. Sometimes, this time, it's like a slap in the face. Another cool thing is that in many shots you see the AB logo on the wall somewhere to prevent the 1909 version of video piracy. Anyway, I enjoyed this little picture, thank God. I was running out of steam. It will be more fun when Mary Pickford arrives and there is real screen acting at last. All we've seen so far are those big, arms-held-wide gestures that reek of the old-fashioned stage and seem so archaic now (kinda cute though when a girl does 'em).

INTERMISSION

I've forgotten to mention one thing. Griffith didn't just direct these, he wrote 'em, or most of 'em. Well, I say wrote but really he did it all in his head, even complex masterpieces like INTOLERANCE. So when you call him an auteur you're right: he is the author in every sense, unlike many directors. Others who had a significant hand in shaping their own screenplays, for better or worse, include Von Stroheim, Hawks, Ford, Von Sternberg, Welles, Preston Sturges, Hitchcock, Wilder, Aldrich, Kubrick, Huston, Fuller and Tashlin -- plus of course Jerry Lewis (one reason why the French love him). Those who didn't write include Wyler, Wellman, George Stevens, Lean and Carol Reed, all darlings of the critical Establishment, plus some dodos like deMille, Fank Lloyd, and hell, the list is endless. I would suspect Stanley Kramer belongs in the first group, but have no first-hand knowledge except that he produced his own movies. Perhaps Preminger worked on his scripts too; that would explain how his career went all to Hell, because when these writer-directors burn out they stay burnt. OK, then -- back to Griffith.

4.) At the Alter (re-sic) -- Jealousy, Italian style. This Sicilian family is having dinner; a violinist comes in to propose to their daughter, who accepts, and there is great rejoicing, except from this one guy who wanted her himself. So what he does is rig up a pistol that will shoot the couple as they kneel at the altar -- would you have thought that up? -- goes home, drinks poison and has a spazz attack that forever defines how silly silent movie acting can be. So he's dead, a girl discovers the body, gets a cop, the cop finds a note about the rigged-up pistol and runs like hell to get to the church, but you know, falls down a lot and like that: we wonder if he's going to make it but he does and the couple is saved, thank goodness. Straightforward storytelling with at least one shot too long (the dinner at the beginning) and the aforementioned acting, plus it's a dupe from a print with sprocket damage. I hope MOMA's print is better.

5.) Lure of the Gown -- A cool little movie but unfortunately another one that jumps up and down, I don't have enough tech Knowledge to know why, I said sprocket damage up there but I have no way of knowing if the Biographs even had sprocket holes. It's one of those "comeuppance" stories and I like it. Unfortunately the print I saw was soft. This is the first really good one -- has a satisfying ending.

6.) The Voice of the Violin -- This fella is a violin teacher, and in love with a girl student, but she tells him her father would never consider an engagement to a poor musician. He gets mad and becomes a Communist. At a meeting, the Communists draw lots to see which two will go on a dangerous mission. You know what? He's one of the winners. And that ain't all, the job is to blow up a rich man's house. They get there and guess whose house it is? Imagine the rest -- you'll probably get it right. Probably the best-made one yet, but what a plot! Print soft, but no jumps.

7.) A Drunkard's Reformation, released April Fool's Day, 1909, is an absurd movie whether you drink or not, especially since Griffith was knockin' 'em back pretty good. The hero, the actor who was teaching violin two weeks before, is now a scary, abusive drunk. He wakes up hung over and his little girl asks him to take her to the theater, she has tickets. He goes, and its a play about the evils of drink. He sees himself in the play's protagonist and vows to quit. That's all, folks. The cameraman was Bitzer and every shot is dark, but the titles look great. I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for this, but I don't know what.

8.) Confidence. Florence Lawrence returns as an orphan girl who works for a crooked gambler. She warns two marks that he's using a crooked deck, he fires her and she vows to go straight. She goes to New Yawk and becomes a nurse, a "respectable working girl." A doctor marries her, so she's got it made, except the slimy gambler happens to see her coming out of her house and blackmails her first for money, then the second time he calls he takes her jewels, including the wedding ring. He leaves his cigar behind and the husband finds it. The next time he calls, the husband appears and throws him out of the house. He had Confidence in his wife. I liked this, Lawrence is a pretty good actress by now, but the soundtrack Grapevine used was appallingly corny, standard melodrama fodder. Every cliché in the book.

