The Griffith Project Volume 10: Films Produced in 1919–46 9781844572199, 9781838710712, 9781839020001

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THE GRIFFITH PROJECT VOLUME 10 FILMS PRODUCED IN 1919–46

TO DAVID FRANCIS

THE GRIFFITH PROJECT VOLUME 10 Films Produced in 1919–46

G ENERAL E DITOR Paolo Cherchi Usai CONTRIBUTORS Stephen Bottomore, Eileen Bowser, Kevin Brownlow, Karen Latham Everson, Scott Eyman, Tom Gunning, Steven Higgins, Lea Jacobs, Joyce Jesionowski, J.B. Kaufman, Charlie Keil, Mike Mashon, David Mayer, Russell Merritt, David Robinson, Scott Simmon, Paul Spehr, Kristin Thompson, Yuri Tsivian A SSISTANT E DITOR Cynthia Rowell

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

First published in 2006 by the British Film Institute 21 Stephen St, London W1T 1LN 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 2006 Reprinted 2009 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 1–84457–219–6/978–1–84457–219–9 eISBN 978–1–83871–899–2 ePDF 978–1–83902–000–1

CONTENTS

Foreword Notes on Contributors Note on Layout 577. Boots 578. [Signing of United Artists Contract of Incorporation] 579. The Big Four – Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and W.S. Hart 580. The Girl Who Stayed at Home 581. Peppy Polly 582. I’ll Get Him Yet 583. True Heart Susie 584. Nugget Nell 585. The World at Columbus 586. Nobody Home 587. Turning the Tables 588. The Greatest Question 589. Scarlet Days 590. Mary Ellen Comes to Town 591. The Love Flower 592. The Idol Dancer 593. Remodeling Her Husband 594. Romance 595. A Great Feature in the Making 596. The Country Flapper 597. Little Miss Rebellion 598. Way Down East THEATRICAL SOURCES

599. Flying Pat

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600. 601. 602. 603.

1

The Ghost in the Garret Dream Street [Prologue to Dream Street] Orphans of the Storm PREPARATORY NOTE THEATRICAL SOURCES CINEMATIC ALTERATIONS

4

6 8 12 15 18 28 31 36 39 42 50 54 57 60 68 71 74 75 77 80 95 104

604. [Personalities of the Twenties] 605. One Exciting Night 606. Paddy – The Best-Next-Thing 607. The White Rose 608. His Darker Self 609. America 610. Isn’t Life Wonderful 611. Sally of the Sawdust THEATRICAL SOURCES

612. 613. 614. 615. 616. 617. 618. 619. 620. 621. 622.

623.

That Royle Girl The Sorrows of Satan [Screen Snapshots] [D.W. Griffith Returns to Los Angeles] [D.W. Griffith on the Set of The King of Kings] Topsy and Eva The Drums of Love The Battle of the Sexes [Unidentified Newsreel Excerpt: Beauty Contest?] Lady of the Pavements [Television Broadcast: D.W. Griffith Talks About Success in the Movies] [Mary Pickford and Guests]

106 108 114 116 119 125 131 138 139 143 146 159 162 166 177 184 187 193 201 202 203 204 207 211 215 216

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624. Abraham Lincoln 625. [D.W. Griffith at Premiere of The Florodora Girl] 626. [Prologues to The Birth of a Nation Reissue 627. The Struggle 628. Hearst Metrotone News [Vol. 7, No. 250] 629. San Francisco 630. [D.W. Griffith Meets Hal Roach]

631. One Million B.C. 632. [Home Movies of D.W. Griffith and Evelyn Baldwin Griffith] 633. [Academy Awards, 18th]

226 232 233 239

Bibliography Index of Titles: 1919–46 Cumulative Index of Titles: 1907–46

244 246 248

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249

251 254 255 257 259

FOREWORD

The last period of Griffith’s career encompasses the 1920s, postwar years of great change in American society, mores, fashion, and entertainment. During this time (1919–31) he completed twenty-one feature films and probably directed one short, a prologue for the 1930 sound reissue of The Birth of a Nation. The trajectory of his work in these years roughly falls into five corporate phases, starting at Artcraft Pictures (1918–19) and First National (1919–20), and proceeding to United Artists (1919–24), followed by Paramount (1925–26), and finally the Art Cinema Corporation. After World War I Griffith was at the peak of his popularity, along with his stars Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and he consolidated his success by beginning to build his own grand studio complex in Mamaroneck, north of New York City on Long Island Sound. In the meantime, he directed six films for Artcraft Pictures, including a rural romance that must be counted among his masterpieces, True Heart Susie (1919), while producing a string of high-budget comedy vehicles for Dorothy Gish. His two films for First National – The Greatest Question and The Idol Dancer – were poorly received by the press. But another major commercial success was in the offing, which would put Griffith back on top. With great fanfare, in early 1919 Griffith regained creative independence by joining the celebrity Hollywood triumvirate of Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin in the creation of the production-distribution consortium called United Artists. His first big Mamaroneck production under the United Artists banner was Way Down East (1920), whose box-office triumph was second only to The Birth of a Nation. Unfortunately, the record-breaking grosses of Way Down East were not enough to offset the production and maintenance costs of running the Mamaroneck operation over the next few years, compounded by the financial balance sheets for his subsequent films of this period – Dream Street (1921), Orphans of the Storm (1921), One Exciting Night (1922), The White Rose (1923), and America (1924) – none of which achieved anywhere near the same success. Griffith’s financial situation reached its crisis point, and by the time America was released rumors of a split within United Artists were rife. Unhappy with his new Paramount contract with Adolph Zukor, Griffith’s business partners forced him to give United Artists the distribution rights to Isn’t Life Wonderful (1924) and Sally of the Sawdust (1925). By 1926 Griffith had been forced to surrender his independence and was essentially a Paramount studio employee, having to accept scripts, budgets, and casting decisions increasingly imposed upon him from above. Despite his vehement protests, he eventually had to succumb to making That Royle Girl and The Sorrows of Satan. This was the final straw for Griffith, and he looked westward to California for release. In a last move to Hollywood in 1927, the now humbled Master returned obliquely to a restructured United Artists under a new arrangement with producer Joseph Schenck, who offered to finance Griffith’s films through his own Art Cinema Corporation, which distributed via United Artists. The moderate commercial success of Abraham Lincoln (1930), his fourth and last picture for Schenck, was not enough to restore Griffith’s self-confidence. His final film, the demon-drink parable The Struggle (1931), cheaply made in a rented Bronx studio and financed by an unexpected tax windfall, was a professional disaster dismissed by critics and audiences alike, marking an inglorious, definitive end to Griffith’s career as a filmmaker.

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The thirteen-year trajectory described above is followed in this volume, the tenth installment in a multi-year 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. The final entries in this volume cover the last years in Griffith’s life, and his occasional appearances in newsreels and home movies. Editors and contributors to this book have extensively verified the filmographic information published in modern scholarly books, filmographies and essays with the data gathered from primary sources and, whenever possible, through the analysis of the prints viewed; still, question marks abound. As in the previous two volumes of the series, we make no claim of completeness nor absolute accuracy in relation to the titles supervised by Griffith, a field still awaiting proper research. As customary in this project, films are listed in their presumed order of shooting, with the last day or month of shooting determining the chronology of the entries. It has been extremely difficult to do so in the case of the films supervised by Griffith, and the sequence proposed here should be considered as tentative. When the presumed date of filming is vague or ambiguous, the dates of copyright, release or premiere in large cities have been taken into account in establishing the entries’ sequence. The methodology adopted for the inventory of archival sources has been discussed at some length in the foreword to previous volumes of this series, but it is worth summarizing here. The archival sources listed in each entry of The Griffith Project represent the extant preservation material (closest to the original camera negatives) utilized for the making of viewing copies. According to this definition, the term “archival source” is used exclusively 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. For example, 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 is no longer extant. Whenever in doubt about the nature of an archival element, we made mention of it with the caveat that its printing generation has not been determined. Detailed information (including format, footage and source) on some of the prints available for viewing at the time of publication of this volume can be found in the official catalogue of the 2006 Pordenone Film Festival, held from 7 to 14 October in Sacile. The Griffith Project is the direct outcome of the generous help provided by all the individuals and institutions involved in the preservation and study of Griffith’s work. Mike Mashon (Library of Congress), Steven Higgins (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Elaine Burrows, Paul Spehr, Russell Merritt and Kevin Brownlow have replied with admirable patience and insight to the hundreds of inquiries I have submitted to them for a decade. Our special thanks go to Mary Lea Bandy and Anne Morra (The Museum of Modern Art), Greg Lukow, Madeline Matz and Linda Shah (Library of Congress), all of whom are currently involved in 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. Film preservation is by definition an international effort: several archives have restored

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other Griffith titles, or helped with additional documentation and research. We wish to express our gratitude to Tim Kittleson, Eddie Richmond, Charles Hopkins and Jennifer Teefy (UCLA Film and Television Archive); Mark-Paul Meyer, Rommy Albers, Catherine Cormon and Simona Monizza (Filmmuseum, Amsterdam); Eva Orbanz (Film Museum Berlin); Dan Nissen and Thomas C. Christensen (Det Danske Filmmuseum); Stéphanie Côté (Cinémathèque Québécoise, Montréal) and Robert Daudelin, former director of the Cinémathèque Québécoise; Anca Mitran and the staff of the Arhiva Nationala de Filme (Bucarest); the late Paulina Fernandez Jurado (Fundación Cinemateca Argentina); Carlos Roberto de Souza and Patricia De Filippi (Cinemateca Brasileira); Lúcia Lobo (Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro); Michelle Aubert, Eric Le Roy and Jean-Louis Cot (Archives françaises du film du Centre National de la Cinématographie, Bois d’Arcy); Michael Pogorzelski and Fritz Herzog (Academy Film Archive); Antti Alanen (Suomen Elokuva-Arkisto); Alberto Del Fabro (Cinémathèque française); Catherine Gautier (Filmoteca Española); Dinko Tucakovic (Yugoslovenska Kinoteka, Belgrade); Agata Zalewska and Waldemar Piatek (Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw); Vladimir Dmitriev (Gosfilmofond of Russia); Patrick Loughney, Edward E. Stratmann, Caroline Yeager, Deborah Stoiber, Daniel Wagner, Tim Wagner, Jared Case, Benjamin Tucker, Kelli Hicks, Anthony L’Abbate and all the staff of the Motion Picture Department at George Eastman House for their generous help in retrieving and sharing information on film credits and archival sources. Last but not least, we are grateful to all the interns and students of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation who contributed to the early stages of preparation of this and other volumes: Kelly Chisholm, Sonia Genaitay, Sungji Oh, Christina Porterfield, Heather Stilin, John Woodard (in the academic year 2001–02); Susan Busam, May Dea, Andrew Lampert, Diana Little, Ember Lundgren, Brianne Merkel, Robert Nanovic, Heather Olson, Brent Phillips, Magnus Rosborn, Alexandra Terziev, Edward Tse (2002–03); Daniel Blazek, Brendan C. Burchill, Christina Nobles, Loubna Regragui, David Rice, Jennifer Sidley, Marcus Smith, Anna Sperone (2003–04); Janet Ceja, Angela Holm, Nancy Kauffman, Bryan Pang, Molly Pielow, Albert Steg (2004–05); Charles Allen, Leslie Lewis, Elisa Mutsaers, Joanna Poses, David Spencer (2005–06); Brian Meacham, recipient of the 2006 Pordenone/Selznick School Fellowship, has assisted with supplementary research. My colleagues on the Board of Directors of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (the late Davide Turconi, David Robinson, Piera Patat, Livio Jacob, Carlo Montanaro, Piero Colussi, Lorenzo Codelli 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 have been published in Griffithiana, vol. 21, nos. 62–63, May 1998, pp. 4–37; in the French journal 1895, no. 29, December 1999, pp. 187–88, and in Luca Giuliani (ed.), The Collegium Papers I (Gemona: Cineteca del Friuli/Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2001, pp. 23–32), the inaugural volume of an annual collection of essays and workshop transcripts written or assembled by students participating in the festival. While The Griffith Project has not yet come to its conclusion – both from the point of view of the volumes still to be published, and of the prints to be screened at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (the Griffith retrospective is scheduled for completion in 2008) – this book has a symbolic significance in that it marks the epilogue of the phase dedicated to the 633 film entries planned for the series. Thirty-five authors of six nationalities have worked with me for up to ten years or more, with a generosity and enthusiasm well beyond my most optimistic expectations. To say that The Griffith Project would not exist without them is indeed a truism, but it is also a tribute to the standards of excellence they have established for film history and scholarship. Back in 1999, when Cynthia Rowell – then a student of the L. Jeffrey Selznick ix

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School of Film Preservation – committed to undertake this journey with me in the capacity of assistant editor, I could not have imagined the level of commitment she would demonstrate throughout the years, often rescuing me and the authors from the many contradictions and oversights which are inevitable in an endeavor of this magnitude. The countless questions and issues raised by Cindi during the editorial process have filled me with awe, but this accounts to a modest extent for my gratitude to her. The very fact that Cindi stayed with me until now and remained so loyal to the project, even at times of dramatic change in our lives and in society, is an eloquent testimony of her intellectual and professional integrity. Paolo Cherchi Usai Canberra, January 2006

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

STEPHEN BOTTOMORE is a London-based documentary television producer who has filmed all over the world, especially in developing countries. He also researches and writes about the early cinema, especially the cultural context of the first movies and non-fiction. He is an associate editor of Film History and has published many articles on silent film history, as well as writing two books on the subject, including I Want to See This Annie Mattygraph: A Cartoon History of the Coming of the Movies (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1995). EILEEN BOWSER is a film historian and curator emeritus of the film archives, Department of Film and Media, 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). KEVIN BROWNLOW has been collecting films since he was eleven. He joined the industry as an office boy in 1955, and embarked on his first feature, It Happened Here, a year later (it took eight years to complete and was released in 1966). His passion has always been for silent films, and his restoration of Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1926) has still not been completed, although several versions are in circulation. With David Gill he produced the 13-hour TV series on the silent era, Hollywood. His latest film is I’m King Kong! (2005). PAOLO CHERCHI USAI is Director of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. He is co-founder of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House, and of Domitor, the international society for the study of early film. He is a contributor and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (Richard Abel, ed., 2005). His latest book is The Death of Cinema (BFI, 2001). He recently completed Passio (2006), a feature silent film based on music by Arvo Pärt. KAREN LATHAM EVERSON has been an independent filmmaker and also has worked as an archivist, with her late husband and at the George Eastman House. She has now returned to her roots, living in Texas and doing historical research and freelance writing. SCOTT EYMAN is the author of, among other titles, The Speed of Sound (1997) and Print the Legend: The Life of John Ford (1999). His most recent book is Lion of Hollywood: The Life of Louis B. Mayer (2005). 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. STEVEN HIGGINS is curator in the Department of Film and Media, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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LEA JACOBS teaches film at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is the author of Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (1997), written with Ben Brewster, and is currently writing on American film in the 1920s. JOYCE JESIONOWSKI is a film scholar and the author of Thinking in Pictures (1987), an examination of the formal structures of D.W. Griffith’s Biographs. J.B. KAUFMAN is a film historian who has written extensively on topics including Disney animation and the films of Blanche Sweet. He is co-author, with Russell Merritt, of Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney (1992), as well as Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies: A Companion to the Classic Cartoon Series (2006). 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. MIKE MASHON is curator of the Moving Image Section in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division at the Library of Congress. 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 in the Film Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written with J.B. Kaufman an account of Walt Disney’s silent cartoons, Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney (1992), and Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies: A Companion to the Classic Cartoon Series (2006). He directed and produced “The Great Nickelodeon Show”, presented at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 2002. His most recent commentaries on Griffith can be read and heard on laser disks and DVDs produced by Film Preservation Associates for The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Way Down East, and the Biograph anthology D.W. Griffith Years of Discovery: 1909–1913. DAVID ROBINSON is the author of Chaplin. He is director of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. CYNTHIA ROWELL graduated in 1999 from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House. She currently works at New Yorker Films. SCOTT SIMMON is professor of English and co-director of Film Studies at the University of California, Davis. 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). For the National Film Preservation Foundation, he curated the DVD sets “Treasures from American Film Archives” (2000) and the forthcoming “The Silents: 50 More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894–1931”. Among his books are The Films of D.W. Griffith (1993) and, most recently, The Invention of the Western Film (2003). PAUL SPEHR has been an archival consultant and film historian since retiring from the Library of Congress where he was Assistant Chief, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. He is the author of The Movies Begin: Making Movies in New Jersey, 1887–1920 (1977) and American Film Personnel and Company Credits, 1908–1920 (1996), as well as of a number of articles on archival matters and early film history. He is working on a book about the career of William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. xii

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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). Her latest book is Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film After World War I (2005). YURI TSIVIAN is professor of Film at the University of Chicago. He earned a PhD in Film Studies from Institute of Theater, Music and Cinema, Leningrad, in 1984. Among his books are Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1908–1919 (1989), Istoricheskaja recepcija kino (1991), translated as Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception (1994), and, in collaboration with Yuri Lotman, Dialogues with the Screen (1994). His most recent book is Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (2004).

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NOTE ON LAYOUT

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

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577 THE NEW ART FILM COMPANY

BOOTS Filming date: ca. December 1918–January 1919 Location: Fine Arts studio, 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles Presented by: The New Art Film Company Distribution: Famous Players-Lasky Corp.; Paramount Pictures New York premiere: week of 9 March 1919, Rialto Theatre Release date: 16 February 1919 Release length: five reels Copyright date: 12 February 1919 (LP13399) Director: Elmer Clifton Scenario: M.M. Stearns Story: Martha Pittman (according to copyright records) and/or Stanner E.V. Taylor (according to letters in The D.W. Griffith Papers; the name of Stanner E.V. Taylor does not appear in the press book nor in the summary for the trade press) Camera: John Leezer Cast: Dorothy Gish (“Boots”); Richard Barthelmess (Everett White); Fontaine LaRue (Mme. De Valdee); Edward Peil (Nicholas Jerome); Kate V. Toncray (Lydia Hampstead); Raymond Cannon (The chauffeur) Archival sources: none known Upon the open pages of the paper-backed edition of “Her Sainted Love” fell two large and shiny tears. The erstwhile owner of the tears beheld them with dismayed surprise. The eyes widened, the chin quivered for a moment and then she threw “Her Sainted Love” against the opposite wall with a sudden whack. “Boots”, the owner of the tear-stained eyes, was done with the crying. Also, with paper-backed books that told of sainted lovers. To her trusting mind the thing had worked out differently. Her sainted lover had apparently turned out to be a devilish liar instead. She remembered how she came by her name – through shining the shoes of the boarders in the London tenement. She reflected on the landlady whose fish-wife tongue had curled around nothing but abusive adjectives in the four years of her service. She had stood it because, orphaned, she had no place to go. She recalled the moments stolen with some book or other in learning to read and write. And her war garden. She looked wonderingly at it now. It was growing, and the only reason it was, was because of HIM. She [sic] had come to the boarding house late at night, in fact, just after that woman boarder whom Boots hated with all the fire of her soul. She had blacked his boots and this woman’s, and there had been so many that she took all she could in her arms, then stepped into a pair of his and clattered through the hall to the rooms, in her blithe spirit of youth, reaching his door after a standing jump in his broad footgear. And he had opened the door in front of her. She smiled sadly as she remembered how she had run down the hallway. Then this woman: Mariana, she called herself, and [sic] had her room full of those horrible statues. She was always pounding on something, and she made Boots feed her pet mice, an operation that sent the cold chills up the little slavey’s back. Boots knew there was something wrong with this woman, for ever since the little romance between Boots and Everett White had begun to develop, Mariana had been stepping in the way.

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What she did not know was that Mariana was one of a Bolshevist council, that her business in this house was to locate an underground passage, and on a certain day when the world peace delegates would be in the building next door, place a bomb beneath the place and blow the peacemakers to atoms. White had taken no interest in this Mariana woman at first, but with Boots had nourished the war garden and told her ever so many things that she had needed to know. And that day they had gone punting; he had saved her from drowning, and she had called him her hero. But today had brought her little castle crashing down around her ears. She had found him – kissing Mariana. She did not know that White was really a Secret Service man, and that he was there primarily to block Mariana in her murderous attempt. And White could not tell Boots, whom he loved dearly, why he had been doing the things that were breaking her heart. It was the end for Boots, her faith was broken. Boots gazed at the war garden. It presented itself in an array of boxes filled with dirt and many growing plants. More dirt was needed. So, trudging down the stairs, pail and shovel in hand, she reached the back yard and began to dig. In her need for the physical expanse of her emotions, she sank the shovel deep and fast into the soft dirt. Suddenly the earth gave way, and in the mass of falling dirt, she landed ten feet or more below in an underground tunnel. Dazed for the moment, she sat up and stared, then listened. There were sounds of a struggle near her, a moan and then a ticking sound. Boots crept along the floor until she saw a faint light. There stood Mariana, bending over a black box which she was adjusting. On the ground near her lay White, bound and gagged. Boots crept stealthily behind the woman and leaped upon her, bringing her to the floor, and in the struggle succedeed in dazing the adventuress and tying her. She then tore the gag from White’s mouth, in time to hear him cry out to her to throw the bomb outside. Seizing the engine of death, Boots ran wildly through the tunnel until she saw light. An entrance had been cut through the room occupied by Mariana. Through this ran the little slavey and out to the rear of the house where she cast the bomb from her into the river below. A moment later came the crashing roar of the explosion. Boots fainted, and when she awoke, it was in the arms of the man she had thought was traitor to her. Synopsis from Paramount press book submitted for copyright at the Library of Congress, February 12, 1919, LP13399 [stamped with date February 17, 1919] There is “atmosphere” in abundance in the Paramount production “Boots”, if London fog can be so called, and it is highly effective, especially in the opening scenes. The carefully selected exteriors and admirably devised interiors of “Boots” constitute in themselves an artistic achievement. The story is reasonable enough for melodrama, though it pertains to a Bolshevist attempt to bomb the meeting place of President Wilson and King George, but after all, it is inimitable Dorothy who does the “carrying on”. Not only is she delightful as an exponent of ardent love, but a veritable tigress in an Amazonian hand-to-hand fight with the female villain when the latter is about to set off the bomb. Louis Reeves Harrison, The Moving Picture World, March 8, 1919, p. 1390