9.) Lucky Jim. Supposed to be a comedy. The hero, Lucky Jim, is in love with this awful girl but she marries another guy --- she abuses him and then he dies. So Jim gets her, with results you could imagine, but why bother? Jumpy, soft print, terrible movie. Apparently abusive wives used to be hilarious before women had the vote, but we can only marvel at that these days.

10.) Resurrection. Tolstoi in one reel; something I might have tried to do back then so I can sympathize, but what we have is a soft, contrasty print without the original titles -- impossible to follow. Something about a person unjustly imprisoned who accepts her fate, I guess. Crazy stuff, poorly done.

11.) The Cricket on the Hearth. Forgotten Dickens novella about a miser engaged to a girl who loves another, and how his heart is melted at Christmas a la Scrooge. The limitations of the form defeat the project. Half the film is spent setting up the premise, and after that there isn't even time for the cricket of the title. If you haven't read the book, the whole thing is mystifying. I guess there was a certain prestige in even attempting such a thing, but the thing itself has no entertainment value.

12.) Next up, the final film in this volume, What Drink Did, dedicated to Mr. Ratzywatzky. A father takes his first drink at lunch, and is pounding them from the get-go. He comes home totally wasted. The next night he goes to the bar again, his little girl comes to fetch him home, and she gets shot: so he learns a bitter lesson, how to overact. I kid Mr. Griffith, but this film shows progress in storytelling -- what is needed is more skilled acting, and that will soon arrive in the form of Miss Mary Pickford.

Volume three will include the first famous Biograph, The Lonely Villa, so we are getting somewhere, I hope.



Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Jul 10 2009, 09:14 AM.
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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.
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Reprint of my Previous Griffith posts at the Serial Squadron:

Somebody was rash enough to ask me to review this massive set (The Kino Griffith box) a few years ago, and now I am egomaniac enough to try it. First a word about Griffith. He was a Kentuckian in an era when having unreconstructed pro-Southern views about the Civil War had quite recently emerged from criminality. Americans have always pitied underdogs and losers, and New York City always had a strong pro-South leaning (vide the draft riots), and minstrel shows & novels began pushing the Old South mythology, painting the South as a fount of gracious living. This stuff quickly got out of hand, as falsehoods will. A number of virulently racist pro-Southern novels and plays appeared, and among the worst were two novels and a fabulously successful play by a clergyman named Thomas W. Dixon: The Klansman, The Leopard's Spots, and the Clansman. In choosing these as the raw material for Birth of a Nation, Griffith branded himself as hopelessly archaic to say the least. He is routinely derided in film classes today -- academics have quite rightly pushed the pendulum in the other direction -- maybe a little too far, but that's the way it is with pendulums and with academics.

Griffith is also the one who invented good movies. His ability to pick out the little detail that gives a scene its point has never been surpassed. Most of the people who set the bar for film acting started by working with him, and he made the first movie masterpieces. Many revered directors are those who learned from him: two obvious examples are Hitchcock and Kurosawa.

The first box in this set is called Biograph Shorts, Special Edition. It adds eight shorts to the previous Biograph twofer collection, while shunting a few Civil War-themed ones off to the Birth of a Nation Box.

Let's do the first disc and take 'em one by one:

DISC ONE:

THOSE AWFUL HATS (1909): This is kinda like those "let's All Go to the Lobby" things, only it's about ladies taking off their hats. The ladies who refuse get lifted out of the auditorium by a crane. I saw this in a real theater with a real audience a few years ago and the people laughed.

THE SEALED ROOM (1909) is the worst Griffith picture I have seen. Based on Poe, a little, and playing up Griffith's apparent fear of suffocation, it's stagy and dull. Jealous husband walls up his wife and her lover, they suffocate and emote.

CORNER IN WHEAT (1909) I would nominate as the movies' first masterpiece. Gorgeous photography and strange parallel editing. It's about the evil folk who run the commodities market and how they will get buried under a mountain of wheat (suffocation again), while the simple farmers continue to sow the soil and keep the world going. This one I have seen dozens of times. At first I didn't much like it, but it grows on me. My assessment today: great. Towering masterpiece. 4 1/2 stars.