No print of this film is known to survive at the time of this writing. “Boots, Bombs and Bolsheviki are brought together for the benefit of Dorothy Gish”. This is the way that an anonymous New York Times’ writer opened his review of Boots (March 10, 1919), and it pretty well sums up the story. Gish had thwarted German spies in The Hun Within (1918) and now it was the Bolsheviks’ turn. In Boots she played a “slavey” working at a London inn where shining shoes was a major part of her job – hence her nickname and the title of the film. She became involved with the Bolsheviks by accident and coincidence. The Bolsheviks planned to plant a bomb in a tunnel running from the inn to the building 2

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where President Wilson, King George and other allies were meeting to discuss peace in Europe. Boots saved the day when she accidently dug too deeply in her war garden, fell into the tunnel and found her Secret Service Agent boy-friend (Richard Barthelmess) tied up while a Bolshevik woman (Fontaine LaRue) planted the bomb. Boots jumped the Bolshevik, saved her agent and dashed to the river with the bomb, tossing it in just before it exploded. Wilson, King George and the peace effort were saved and Boots got her Secret Service man. This was all lighthearted, innocent fun and it gave Dorothy Gish a chance to do her stuff. She seems to have come through in style. The New York Times said it gave Gish “a chance for some of her best comic pantomime since ‘Hearts of the World’”. Variety’s “Fred.” said she “just walks away with everything that there is to be had in the picture”. He was especially impressed with the way she used her feet and limbs for comic effect (March 14, 1919). A publicity blurb in the Paramount press book said that Gish based her portrayal on a servant called “Boatsie” she saw at an inn while in London filming Hearts of the World (1918). Gish said that she observed her carefully and “she made my heart ache because she was abused from morning until night by an old wretch of a landlady who seemed to think her chief form of amusement was to keep this little girl breaking her back over some kind of work”. Gish apparently discussed this with the scenarists while the picture was in preparation. Boots was the third release by Gish’s New Art Film Company and, like the previous films, it was directed by Elmer Clifton with John Leezer on camera. The scenario was credited to M.M. Stearns but the authorship of the story is uncertain. The company’s publicity at the time of release credited Martha Pittman, but correspondence in The D.W. Griffith Papers at the Museum of Modern Art seemingly credits Stanner E.V. Taylor with authorship (AFI Catalog of Feature Films 1911–1920, p. 89). The project was apparently delayed by the epidemic of flu that spread across the country in 1918 and 1919. Lillian and Dorothy contracted flu in late November 1918 and director Elmer Clifton came down with it shortly after that. Dorothy and Clifton returned to work at the end of December. Griffith’s involvement, if any, seems minimal. While Boots was in production, he had begun work on Broken Blossoms (1919); was in the midst of negotiations with First National for production of three films; and was in the process of uniting with some other artists to create an independent production and releasing organization. Paul Spehr

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578 UNITED ARTISTS; OR, CHARLES CHAPLIN STUDIO FOR UNITED ARTISTS

[SIGNING OF UNITED ARTISTS CONTRACT OF INCORPORATION] Filming date: 6 February 1919 (restaging the signing of the articles of association which had taken place on 5 February) Location: Fine Arts studio, Los Angeles, or Chaplin studio, Los Angeles (see essay below) Length: one reel (ca. 300–400 ft.) Release date: not released Copyright date: not copyrighted Directors: Marshall Neilan (interiors); Roland H. Totheroh? (exteriors) Camera: Jack Wilson On camera: Mary Pickford; D.W. Griffith; Charles Chaplin; Douglas Fairbanks; Marshall Neilan; Roland H. Totheroh; Dennis O’Brien; Oscar Price; Albert H.T. Banzhaf?; Tom Wilson? Archival sources: Association Chaplin/Roy Export (Paris), 35mm acetate negative (generation undetermined); ITN Archive (London), 35mm acetate negative (generation undetermined) NOTE: Footage from this film was included in a Hearst Metrotone newsreel under the title Movie Stars Meet to Sign Contracts. Preservation elements of this film are held by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. See also entry #579 in this volume.

The first to sign the United Artists agreement is Mary Pickford, followed by Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks. Two lawyers are in attendance; one blots the contract after each signature. Then they all shake hands. The cameraman fades prematurely and has to fade back in. A short scene following the signing shows everyone relaxing and joking. There are some amusing scenes outside the stage in which the four stand stiffly, for stills. Then they are photographed in close-up, Chaplin inclining his head coquettishly, and fluttering his eyes, the cameraman fading out just as Mary Pickford exchanges hats with Charlie – and he fades back again. Griffith remains his dignified self. In a long shot we see the studio buildings and the press. Chaplin and Fairbanks perform acrobatics, which go hilariously wrong, and they both fall over. Mary Pickford is in attendance. Griffith stands in the background and smiles at the antics, but then leaves. The sequence was followed by a scene at the railroad station in downtown Los Angeles with Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks being seen off by family and colleagues. No sign of Griffith here. [Synopsis by Kevin Brownlow]

This short news film was made to commemorate a pivotal event in motion picture history: the decisive move by the four top names in the American film industry to take control of their careers. As such it’s a fascinating document in its own right, capturing Griffith, Pickford, Chaplin, and Fairbanks at a moment of triumph. Griffith maintains his dignity, absenting himself from the exuberant clowning of the other three, but it’s clear that he, too, is relaxed, happy, and relishing the moment. We know from hindsight that career setbacks will come all too soon, but in this brief appearance we can see D.W. Griffith on top of the world, enjoying the success he has worked so hard to achieve. 4

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Along with the historical significance of the event, this short film has acquired an interest of its own through a mystery behind its production – a mystery that has attracted the attention of two of our foremost silent-film historians, Kevin Brownlow and David Robinson. In correspondence with each other and with Griffith Project editor Paolo Cherchi Usai, Brownlow and Robinson have compared their observations. They have agreed that, whereas the actual signing of the United Artists agreement took place on 5 February 1919, this film was shot the following day to reenact and commemorate the event for newsreel cameras (and, clearly, many cameras were present; numerous takes of the same action, taken from slightly different angles, survive in various archives). Brownlow points out that the first part was photographed, not in a real office, but in a studio set: “The scene of the signing was lit as for a feature ... you can see in the ‘office’ that the lighting is very high – you can’t get lights like that in a regular room because of the ceiling” (Kevin Brownlow to the Editor, October 3, 2003). But in which studio was the film shot? The two candidates are the Griffith (Fine Arts) studio and the Chaplin studio. Brownlow notes that the film itself makes a case for the Griffith studio. He points to a small sign on the exterior of one building: “Positively no admittance except to employees of D.W. Griffith Co.”, and to other physical details of the setting: “The buildings do not resemble those on the Chaplin lot and look a lot scruffier, having been up for a few years longer, since [the days of] the old Kinemacolor Company. You will notice that at [the studio’s] centre is a large wooden stage, the equivalent of two or three storeys. There was no similar structure on the Chaplin lot that I am aware of – they were all single-storey buildings. You can see this big stage in the background when Chaplin is being hoisted aloft by Fairbanks and the camera tilts up” (Kevin Brownlow to the Editor, December 13, 2003). On the other hand, Robinson – a Chaplin specialist and author of the definitive Chaplin biography – finds evidence that the film was shot at the Chaplin studio instead. He points out that the Chaplin studio’s daily report for 6 February reads “400 ft of film used for special scenes of Artists’ Combine”; that Chaplin’s chief cameraman, Rollie Totheroh, appears before the camera “directing” the horseplay between Chaplin and Fairbanks; that the daily report makes no mention of the trip to the Fine Arts studio (“Normally the studio reports were very specific if any shooting was done on location or outside the studio” – David Robinson to the Editor, December 10, 2003); and that Tom Wilson, who can be glimpsed briefly in one shot, is recorded in the Chaplin studio log as having worked that day. In addition, Chaplin appears in street clothes for the “signing”, but is then seen outside in his Tramp costume and makeup – a change that would have been facilitated by access to his own dressing room. The answer seems to be that parts of this film were shot at both studios. Brownlow suggests a possible scenario: “Could it be that, having filmed the first scene at the Chaplin studio, everyone piled into their touring cars and drove the three miles to the Fine Arts studio, where all the press had gathered? I can imagine that Chaplin flinched from having all those cameras peering into his property” (Kevin Brownlow to Catherine Surowiec, January 26, 2006). This may well have been the case, but there remains the question of why the stars and their entourage indulged in this roundabout exercise – and, indeed, whether all of this film really was shot on the same day. (Inconclusive evidence suggests that the “Big Four” may have gathered on another later occasion for a filming or photo session.) We may never resolve the exact logistics of the making of this little film. As Griffith and his fellow United Artists declare their independence, impishly thumbing their noses at Adolph Zukor and the other studio heads, they may also be mocking the attempts of future historians to understand just when and where the filming took place. J.B. Kaufman

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579 GAUMONT GRAPHIC

THE BIG FOUR – MARY PICKFORD, DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, CHARLIE CHAPLIN AND W.S. HART Country of production: United Kingdom Series: Gaumont Graphic Newsreel, Issue 835 Filming date: 6 February 1919 Location: Fine Arts studio, Los Angeles, or Chaplin studio, Los Angeles (see entry #578) Length: one reel (55 ft.) Release date: 20 March 1919 Copyright date: not copyrighted Director: not known Camera: not known On camera: Mary Pickford; D.W. Griffith; Charles Chaplin; Douglas Fairbanks; Marshall Neilan?; Roland Totheroh; Dennis O’Brien?; Oscar Price?; Albert H.T. Banzhaf?; Tom Wilson? NOTE: The presence of William S. Hart in the film as indicated by the title is spurious. Archival sources: ITN Archive [London] (Reuters Collection), 35mm acetate positive

I have now examined the ITN Archive tape. Alas, it was transferred in the earliest days of tape and a very slapdash job was done – unlike the rest of the stuff on the tape, it is of usable quality, but it has been severely cropped. It comes from Gaumont, and, Paolo, you ought to find out if Gaumont in Paris has retained the nitrate, because whoever owned this when it was transferred junked theirs in 1965. This tape was made from a F[ine] G[rain] pos[itive]. There is another notice which could be read if we had access to first-class quality. This was shot at the same event, but is subsidiary to what we already have. The scenes appear on video roll 165 (Reel IV Neg). It begins with a soot-and-whitewash transfer, but at least they wound it back and had another go, with passable results. Alas, the quality is not good enough to recognise anyone other than the main participants. W.S. Hart is mis-identified (Gaumont must have thought DWG, with his hawk nose, was W.S. Hart, presumably because he was originally announced as one of the Big Four). Title: THE BIG FOUR! so cropped that all I can read is “[Mar]y Pickford Douglas Fairbanks [Charl]ie Chaplin W.S. Hart [sig]n up Contract with D W GRIFFITHS [sic] […] productions in which they will […]”. We see part of the signing in the office, very brief. Then a side angle of the Big Four, with DWG and CC raising their hats to the press offscreen. Title: THE LENS ARTISTS WERE ON THE JOB. High angle of crowd of press etc watching the filming of the close-ups of the Big Four. Does not resemble the Chaplin studio. Tall windows. Fence (on to street?), small palm tree. As camera pans l[eft to] r[ight] we see still cameras and three motion picture cameras filming close-ups. One is operating from the side. Since the cameramen are seen from the back, and are wearing hats, it is not possible to identify them. But I could spot Totheroh, from his smooth fair hair, and oddly enough he is standing beside the cameras, but is not operating any. Perhaps he has shot whatever he needed. There is a character dressed like Mickey Neilan who is apparently directing the Big Four, and he moves out of camera range and stands at the side. There is a camera flash and when the shot continues he has disappeared. That’s all we get. 35 secs. Kevin Brownlow to David Robinson and the Editor, December 22, 2003 6

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This fragment can be considered a supplement to the other United Artists newsreels, documented in the previous note. Most of the surviving American newsreels of the event feature near-identical views of the same action, distinguished only by minute variations in camera angle. This European entry offers a new high-angle perspective on the occasion (but still fails to resolve the mystery of the filming location). Otherwise, the most striking feature of this newsreel is its misidentification of Griffith as William S. Hart! Early announcements of the United Artists combine had tentatively included Hart among the principals, and the Gaumont title writer, seeing a tall, slender figure among the “Big Four”, apparently assumed that that figure was Hart. J.B. Kaufman

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580 D.W. GRIFFITH

THE GIRL WHO STAYED AT HOME Series: Griffith’s Short Story Series Filming date: September 1918–February 1919 Location: Washington, D.C. and California Producer: D.W. Griffith Distribution: Paramount-Artcraft Pictures New York premiere: 23 March 1919, Strand Theatre Release date: 23 March 1919 Release length: seven reels, 6,672 feet Copyright date: 10 March 1919 (LP13496) Director: D.W. Griffith Scenario: Stanner E.V. Taylor Camera: G.W. Bitzer Additional photography: Hendrik Sartov? Cast: Adolphe Lestina (Monsieur [Le] France); Carol Dempster (Mlle. Atoline France [Mademoiselle Blossom]); Frances Parks (The Chum); Richard Barthelmess (Ralph Grey); Syn De Conde (Count de Brissac); Robert Harron (James Grey); George Fawcett (Mr. Edward Grey [The elder Grey]); Kate Bruce (Jim’s mother, Mrs. Edward Grey); Edward Peil (Herr Turnverein [The Turnverein Terror]); Clarine Seymour (Cutie Beautiful); Tully Marshall (Cutie’s old friend/A man about town); David Butler (Johann August Kant); D.C. Provost Marshal General E.H. Crowder, General Peyton Conway March, Secretary of War Newton Baker (Themselves) Archival sources: National Film and Television Archive (London), two 35mm nitrate positives (one had ca. 370 ft. discarded due to deterioration) Two American brothers display different spirits, one volunteering, the other evading service. They are reunited on the field through the slacker’s enforced regeneration. The volunteer loves a young lady whose grandfather was an irreconcilable secessionist, who at last salutes the American flag when American soldiers save his life. The slacker brother has a girl who stays at home, a show girl exposed to much temptation, but true to her soldier lover. The volunteer wins his bride and the two brothers return home, the pride of their friends. The slacker, no longer one, weds the plucky little girl who waited for him loyally and joyfully. Louis Reeves Harrison, The Moving Picture World, April 5, 1919, p. 121 From Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, March 10, 1919, LP13496

An unregenerate Southern gentleman has fled to his father’s home in France rather than submit to the Yankees, and now lives there with his young daughter. Her old school friend from America pays a visit accompanied by her family, including her two brothers. The eldest falls in love with the daughter but she already has an accepted suitor in France. War breaks out: her French fiancé and her American lover both join up to fight. The younger Grey brother is a sissy and a coward, who is transformed into a fighting man when he is drafted and trained by the army. The French fiancé is wounded fatally, leaving the daughter free for her American lover. The German forces arrive in France. The chateau’s occupants are threatened and 8

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a wounded German soldier defends the daughter’s virtue. The American troops arrive to rescue them, and the old Confederate is converted to loyalty to America. The Grey brothers win medals for bravery and win the girls they love.

The Girl Who Stayed at Home was a war propaganda film, the last of Griffith’s war films and an attempt to popularize the selective draft amendment. Full government cooperation was extended: sequences or scenes were shot in the House of Representatives, at a local California draft board, and in the training camps. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, Provost Marshal Enoch H. Crowder, and other officials posed for the camera. Production began in the fall of 1918, when Griffith went to Washington, D.C., to film the House of Representatives in session for a proposed government propaganda film, but is unlikely to have been continuous through the winter: the production of Broken Blossoms (1919) intervened. The production records describe The Girl Who Stayed at Home as the “official government war picture”, but the film as it exists today does not credit government help. Nevertheless, a special showing was arranged for congressmen in March of 1919, a few days before the New York premiere. Long before film production really got underway, the armistice had been declared. Griffith’s propaganda efforts, as with Hearts of the World (1918), were once more overtaken by events. He had also produced a one-reel film for the Liberty Loan Appeal in September 1918 featuring Lillian Gish, Carol Dempster and Kate Bruce (see #569 in volume 9 of The Griffith Project). The atrocities, the horrors, and the hatred in Hearts of the World are toned down considerably for The Girl Who Stayed at Home, a more lighthearted film, despite its violence. This time, a “good German” named Johann August Kant is included. He is already sympathetic from his first appearance, when he leaves his dear old mother at home to go to battle. In the cultural terms of the silent film, no young man who loves his old mother could be all bad. When Johann ends up at the chateau, seriously wounded, Mlle. France takes care of him. When the German captain threatens Mlle. France with rape, Johann rouses himself from his deathbed to enjoin him with “FIGHT MEN – NOT WOMEN”, and then shoots the captain when his admonition is ignored. The portrayal of a sympathetic German looks forward to reconciliation and peace, though Griffith received some criticism for him from an embittered post-war public. Further reconciliation is represented by the stubborn Confederate, the American Monsieur France, who has set up residence in his father’s chateau in France, unable to accept the defeat of the South in the War Between the States. He insists on flying the Confederate flag and calls himself a citizen of the Confederate States. Then, moved by the arrival of the heroic American troops to rescue them from the Germans, he capitulates, and raises the flag of the United States. Thus the World War reconciles the divisions of the Civil War. Three other characters are transformed by the war. The father of the American family is a pacifist. He attempts to get his younger son deferred after the older one enlists without his consent. He tells the draft board that his son is essential to the war effort, working in a shipyard, although we can see that the boy is only aimlessly shuffling time cards. The son is drafted anyway, and by the end of the film, the old man is proud and boastful of his two hero sons: “I TOLD YOU WE COME OF FIGHTING STOCK”. The younger son, a college-educated LOUNGE LIZARD known as THE OILY PERIL with a KILLING STANCE and a lighthearted attitude toward the female sex, becomes a real man, standing straight and tall, disciplined, and in love with the girl he was flirting with before the transformation effected by army training. The training is exemplified by young men doing calisthenics at an army camp. Young Bobby Harron is utterly charming, if not really believable, in his role as the lounge lizard, round-shouldered, limp-wristed, looking as though he had a permanent cramp in his stomach. The irony is that Griffith’s intervention saved Bobby Harron from the draft – for the purpose of making official war pictures. 9

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The third character to be transformed is his girlfriend, Cutie Beautiful, played by Clarine Seymour, who thinks of nothing but dancing and flirting until she falls for the new manly Bobby Harron, back from training camp. She turns into a faithful woman waiting at home, a nurturer, knitting for the boys overseas. Harron and Seymour provide the comedy scenes, and, in fact, they dominate the film, even though Carol Dempster and Richard Barthelmess are the apparent leads, given their early introduction. The main title awards the chief significance to Seymour’s character, who stayed at home. Mlle. France was Carol Dempster’s first lead role for Griffith. She and Barthelmess are stereotypical and bland lovers, with no big love scenes: they are apart during most of the film’s events. Both Clarine Seymour and Carol Dempster were professional dancers who studied with Ruth St. Denis and briefly toured with the company. They performed in a live prologue, together with Rodolfo Di Valantina (Rudolph Valentino), for the showing of Griffith’s The Greatest Thing in Life in December 1918 at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles. Undoubtedly Griffith played the two young women against each other as rivals for his attention, as he did with his actresses in Biograph days. Seymour is shown here with jazzy feet that won’t keep still even after she has reformed. Dempster, however, has a solo dance sequence, an artistic dance in the moonlight, to entertain her guests at the chateau, and to enchant the older Grey boy. Tragedy for the promising young actors in The Girl Who Stayed at Home came in the next year. Clarine Seymour died in the spring of 1920 following an emergency operation, and Bobby Harron died in the summer of the same year from a self-inflicted gunshot wound (strangely, in the Hotel Seymour in New York, although there is no hint of a Harron-Seymour real-life romance), on the eve of the premiere of Way Down East. The battlefield sequences probably incorporated some of the Captain Kleinschmidt footage that Griffith purchased for use in Hearts of the World, but most of it is obviously shot for the film, in California. Trenches may be dug into dirt and mud almost anywhere. Food and water are dropped to the trenches from airplanes – such scenes could logically come from the stock footage, or may have been made in California. Two typical Griffith sentimental touches: the older Grey son plays with a fluffy kitten in the trenches and the French fiancé dies as rose petals fall, accompanied by an intertitle: THE FLOWER OF FRANCE. However, the atmosphere of chaos that overtakes the chateau, the flight of the Americans who live there, and the lines of refugees, convince. While Griffith filmed little or nothing on his trip to the battlefields of Europe in the spring of 1917, he observed and he remembered. Frequent flashbacks are part of the structure of The Girl Who Stayed at Home. They do not add events to the narrative nor tell us anything we don’t already know, unlike the flashbacks in The House of Darkness (1913), for example. In The Girl Who Stayed at Home, they are very brief “flashes” to scenes that have already played out. They are chiefly mental images, memories, and reminders. They tell us what the characters are thinking and remembering, and remind us of their motives for action. In the structure of this film, the flashbacks are repetitive and almost mechanical. None are prolonged, they are mere “flashes”, in the terminology of the time. The New York Times critic took note of the use of partial focus for emphasis on objects and faces and allowing the rest of the image to be out of focus, as well as the soft-focus close-ups: .... in some way which has not yet become general, he [Griffith] dramatically emphasizes the central figures of a scene by throwing all its other objects so out of focus that they remain to provide a suitable background and environment for the action without competing with it for the interest of the spectators. This is an artistic development of the close-up. In certain scenes it has all of the psychological effects of the close-up…. It makes the action more eloquent by keeping it in its environment, it preserves the continuity of the story, and it adds smoothness and beauty