THE UNCHANGING SEA (1910) is even better; in fact, my favorite pre-1912 film by anybody. It's the 'Bitter Green' story, the girl who waits for her husband who went off to sea and never sent word, but she waits and waits because he is just so cool. When he does come back, he's lost his memory, and all that, but wait til you see the photography and editing. Great.

HIS TRUST (1911) is about a Southern slave who takes pity when his owner's wife loses her marbles and everything else when her house gets burned by Yankees: he takes her in. That is the entire plot. There is no sexual issue, and the wife's insanity is stark. A real oddity, and not likely to win many friends with the PC crowd, but such things actually did happen -- I know of a famous case iun Beaufort, S.C. The intense performances are remarkable. For some reason, the rest of this film is on the BIRTH OF A NATION DVD, but this is the first half of what became the first American two-reeler when exhibitors insisted on showing the two films together.

In THE NEW YORK HAT (1912) Mary Pickford is light years ahead of other actors of the period. She invented modern acting, and here you see her doing it. Lionel Barrymore is present too, walking around like real people. Evil gossips try to sabotage a girl and a preacher: Mary Pickford & Lionel Barrymore -- now there's an odd couple... Good one. Anita Loos wrote the script when just a girl.

AN UNSEEN ENEMY (1912) is revered among old movie scholars as an early manifestation of the switchback, last minute rescue, but I've always thought it was kinda silly, and you'll know why when you see it. Sort of like The Invisible Monster in a way. Well edited though, & some lovely location work. Griffith was always at his best outdoors.

THE MOTHERING HEART (1913) is about a young wife bamboozled by her idiot husband who finally sees the error of his ways after their baby dies. Does that sound bad? Well it ain't because the young wife is Lillian Gish, who has watched what Pickford is up to and absorbed it all, and then adds little touches of her own in an extraordinary performance, and there is also cross-cutting between neglected wife at home to husband out on a spree among the Apache dancers, more interesting than the crosscutting of Unseen Enemy.

THE ADVENTURES OF DOLLIE (1908) is the first of the Biographs new to DVD. It happens to be the first picture Griffith directed, reconstructed from frame-by-frame photos deposited in the Library of Congress. You can tell what's happening, but that doesn't make you care. Very primitive, of historic interest only.

THE USURER (1910) seems to have been made for the folks who liked CORNER IN WHEAT. It's kinda left wing-sh, and so artful as to be almost arty, but still it's my second favorite pre-1912 Biograph. It keeps repeating the same point, by cutting back and forth between the champagne party the usurer is holding to the misery his business practices are causing, but for some reason that just keeps getting more and more abstract and interesting. Maybe it hits home because these days the usurer's name is Mr. Insurance. Anyway, (spoiler!) he gets locked in the bank vault with all the money, and ya know what? He suffocates. Think we're catching a theme here? But let me tell you, it isn't the theme that's interesting, it's the intensity Griffith brings to it. There is no more intense director, not even Fritz Lang.

ENOCH ARDEN was Griffith's first two-reeler to be officially released as such, a prestige product based on Tennyson, whose reputation was at its peak at this time, just after Queen Victoria's death. It's the old story about the guy who wins the girl away from a rival who looks a bit like Elvis, and they get married and have three kids (one of 'em a baby you never see) and he goes off in a ship that wrecks and gets washed up on a desert island. About twenty years later he returns to find the wife remarried to the rival (the kids, now somehow reduced to two, are crazy about the rival, so Enoch slinks off so that "she will never know," and instantly dies. After his marooning the fellow who plays Enoch abandons any attempt at modern acting, throws his hands over his head and lets his eyes bug out to express emotion. I thought I'd better warn you. Other than that, a nifty little drama with gorgeous location shots and one really nice two-shot when Enoch is about to leave home, before he forgot how to act normally.

THE MISER'S HEART is interesting particularly to serial fans. It gets you involved with two different good-bad guys, a thief and a miser, and then opposes them to two bad-bad guys, burglars so bad that they tie a rope around a little girl's waist and dangle her out of a window at the end of a rope, and then hold a candle under the rope to persuade the miser to give them the combination to the safe with his hoard in it. I can't tell you more without serious spoilers, but I can say that there is a lot more to it, and you may even get involved, especially since the piano accompaniment is able. A satisfying silent movie recreation and a fitting end to the first disc of this astounding collection.

FIRST DISC: 188 minutes, no extras, 5 stars out of 5. Such a deal!