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to the picture as a whole. And when Griffith does make a close-up, it is a soft, delicately shaded portrait. (The New York Times, March 24, 1919, p. 11)

I think that the critic, in talking about keeping the action in its environment, may be referencing earlier uses of the close-up in which a blank background would be used. The use of differing focus relates an inserted shot to the larger scene, reducing abrupt contrasts and helping to make the editing less visible. Hendrik Sartov was not credited on the film, but as he worked on special effects for Broken Blossoms that winter, he may have been involved here as well, at least for such close-ups. Sartov, a still photographer, had taken some soft-focus photographs of Lillian that impressed her and Griffith. Sartov was hired, without having had any film experience, and Bitzer was obliged to take him under his wing, resentfully, according to his assistant’s memoirs. Karl Brown, the sharp-eyed lad who was Bitzer’s assistant, discovered that Sartov’s secret for soft-focus portraits was an old yellowed lens with aberrations that he stopped down until the defects almost disappeared and the image was beautifully soft (see Karl Brown, Adventures with D.W. Griffith, p. 206). While the completion of the production may have been perfunctory, now that the war was over, The Girl Who Stayed at Home does not show it. It has a lot of charm, captivating characters, a clever script, and some absorbing episodes of documented reality of its times. Eileen Bowser

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581 THE NEW ART FILM COMPANY

PEPPY POLLY Filming date: Winter 1918–1919 Location: Fine Arts studio, 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles Presented by: The New Art Film Company Distribution: Famous Players-Lasky Corp.; Paramount Pictures New York premiere: week prior to 6 April 1919, Rialto Theatre Release date: 30 March 1919 Release length: five reels, 4,719 feet (“running time, fifty-five minutes”, according to advertisement in Exhibitor’s Trade Review, April 19, 1919, p. 1529) Copyright date: 27 March 1919 (LP13552) Supervision: D.W. Griffith Director: Elmer Clifton Scenario: M.M. Stearns (crossed out in copyright record but credited in Exhibitor’s Trade Review, April 19, 1919, p. 1529) Story: Frank E. Garbutt (crossed out in copyright record but credited in Exhibitor’s Trade Review, April 19, 1919, p. 1529) and/or Marjorie Raynale (hand-written in copyright record) Camera: John Leezer Technical director: Leigh R. Smith Cast: Dorothy Gish (Peppy Polly); Richard Barthelmess (Dr. James Merritt); Edward Peil (Judge Monroe); Emily Chichester (Sarah Keene); Kate V. Toncray (Mrs. Kingsley Benedict); Josephine Crowell (Mrs. Crafton) Archival sources: none known Peppy Polly, a poor but deserving girl, pretty and ambitious, is anxious to improve her social and economic condition. Through the aid of Judge Monroe, a prominent jurist, she obtains a position as secretary and social leader. One of her girl friends, on the verge of starvation, is arrested for misconduct and sent to Melville Reformatory, greatly to the annoyance of Polly who resolves to obtain her pardon if that be possible. Judge Monroe receives information from some reformers that the Reformatory is a hot bed of vice and graft, but none is able to get the goods on the matron of the institution. While visiting her friend one day, Polly obtains ocular proof of cruelty against the inmates, her friend showing her bruised body, due to excessive beatings. Polly tells Judge Monroe of her experience and she arranged with him to be committed to the Reformatory and to make a secret investigation. In accordance with this plan, Polly breaks the show window of a jewelry story [sic] and is promptly arrested and haled [sic]before another Judge who as promptly sends her to the Reformatory for a period of three years. Polly is delighted and h[e]r apparent joy is regarded as a manifestation of her depravity. When she is enrolled as an inmate of the institution, she at once begins her inquiry and as the days passed, made the discovery that the conditions therein were unusually shocking. Dr. James Merritt, the superintending physician, discovers evidences of depravity and laxity on the part of the matron and when he denounces her, she revengefully plans to place him in a compromising situation and have him dismissed by the governing board. To that end, Polly is appointed to be his private secretary, and while the physician and his pretty secretary proceed to

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fall in love with each other, they are closely watched by the matron and her minions, who peer at them through the keyhole. After obtaining what she deemed sufficient evidence to secure Dr. Merritt’s dismissal, the matron notifies the governor who sends an agent to the Reformatory to gather the facts. Polly makes her unusual report to Judge Monroe, but in this crisis, her report is intercepted by the matron and this is followed by the news of Judge Monroe’s sudden death. Things look bad for Polly, and just as Dr. Merritt asks her to be his wife, the governor’s agent and the matron burst in upon them and Dr. Merritt is under arrest. Polly appeals to the agent, who, after hearing her story, takes her to the house of Judge Monroe where her story is fully corroborated by the late jurist’s secretary. Through the assistance of the governor’s agent, Polly and Dr. Merritt are pardoned. They are married and after their honeymoon, both are surprised to receive from the governor the request that they take charge of the Reformatory which position they accept, greatly to the advantage of [the] inmates, but discomfiture of the matron and her satellites. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, March 27, 1919, LP13552 [stamped with date April 2, 1919] The average lady reformer is not a creature calculated to appeal favorably to the average citizen, but as presented by Dorothy Gish in her heroine role of Peppy Polly she shines with an entirely new radiance, figuring as a pretty heart-breaker, determined investigator and vivaciously amusing damsel combined. It is a part peculiarly well suited to the versatile star, endowed with a rare mingling of pathos and humor, winning and holding the spectators’ sympathy by sheer force of personality. The “only and original Gish” charm is never absent, that unusual Thespian gift of being mirthful and wistful at the same time, which nature has bestowed upon the laughing Dorothy. There is a happy mixture of grave and gay situations which strikes just the proper balance and saves the play from swaying to extremes in either direction. Nothing would have been easier than to overdo the melodramatic appeal in the case of Polly’s reformatory adventures, for instance. The temptation to “lay the agony on thick” in depicting the heroine’s sufferings, or accentuating the brutality of the matron and her aids would be too strong for most directors to resist. But Elmer Clifton knows when to call a halt on emotional stress and his good judgement is ever apparent in the artistic handling of all such scenes. Miss Gish is supported by a strong and capable cast. Richard Barthelemess [sic], the lover physician, is an exceedingly acceptable and alluring swain, Josephine Crowell gives a capital impersonation of the venomously revengeful matron, and Emily Chichester is engagingly pitiful as the erring girl chum, during the short period she is on view. It is worthy of note that the reformatory and its inmates seem vividly true to type and convey an impression of realism which adds immeasurably to the picture’s strength. There is an abundance of beautiful photography in evidence, with well filmed interiors and exteriors, clever long shots and fine close-ups. This feature ranks high as a program attraction, offering sparkling comedy, romance, love interest in generous quantities and should be welcomed by all exhibitors. George T. Pardy, Exhibitor’s Trade Review, April 19, 1919, p. 1529

No copy of this film is known to exist at the time of this writing. The title Peppy Polly was chosen because it suited the film’s leading lady, Dorothy Gish. Its aptness was not lost on the reviewers. Variety’s unidentified commentator opened his review with the observation that “‘Pep’ and Dorothy Gish are synonymous”. While the title suited Dorothy, it hardly fit the film’s solemn subject: corruption and the mistreatment of 13

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women in prisons. Instead of the titillating exploitation approach modern audiences are used to, this was a lighthearted comedy with a touch of melodrama. It was an odd approach, but apparently it worked. The picture combined realistic sets with outlandish situations. The heroine’s attempts to get arrested, including breaking the window of a jewelry store, was one of the films’ comedy highlights. The improbability of the plot was not lost on the reviewers, but they gave high marks to director Elmer Clifton for balancing the story elements and blending light comedy and melodrama: “the plot of ‘Peppy Polly’ is not exactly possible, but Miss Gish and the others in the cast, aided by Elmer Clifton, director, make it seem possible and highly entertaining while it lasts” (The New York Times, April 7, 1919). The production information provided by New Art gave conflicting credits for authorship of the film. On the typewritten description filed with the copyright registration, the names of Frank E. Garbutt (story by) and M.M. Stearns (scenario) were crossed out and Marjorie Raynale was written in as “author of story”, but Stearns and Garbutt were listed with the credits in Exhibitor’s Trade Review (April 19, 1919, p. 1529). Beyond supervising the production company, D.W. Griffith seems to have had little to do with this production. Paul Spehr

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582 THE NEW ART FILM COMPANY

I’LL GET HIM YET Filming date: Winter 1918–1919 Location: Fine Arts studio, 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles Presented by: The New Art Film Company Distribution: Famous Players-Lasky Corp.; Paramount Pictures New York premiere: week of 18 May 1919, Rivoli Theatre Release date: 25 May 1919 Release length: five reels, 4,555 feet (“running time, fifty-five minutes”, according to Exhibitor’s Trade Review, May 31, 1919, p. 2021) Copyright date: 6 May 1919 (LP13702) Supervision: D.W. Griffith Director: Elmer Clifton Story: Harry Carr Camera: John Leezer, Lee Garmes Assistant director: Leigh R. Smith Technical director: Leigh R. Scott Cast: Dorothy Gish (Susy Faraday Jones, alias Skinflint Jones); George Fawcett (Bradford Warrington Jones, her father); Richard Barthelmess (Scoop McCreedy [McCready], a newspaper man); Ralph Graves (Harold Packard, a rich young dilettante); Edward Peil (Robert E. Hamilton, Susy’s legal adviser); Porter Strong (William R. Craig, Superintendent of Susy’s Railroad) NOTE: According to a 1921 source (AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 1911–1920, p. 441), actor and director Wilbur Higby worked on the film in some capacity. Archival sources: none known Susy Faraday Jones’s father, B.W., has put the Standard Railroads Corporation in her name, that he may dodge, to some extent, the heavy income tax of your Uncle Samuel. Whereupon Susy insists on really running the railroad, having the legal right to do so. Among the orders that S.F. Jones, as she signs herself, puts through, is one forbidding through trains to stop at Rivera. This riles Rivera, but doesn’t bother S.F. a bit. Thinking S.F. Jones to be a man, the populace dubs “him” Skinflint Jones. A young Mr. Packard is smitten with Susy, but he is not alone. She is also loved by Scoop McCreedy, a reporter on Packard’s paper, and she falls for him, too. Scoop goes to ask Dad’s permission, but Dad throws him out. Scoop’s body and pride are hurt, and he tells Susy that he is through with rich girls forever. But Susy is in love, and she fairly drags her young lover off to the alt[a]r with her. She promises never to touch a cent of her father’[s] money to appease Scoop, but forgets to mention she has a few million of her own. They go to live in a honeymoon cottage, which happens to be in Rivera, where the cars won’t stop. Susy could fix this, but she is afraid to reveal that she is “Skinflint” Jones. And then Packard, being jealous, fires Scoop. Whereupon Scoop, financed by the Rivera Board of Trade, starts a rival paper roasting the wicked railroad which doesn’t even hesitate at Rivera. A committee is formed to go and see S.F.

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Jones and demand the stopping rights for Rivera. And Susy is asked to be on the committee. She can’t refus[e], and makes a speech to her own superintendent demanding that he let the cars stop at Rivera. Packard knows her real position and is about to speak when she drags him off. Scoop doesn’t understand and is jealous. The next day Packard calls on her and she hides him in a closet; her lawyer comes on business, and she hides him in another closet; the superintendent calls to find out which of her orders about Rivera she meant and she hides him just as Scoop enters. Scoop leaves but comes back unexpectedly to see them emerging from their hiding places and threatens to murder them all. Then Susy confesses about the railroad, and Scoop, forgives her for that and for having five or ten million, and Rivera gets its station and everything ends happily. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, May 6, 1919, LP13702 [stamped with date May 13, 1919] Here is a comedy which travels at top-notch speed throughout its entire five reels, bubbles over with clean fun, contains a number of utterly unexpected situations and holds its interest from start to finish. There isn’t a dull moment in it, and judging by the enthusiastic reception given it by audiences at the Rivoli Theatre, New York, there is every reason to believe that the feature will prove a big box office asset wherever shown. The name of Dorothy Gish is always a strong program lure and the many admirers of that gifted comedienne are sure to delight in the entertainment offered by this, her latest screen offering. The fascinating Gish mannerisms are ever to the fore, she acts with a sparkle and force which are simply irresistible, and the wonder is not that she finally captures the man of her choice, but that even jealousy could have embittered him toward her momentarily. There are many farcical incidents developed during the progress of the plot, but such a hurricane of mirth blows merrily at all times that nobody will feel disposed to argue over the story’s improbabilities. It ranks as bully good amusement, calculated to drive away the blues, make the spectators happy and what more could be desired by those in search of relaxation? How Dorothy would make out as head of a real railroad is another question, but it goes without saying that if some executives possessed her joyous disposition and powers of attraction our steel highways would inevitably be swamped by legions of job-seekers. The supporting cast is excellent. Richard Barthelmess registers as an exceedingly handsome young reporter. As Scoop McCready he scores a decided hit, working with an energy and attention to artistic detail which deserves unqualified praise. George Fawcett gives a fine impersonation of Susy’s father, the perplexed and occasionally justly vexed millionaire, while Ralph Graves shines brilliantly as Harold Packard, the wealthy but disappointed suitor. A mirthful character sketch is supplied by Edward Peil, in his impersonation of the fleshy attorney, Hamilton, and Porter Strong is seen to good advantage as superintendent Craig. The picture abounds in fine photography. Timely and clean-cut closeups of the star are shown, with handsome interiors and several skillful long shots. Elmer Clifton has done an admirable job of direction and “I’ll Get Him Yet” can safely be listed as a program attraction of unusual merit. George T. Pardy, Exhibitor’s Trade Review, May 31, 1919, p. 2021

No copy of this title is known to survive at the time of this writing. While many of Dorothy Gish’s comedies were a blend of serious subject matter and comic situations, I’ll Get Him Yet was produced as a farce. The comedy was apparently fast-paced, with cleverly scripted titles (per Variety’s “Fred.”, May 23, 1919) and Gish was given ample opportunity to display her comic skills, which included mimicking Chaplin’s walk. By this time Dorothy was well established as a comedy star and her films were doing very well at the 16

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box office. Exhibitor’s Trade Review reported that Battling Jane, The Hope Chest and Boots were all well received and doing good business (April 26, 1919). I’ll Get Him Yet continued the favorable response. It was the comedy highlight of the evening at its New York premiere, even though Harold Lloyd’s Back to the Woods (George Irving, 1919) was also on the bill at the Rivoli. The trade critics were impressed, as confirmed by George T. Pardy’s review reproduced above and by Variety: “a blimp of a comedy that will blow out to sea and carry all your troubles with it” (“Fred.”, op. cit.). As with other New Art productions, Griffith was the nominal supervisor, and there is no evidence that he was directly involved in the production. He was working on True Heart Susie during the production of this picture. But Dorothy’s comedies were important to him. They were successful, and the income from them helped support his other, sometimes less profitable productions. Paul Spehr

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583 D.W. GRIFFITH

TRUE HEART SUSIE Series: Griffith’s Short Story Series Filming date: March? 1919 Location: Fine Arts studio, 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles Presented by: D.W. Griffith Distribution: Paramount-Artcraft Pictures New York premiere: 1 June 1919, Strand Theatre Release date: 1 June 1919 Release length: six reels, 6,213 feet Copyright date: 4 June 1919 (LP13810) Director: D.W. Griffith Story: Marian [Marion?] Fremont Camera: G.W. Bitzer Film editor: James Smith Cast: Lillian Gish (Susie May Trueheart); Loyola O’Connor (Her aunt); Robert Harron (William Jenkins); Walter Higby [Wilbur Higby?] (His father); Clarine Seymour (Bettina [Betty] Hopkins); Kate Bruce (Her aunt); Raymond Cannon (Sporty Malone); Carol Dempster (Bettina’s chum); George Fawcett (The “Four-flusher”) Archival sources: Arhiva Nationala de Filme (Bucuresti), 35mm acetate positive (generation undetermined); Cineteca del Friuli, 16mm (generation undetermined) (Griggs Moviedrome Collection); George Eastman House, 16mm acetate positive (Essex Films reissue, William K. Everson Collection/New York University); National Film and Television Archive (London), 35mm nitrate positive (according to Kevin Brownlow [correspondence with the Editor, June 15, 1997] this is the source of all other existing archival elements); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) “True-Heart Susie” lives with her aunt and loves stupid William Jenkins. Her love is so deep that she sacrifices the family cow, a pet of her’s [sic], and much more of the farm product, that he may go to college, but the benefaction is a secret one, and he finishes his theological studies without a suspicion that she has aided him. He has impressed her that she must dress plainly as possible, and she is so attired when she goes with him for a “sody” [sic] on his triumphant return from college, but his eyes wander to the girls giving more attractive expression of themselves and he is married to one of them when he becomes a full-fledged minister, very cruelly consulting the girl who adores him, about the policy of taking a wife. William weds gay Betty Hopkins and expects her to adapt herself to his colorless life, almost breaking the heart of Susie. The younger wife fails to satisfy her husband with her cooking, and he finds the dishes that Susie makes are much more to his taste. He begins to regret his marriage, so does his pleasure-loving wife, when she manages to escape the monotony of his household one night and attends a little dance at a neighboring house. She loses her key and gets caught in the rain on the way home. In fright she appeals to True-Heart Susie, who shields Betty from the consequences, so far as the minister is concerned, but Betty’s fright and her soaking bring on fatal sickness. Not until her death does the minister learn of her escapade. He swears never to marry again, but he finds that True-Heart Susie gave him the one opportunity of his life, so he returns to her with an offering of his hand in marriage. Louis Reeves Harrison, The Moving Picture World, June 14, 1919, p. 1679

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Susie and William are childhood sweethearts in a small town. One day an important seeming man from the city, waiting for his automobile to be repaired, sees young William on the street. The man says he can tell William is destined for great achievements and takes his name. William wants to go to college, but his father cannot afford it. Susie decides she should finance William’s education by selling her farm livestock. She sends him the money anonymously and William believes it comes from the man from the city. William returns from college with a bit of sophistication and becomes the local minister. Susie is sure he will ask her to marry him soon. However, he becomes attracted to Bettina, a milliner visiting from Chicago. Bettina loves fun and parties, but decides a husband supporting her would be an easier way of life. Although she continues flirtations with her friends, Bettina accepts William’s proposal, to Susie’s great shock and eventual despair. Bettina does not supply William with the sort of home-life he imagines, and he often recalls Susie’s devotion. One night Bettina sneaks out to a party, is drenched by rain coming home and finds she has lost the key to her front door. She goes to Susie’s nearby home and asks her to give her a bed for the night and to lie for her to William, claiming she had spent the night with her. Susie agrees. Bettina, however, grows ill from her drenching and eventually dies. William feels devoted to her (false) memory and Susie will not disillusion him. However, eventually Susie’s aunt tells William of Susie’s sponsoring of his education and a friend of Bettina’s reveals her previous deceit of William. William realizes his lack of insight and finally asks Susie to marry him.