SECOND DISC:

THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY is often cited as "the first gangster film." It uses the word gangster and shows a skirmish in a gang war. It has Lillian Gish, fine urban locations, and too much plot. A musician leaves Gish alone to go make money. While he's gone a hood tries to date her. She goes out to a "gangster's ball" and takes up with the head of another gang, and then the boyfriend comes back but outside Lillian's very door gets bapped by the hood, who steals his money. Well, then, never mind why, there's a gang war, and while that goes on our musician steals his wallet back from the hood, and goes back to Lillian's room, they hug and kiss, and then the hood comes in, escaping from the cops, and asks Lillian out. She refuses because she likes the musician. The hood, amazed, leaves and is arrested just outside the door. Takes the cop into Lillian's room and Lillian and the musician alibi the hood. I told you it was too much plot.

Gorgeous print, gorgeous photography, and some signs of modern editing. Miles ahead of what the French were doing two years later.

THE BURGLAR'S DILEMMA (1912) starts with a title that says it will explode "the fallacy of circumstantial evidence." Lionel Barrymore (before his wheelchair days) is a genial, wealthy "householder," and Henry B. Walthall is his "weakling" brother. Three young ladies (including the Gishes) come to pay Barrymore a birthday visit, then some guys with mustaches arrive, and frivolity and toasting ensues, which incites Walthall's jealousy. The guests leave, the butler goes out for the evening, Barrymore and Walthall sit up drinking, Walthall gets loaded, borrows money from his brother and then cold-cocks him. A title reads: "In his drunken confusion, the weakling thinks he has killed his brother."

"A young burglar (Robert Harron) under the domination of an older crook (Walter Long)" comes in the window and Walthall hides. Seeing this as a chance to blame the killing on somebody else, he locks Harron in with the body. When Harron finds Barrymore on the floor, he tries to rob him. There's an extraordinary "Griffith moment" as Harron's hand dances over the body like a spider looking for the wallet. You know how the plot comes out, and the last confrontation between the two brothers is beautifully done.

The film's chief interest is Barrymore. He's far more modern than anyone else. Walthall, especially, acts in a stagy (though expressive) style that he himself abandoned and Sennett lampooned shortly thereafter. There is all manner of cross-cutting between Walthall and the young burglar throughout, making no particular point except to show simultaneous events. Griffith still announces the action in a title, and then shows what he has already announced -- but subtleties are beginning to creep in. Bitzer's compositions are at times daring, with the action often at the far edges of the frame. I'd call it a transitional film, with flashes of inspiration, showing Griffith's mature Biograph style developing but not yet complete.

THE SUNBEAM (1912) is a drama of tenement life, somewhat like a Victorian ballad in its sentimentality and bizarre ellipses. A little girl's mother dies, and a lonesome couple unites to raise the kid. The couple are a severe spinster and a gruff, beefy middle-aged man, both pictured realistically. This isn't as awful as it sounds, though the plot is oddly abrupt. The little girl, despite terminal cuteness and a tendency to stare at the director, has her moments. Griffith no longer uses titles announcing the coming action, and tells the story in images. Things have begun to gel. In retrospect, it seems that 1912 was his miracle year.

(and incidentally, Tservo is absolutely right, a huge amount of this film is set in stairwells and hallways, something I had never noticed before he mentioned it. Surely there was some economy consideration, at least at first, as well as the fact that stairwells were where people first met in the tenements, but then it could be that Griffith developed a superstition about his more successful films having stairwell scenes. Too late, alas, to ask him. Isn't it sad that nobody was able to break through his shell and get a real interview?)

THE PAINTED LADY presents a problem to the reviewer because if you tell anything about the plot you spoil it. I will say it gives the beautiful Blanche Sweet a chance to do everything but play the musical saw. There are some strange editing choices, titles placed before the action, but again there's modernity in the playing. Not bad at all.

ONE IS BUSINESS, THE OTHER, CRIME has a title that tells the whole plot, but I won't tell more. Blanche Sweet, as the rich wife, may be somewhat overshadowed by Dorothy Bernard as the poor wife -- but this little movie is all about the photographer, Billy Bitzer. One by one you could pull the shots off the screen, frame them, and hang them on the wall. Alas, the physical film itself has shrunk over the years and the preservation of this title must have required lots of work, but we're lucky somebody thought it was worth the effort.