There are those of us who consider True Heart Susie to be Griffith’s masterpiece. A claim like this demonstrates perhaps the only reason for using terms like “masterpiece” in this era so suspicious of canons, and even of critical evaluations. Such a claim must be polemical, an incitement to discussion and argument, rather than reinforcing the received judgment of generations. But more importantly, in its superlative claim to value, it indicates that such a discussion must involve an emotional investment (read: passion) on the part of the critic, as much as analytical demonstration. To be devoted to a film like True Heart Susie has nothing to do with the institutional and long-term support of cultural apparatuses that render literary canons suspect. But it does involve narrative structure and point of view, as well as the fine details of performance, framing and even the use of intertitles that makes a seemingly modest film such as this appear nearly incandescent in its confessional and emotional power. Sergei Eisenstein analyzed D.W. Griffith as a divided artist, accenting a split between the modern, urban, fast-paced Griffith, and the traditional, rural, and pastoral Griffith. True Heart Susie certainly belongs in the latter group, but like all of Griffith’s pastoral features, the barrier between a traditional and a modern world – and especially an urban and a rural world – has been breached, and this contamination supplies part of the drama and tension of the film. As in Way Down East, A Romance of Happy Valley or even The White Rose, movement from the city to the country and back carries tragic consequences for characters, as the two worlds come into conflict in such a way that our heroes no longer feel sure of the model of behavior they should follow. Interestingly in all these films, characters (and the drama) must return to the country (the time characters spend in city in most of the films remains rather brief in terms of screen time – although enormous in their consequences). But we might better characterize Griffith’s stylistics through a contrast not simply between urban and rural, but between the epic and the intimate (John Belton, in his insightful essay “True Heart Susie” [1983], describes this split as between the epic and the lyrical; William

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Rothman, in his fine essay “True Heart Griffith” [1988], makes a distinction between epic and “intimate drama”). In my discussion of Intolerance (1916; see DWG Project, #543, volume 9 of this series, pp. 46–52), I related these two modes of Griffith’s narratives to the visual contrast between long shot and close-up. Although this poses a great simplification of his narrative devices, I think it reveals attitudes motivating Griffith’s framing. Received opinion often (falsely) characterized Griffith as the father of the close-up. In his own myth-making through the advertisement he placed in trade journals when leaving the Biograph Company in late 1913, Griffith emphasized that he introduced not only “large or close-up figures” but also “distant views”. From the Biograph films on, Griffith used a variety of distant framings to capture broad sweeps of action (Indian raids, Civil War battles, Sherman’s March to the Sea, the Siege of Babylon), endowing his films with an epic dimension. Close-ups, on the other hand, initially provided dramatic emphasis in Biograph films, emphasizing small objects such as the bar of soap with hidden jewels in Betrayed by a Handprint (1908) and the monkey wrench in The Lonedale Operator (1911). But in his feature films close-up began to play more complex roles than magnification of crucial small objects. The close-up of the detective’s attentive eye, or his pencil tapping on the table in The Avenging Conscience (1914), expressed the main character’s intense discomfort during the third degree. In Broken Blossoms (1919), the close-ups of the few objects left for the girl by her mother – the ribbon and the piece of silk – not only cue us into their precious nature, but also allow us to see them as she does, with an intimate wonder and a private caress. The close-up does not simply enlarge, but opens up a new realm of proximity, a sense of nearness. Eisenstein noted the resonance of the term “close-up” in contrast to the Russian term “large scale”, which he claims refers more to the value of the object seen, while the American term refers primarily to the viewpoint from which something is seen. The greater sense of the camera as related to a human viewpoint in American cinema plays a key role here, but also the sense that the close-up can invite us into a personal space, into intimacy and nearness. This sense of intimacy in Griffith does not derive only from the close-ups, but also from performances that make use of the close-ups. In True Heart Susie, Lillian Gish’s face becomes a battleground of emotions, expressing not simply a single essential emotion or reaction, but staging complete and progressive dramas of realization, recognition and despair. Consider Gish’s close-up as Susie sees William and Bettina embracing after Bettina accepts his proposal of marriage. Description in words can only demonstrate the ungainly quality of language when posed against the natural expressivity of the face (James Naremore has already offered in Acting in the Cinema, pp. 110–12, an insightful analysis of this shot, illustrated by several well chosen frame-enlargements), but, in the interest of directing viewer’s attention (or memory) to the moment, I will risk the offense. Gish first appears thoughtful: her eyes focused down as her hand mounts to her ear, which she fingers almost abstractly as if considering an intellectual puzzle. Then she laughs a bit, perhaps recognizing the absurdity of her long-term unspoken love, or perhaps momentarily convinced she has mistaken what she has seen. She looks off toward the couple briefly, then her eyes widen and her little finger begins to play with her lower lip as her smiles fades. She looks off left again more intently, her finger now in her mouth. Then her head wavers uncertainly, her eyes widen as she looks toward the camera, as if on the verge of fainting. Gish performs what amounts to a soliloquy of facial expressions unseen by any other character (Bettina and William are unaware of her). She offers her pain of realization, in its intimate revelation, to the camera, to us, alone. This facial expressivity contrasts sharply with the wide-eyed but basically neutral expression she will strive to achieve in the next scene as she literally remakes her face during the announcement of the engagement, an expression 20

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she will maintain in successive scenes: the preparation for William’s wedding, and the ceremony. During the wedding Susie’s face exhibits no emotion, but her lips move slightly (unconsciously, almost a reflex action, almost subliminally) as the couple exchange vows. Almost a twitch, this gesture hovers between the significant and the meaningless, and recalls a number of other odd tic-like reactions Susie displays (e.g., her slightly spastic kick to the right after William has carved their initials, but has been unable to complete their kiss) in which her body seems to rebel briefly against the control demanded of her (Belton calls the kick spasmodic, and also sees it as a moment of rebellion against self-restraint: Belton, op. cit., p. 165). It is a large part of Susie’s tragedy that she, who feels so deeply and can be so emotionally expressive, has been taught by her small-town culture to conceal emotion and desire. One need only recall Susie’s aunt’s reprimand when Susie cavorts around the parlor after receiving William’s letter, “COMPORT YOURSELF!”, and Susie’s sudden resumption of a restrained, indeed repressed, body language (Belton, ibid., makes a similar point). All of American Puritanism is contained in this scene, and this pervasive suspicion of the pleasure of the body and display of emotions serves as the background against which Susie’s seemingly foolish silence and restraint in relation to William must be understood. Griffith never simply celebrates the joys of rural simplicity. He portrays small-town life as a world of hidden violence, of pitiful pleasures stolen on the sly (think of the odd close-up where one of William’s visitors is snatching a lemon from the pitcher of lemonade as she leaves the table, or the old man sternly consuming ice cream under the watchful gaze of a small boy at the ice cream social). In its romance of expectations unfulfilled and desires repressed, True Heart Susie catches Griffith’s deep ambivalence about this traditional society, a nostalgia laced with bitterness. Recall that in the opening intertitles Griffith dedicates this film to that traditional figure of patriarchal satire, the old maid, whom he honors with a gesture of elegant empathy for her “PITIFUL HOURS OF WAITING FOR THE LOVE THAT NEVER COMES”. Of course one can read the film as a reactionary attack on the New Woman represented by Bettina, the milliner from the big city of Chicago. After all, Griffith contrasts Bettina’s slovenly housekeeping, awful cooking and taste for parties and flirtations with Susie’s hometown virtues, melt-in-your-mouth biscuits and “one track” heart. However, such a reading neglects the very real tragedy of Susie’s self-denial. If Bettina seems superficial in contrast to Susie, she nonetheless possesses an energy and joie de vivre that Griffith portrays as childlike and spontaneous, rather than calculating or lewd (at their party, her friends spend part of the time playing “Follow the Leader”!). Griffith clearly believes his intertitle when he describes Bettina’s friends as arriving “TO BRING A LITTLE PEP INTO A LONELY LIFE”. Clearly both William and Susie (and everyone else we see in the town) could use a “little pep”! The scene in which Bettina, having lost her house key after sneaking out for a party, forthrightly informs Susie about her deception and tells her she must lie for her to William, stages an encounter – not between innocence and debauchery – but between a woman whose emotional repression has not yet hardened her heart and one whose thoughtless pursuit of immediate gratification still does not deserve the scorn a joyless community (and husband) will inflict upon her if the truth is known. The intercutting between the two women highlights Susie’s nearly frozen immobility as she watches Bettina’s histrionic performance: twisting her arms and body, wringing her hands. Susie seems as astonished by this display of emotion as by Bettina’s tale of deception and her demand that Susie participate in it. Finally Susie’s eyelids flutter, another reflex response as if to an overload of stimuli, and her hands begin to move spasmodically as she moves in to offer Bettina succor. The scene of the two women in bed that follows enacts Susie’s ambivalent reactions to her rival with nearly allegorical gestures (Naremore, op. cit., p. 107, gives it as an example of 21

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pantomimic “signing”). We see them sharing the bed in a two-shot, Susie on the left, her eyes regarding Bettina with suspicion, if not aversion, her arms crossed on her breast, as if to avoid any physical contact, as Bettina sleeps peacefully on the right. Griffith then cuts and isolates Susie, as she actually clenches her fist (is she about to sock the sleeping girl, or is this a gesture of anxious self-control? – in either case her anger is palpable). Griffith then cuts to the sleeping, unaware Bettina. When we cut back to Susie, her face has softened, her fist relaxed, as she reaches toward her bedfellow. The following two-shot shows Susie embracing the sleeping woman, pulling her onto her breast and patting her. It would be foolish to read lesbian overtones into this decidedly non-erotic gesture, but I think it is equally limited to see it simply as another sign of Susie’s good heart, her self-sacrificing kindness even to a rival. Instead, Susie undergoes a recognition that Bettina possesses something Susie lacks – sexuality, an energy (“pep”), a connection with her physical and emotional needs that rural life has repressed in Susie. Further, the embrace does express a shared sisterhood, based on the fact that neither of these women is getting what they want or need. They share an intense loneliness and frustration. Authorially, Griffith as well displays compassion toward this erring woman, whom he describes in an intertitle preceding her death as “A LITTLE UNFAITHFUL”. The ironic compassion of this phrase typifies the combination of distance and compassion that marks the narration of this film and which may constitute its most remarkable feature. Throughout True Heart Susie, performance, editing and narration create a point of view through which we profoundly share the experiences of the characters. However, this sharing involves more (or less) than strict identification. For Griffith, sharing an intimacy also means being aware of a certain distance, which occasionally we can cross into an emotional nearness. Thus in True Heart Susie we profoundly share Susie’s story and indeed become very close to her, a bit in the way Susie must become close to Bettina when she lets her share her bed in spite of her anger at her for deceiving William, in spite of her envy of Bettina for possessing the one thing Susie loves and not valuing it. Nearness and intimacy mean overcoming a distance that one is fully aware of. Thus, although we share Susie’s story and care about her heartbreak, we do not share her naïveté. We are always one jump ahead of her, realizing all the things she doesn’t: William’s vanity and lack of insight into the world around him, Susie’s own lack of forthrightness in claiming what should be hers. The illusions both she and William have about the way the world operates – often referred to in the intertitles as their “faith” – reflects a peculiarly American foolish expectation that their desires will be met, simply because they are earnest and intense. The film makes it clear that such “faith” must be broken in the end, if they are to find any fulfillment at all. Ultimately it is the narrational point of view created by Griffith’s stylistics that reconciles the limited understanding and perspective of the characters with the compassionate and bittersweetly tragic tone of the film. Along with framing and editing, Griffith’s unique use of intertitles creates this perspective. Griffith’s intertitles have not only been neglected in the analysis of his narrative style, they have most often been mocked for their intrusiveness and their supposed kitsch. In fact, Griffith’s use of intertitles sets up an extremely sophisticated and complex narrative viewpoint, mediating between address to the viewer and the world of characters. In True Heart Susie the intertitles also interrelate with an important theme of writing in the story itself as well as embedding characters into a textual space, expressing their thoughts and feelings through citations of well-known poems. Early in the film Griffith shows the adolescent William and Susie as they approach a tree on which William will carve their initials. They are charming in their awkward courtship and Griffith supplies this title: 22