DEATH'S MARATHON is a grim little item about how Walthall kills himself because of his gambling debts while his friend Lionel Barrymore and his wife Blanche Sweet try to save him. But they're too late, and when they find him he as just done the deed, and a little wisp of smoke is curling out of his mouth. Haunting image. This short is very, very Griffith, and a huge storytelling advance from all we've seen before, with only one explanatory title.

With THE BATTLE OF ELDERBRUSH GULCH we get the epic sweep we associate with Griffith, still tied to the small-scale detail that was his greatest strength. A 30 minute running time, so we have a, what do you call it? Half-feature? Lillian Gish protects her puppy dogs as the savages attack. The switchback, last-minute-rescue come to full flower, and the movies are born. Wonderful theater organ accompaniment by Gabriel Heatter. Five star masterpiece.

Now we get to the new stuff, four Biographs that haven't been available to the general public for , oh, nearly a century. Jon Mirsalis' piano scores for them are impeccable.

THE LAST DROP OF WATER (1911) is legendary, and lives up to its reputation. It's sort of a Bret Harte picture, and does evoke the Old West. Biograph spent some money on period wagons, costumes, and a big bunch of attacking Indians. Epic sweep, and a fine piano accompaniment. Amazingly good for 1911, it throws some doubt on my earlier observations about 1912.

FRIENDS (1912) is a Mary Pickford vehicle, with Walthall, Harry Carey and Lionel Barrymore (alas, Carey is just there for a few moments), and it's in poor shape, with missing footage, not enough to totally obscure the story, but it does hurt. We're in the gold fields. Mary loves Walthall, but the gold's played out so he abandons her to go North. Barrymore shows up and she takes up with him. It's a little hard to figure, but Barrymore & Walthall run into each other and turns out they are old buds, so when Walthall comes back to Pickford & finds Barrymore's picture there, he tries to do the noble thing and split, but then Barrymore comes back & does the even nobler thing by saying no, you can have her. Problem is, this happens while Mary is offscreen. Not the best Biograph ever, with some vile acting by extras.

THE LESSER EVIL is a sea picture. Mae Marsh is a "humble fishermaiden" who gets kidnapped by smugglers. Once they have her at sea, they want to smuggle her, ho ho, except one of them protects her. So those two are barricaded in the cabin of the smuggle-boat (a sailboat) while the bad guys are trying to, ahem, break down the door. Well, in the meantime her boyfriend, a simple fisherman, has alerted the coast guard, so he sets out with them in a little bitty motor launch which overtakes the sailboat in no time and those eight good guys easily overcome about 20 bad guys. So. In all the confusion, Mae makes sure her protector gets away by occupying her boyfriend, who is, as I mentioned, a simple fisherman. A really good one.

THE MASSACRE at last. All my life I've heard about it, and finally see it at the age of 60. It's about this lady who has two boyfriends, and she marries one and has a baby with him, but it's the other one who saves her life. And oh yes, it's also about the whites slaughtering the Indians, so the Indians just about have to take revenge, and do. it's also about Billy Bitzer taking astonishing close-ups and even more astonishing long shots. A flat out masterpiece: proof, if any was needed, that Griffith really was and still is the great American director. Shameless exploitation of a cute baby to heighten the suspense.

188 minutes of sheer enlightenment on one DVD. An incomparable bargain.

After I finish the other Biograph thread I have to write about The Birth of a Nation, a great movie that nobody could rationally defend. The Good Lord only knows what I'll say. I'll make a new thread for it, starting with the Biograph shorts included in the box. Please, folks, if this movie offends you -- and there's no reason why it shouldn't -- let's don't get in a rock fight. I didn't invent the old South, and I have never done a heckin' thing to keep it alive, so do me a favor and blame it on the Bossa Nova, OK?
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Good stuff Paul! Thanks for the informative posts. You should do it more often!!!
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I'm tryin', I'm tryin.
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If you scroll up to the volume three post there's a new review, and there will be one or two more tomorrow. I'm laid out with a strep throat and have nothing better to do.
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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 :blink: . 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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Volume 5 begins tonight! Be there or be trapezoid.
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Saw Birth of a Nation for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art last week. Over 3 hours long.

Much as I love Griffith as a filmmaker and film pioneer, there are stereotypical elements that are hard to watch today. For me, this is Griffith's flawed work in an otherwise unblemished career.
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