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OF COURSE THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT POOR SIMPLE IDIOTS THEY ARE – AND WE, WHO HAVE NEVER BEEN SO FOOLISH, CAN HARDLY HOPE TO UNDERSTAND – BUT –

Few authorial intertitles work as complexly as this one. First, it clearly sets up the space of reading as separate from the space of the image, commenting directly on the characters’ action. The commentary asserts a superiority over the characters on two levels. First, in terms of their actions (“poor simple idiots”) and secondly through their lack of knowledge (they don’t even know that they are idiots). The author presumably does know this and shares this point of view with the spectator through the use of the linguistic shifter “we”. Clearly this title tells us how to read the actions of the following shot and what attitude to take toward them. But are these directions so simple? Rather than a direct instructional speech act, we have here one laden with rhetorical irony. Griffith asserts superiority over his characters, but immediately casts some doubt over it as he addresses the audience as “we who have never been so foolish”. Clearly, rather than offering mutual congratulations on our superior qualities, the intertitle is intended ironically. Rather than asserting superiority over the characters, we are asked to remember (the importance of the past tense “never been so foolish” – not: “are never foolish”) a time when we were so foolish, presumably our adolescence. In other words, Griffith in this intertitle performs the rhetorical form of pro itero, announcing an opinion that, in fact, he hopes to deny (like Mark Antony’s “For Brutus is an honourable man”). He tells us first to recognize the simplicity of his characters, setting up a distance between them and us; but then he asks us to recognize our own (past) simplicity and, instead of asserting a distance from them, to find a common ground. This act of shared intimacy is alluded to rather than given as a direct instruction, as if for Griffith this were a delicate matter, one not to be named directly, one that can not be simply ordered. But its importance is nonetheless made very clear. If we maintain our superiority, we “can never hope to understand” – presumably both the action of the characters and the import of Griffith’s story. Griffith ends this extraordinary intertitle in an extraordinary manner – he doesn’t end it at all, but leaves it hanging. On the one hand, we are told that if we maintain superiority it is useless to continue watching the film, “but –” But what? Presumably, if we can remember our own foolishness, we can understand both characters and story. Griffith refuses to say this explicitly. We have to fill in the gap ourselves. But we must fill it in by continuing to watch the images from a new perspective, one which simultaneously recognizes a distance between ourselves and the characters on the screen, recognizes their simplicity, but after that distance is established, rushes to overcome it through a complex act of identification and sympathy. Thus this tale of unfulfilled, or enormously delayed, love must be viewed both ironically and with sympathy for its characters. The authorial commentary has established a complex type of reading, not only for its own rhetoric, but for the images that follow. True Heart Susie weaves an encounter between writing and image, reading and watching deep into the center of the film in an exceptionally elegant manner, not limited to this sequence. (Rothman also offers a reading of this intertitle. The common ground between our two readings could be expressed by his comment that “with this title, Griffith is declaring his human bond with Susie and William and calling upon us to acknowledge that we share this bond as well”; see Rothman, op. cit., p. 39). The opening scenes introduce the themes of words themselves in contrasting ways, spoken and inscribed. William and Susie are introduced during a spelling bee in a one-room school23

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house. Susie spells correctly the word that William bungles (“anonymous” – as Yuri Tsivian pointed out to me, this word, as well as the one spelled by the younger children, “cry”, already anticipate aspects of Susie’s fate). Susie is then compared to a woman within a poem by the intertitle that follows: SUSIE, LIKE THE GIRL IN THE VERSE: “‘I’M SORRY THAT I SPELT THE WORD, I HATE TO GO ABOVE YOU, BECAUSE’ THE BROWN EYES LOWER FELL ‘BECAUSE, YOU SEE, I LOVE YOU’.”

Thus the characters are introduced as already caught in a web of texts and words, prisoners of a language that seems to possess its own stern words and to thwart their desires. In the scene immediately following, William attempts to mark his love for Susie by inscribing their initials in the bark of a tree. Standing before the tree, William bobs his head toward Susie and she moves forward to receive his kiss, but he stiffens and withdraws, taking out his case knife as if the carving will give him the courage or authority necessary for the display of affection. An intertitle appears: “THE UNDYING PROOF”. We see the inscribed initials in close up: SM WR. But although their heads bob awkwardly into close proximity, William’s courage fails and no kiss happens (it is while walking away from this scene that Susie first does her odd little kick to the right). This unfulfilled kiss haunts the rest of the film, as do the inscribed initials, as well as William’s failure at both spelling and kissing and the way both these characters recall figures in poems. Griffith supplies the poetic reference for Susie, but I think he relied on the audience to supply one for William, lines from a poem that at the time of the film every American who made it through high school would know, Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal – yet do not grieve She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

I am convinced Griffith had this reference in mind for this opening image, and clearly he meant it ironically. Although it perfectly describes this young adolescent couple, coming near the goal, but never, never able to smooch, the scene we see is comic rather than sublime. Harron hardly acts the part of a “Bold Lover”. But, most importantly, the image of eternal unfading love that the painting on the Grecian urn supplied to Keats is precisely what is in question throughout this film. Will Susie’s beauty never fade as she waits for a “love that never comes”? Keats’ image of eternity has lasted millennia and will never move or change, while Griffith’s art relies on “moving pictures”, pictures that carry their temporality within them. Is it possible for such as art to transcend time, and what form would such transcendence take in a modern world? In their naïveté, William and Susie inscribe their initials in the bark as “undying proof”. This inscription they hope will last the test of time as will their love. If they don’t kiss today, they will someday… However pathetic this inscription might be in comparison to Keats’ urn, ironically it does last longer than William’s love for Susie. Years later, after his marriage to Bettina and its less than ideal nature, William passes by the tree and sees the still vivid initials. William has just passed Susie who we are told has decided to destroy the few letters she ever received from William. William, in typical misrecognition, asks her if they are love letters, not realizing they 24

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are his (or acknowledging that he never really managed to write her a love letter). As William walks off, Griffith again supplies a familiar poetic reference (this time from John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet) in this intertitle: “THE SADDEST ARE THESE; IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN”. In close-up, we see William’s finger brush over the inscription. The shot fades, and Griffith flashes back to the scene of William and Susie’s never-achieved kiss, then fades back to William staring at the tree. Rather than the sign of an undying love, the initials testify to the passage of time and the forgetfulness it brings in its wake. We see William standing before the tree, now a rather dowdy minister, though still sporting his “dashing” moustache. The flashback then shows him as an awkward but sincere adolescent unable to manage his first kiss. Rather than eternally unchanging images, the cinematic flashback presents a contrast that inscribes time’s transformations, its amnesia, and when recalled, its sense of loss and shame (like Yeats: “And not a day / But something is recalled / My conscience or my vanity appalled”). The following shots intercut a long shot of William wandering off, seeming uncertain about where he should go, and Bettina and her friends rehearsing a new dance step. Griffith then cuts to Susie holding the letters that William could not recognize as his own to her breast. It is not clear if she will carry out her resolve to destroy them. Susie has her own relation to inscription and writing, one that articulates less time’s amnesia than her foolish faith wrestling with her unconscious impulses. In her diary, Susie writes the desires and resolutions she can not bring herself to say (largely because, as with the kiss, she is waiting for William to make the move and say the word). Soon after William returns from college, she writes: “Of course Spring is the best time to get married but I think we will in August because we can’t wait”. Then, in a gesture that inscribes the whole tragedy of her love (and Susie’s dim consciousness that her desire is not shared equally), she draws a line through “we” and writes over it “I”. This canceling of the couple stands in counterpoint to the initials that proclaim their love. Susie is already aware that she cannot wait, and of course, the tragedy of the film lies in the fact that William forces her to do precisely that. Later, after Susie overhears William and Bettina flirting, she returns home and writes beneath the previous entry her first partial acknowledgement of her fate: “Perhaps after all will wait until Spring”, this time elliptically leaving out pronouns altogether. Following the scene in which William sees the inscription, Susie has an encounter with writing that parallels William’s scene at the tree. Festooned with kittens, Susie sits reading her diary and comes across both these earlier entries, the hopeful and impatient balanced by the dawning realization. William and Bettina are now married. Susie looks off and a flashback fades in of her farewell to William at her front gate as he left for college. Once again, William can not manage the kiss. We return to Susie and the sad frozen expression she has maintained ever since the announcement of William and Bettina’s engagement. But in closeup, Griffith presents a gesture whose fury is displaced from her still patient face to her hand, as Susie rapidly erases the last entry, leaving a blank in her diary. If William has forgotten and then remembers too late, Susie remembers and wants to (needs to) forget. Soon after this we see behind Susie’s expression of patience and self-sacrifice into her fury, albeit still displaced. In the carefully intercut (yet not traditionally suspenseful) climax of the film, Griffith cuts from William’s restless night in bed, Bettina’s secret party, and Susie caring for her sick aunt. Susie’s patience snaps somewhat comically as she expresses irritation at her sick aunt brushing away her covers in her sleep. Intercut with William’s erotic restlessness in his bedroom, Susie stands at the window and looks out through the darkness to William’s lighted window. We cut to William, who is also looking out his window. Cutting back to Susie, for the first time since she dried her eyes at the engagement announcement, we see her cry, as she sobs leaning against the window. But in a beautifully side-lit close-up, 25

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her tears give way to fury, as she sees her aunt has caused the covers to slip again. Susie displaces the real target of her anger, of course, and she soon comports herself again. But this explosion of emotion sears the screen. What can we make, then, of the film’s happy ending, the untangling of this drama of misrecognition and unspoken, repressed desire, which ends with childhood sweethearts embracing once again? Griffith’s commitment to a dream of happiness is as intense and as ambivalent as Dickens’ alternative endings to Great Expectations. As a romance, True Heart Susie evokes the power of the fulfillment of childhood wishes. But the film cannot deny or undo the passage of time. William must confront his lack of understanding of his world, his unfounded faith in the philanthropy of the “unknown gentleman” and of his slightly unfaithful wife. But Susie, for all her outbursts of fury and of charity cannot, as an intertitle tells us, bring herself to “break his faith”. She remains frozen by her mistaken self-denial. In fact, it takes an intervention from the semi-comic aunt to get the narrative of fulfillment on track. Griffith stages the final reconciliation with a portentous and somewhat ambiguous miseen-scène. It takes place, as have a number of significant encounters between Susie and William, with a barrier between them (the hedge and gate in earlier scenes). Here, Susie is framed by a window and we first see her sighing as she performs one of her typical nurturing tasks, watering the flowers that grow around the window sill. Then William approaches, first appearing as a shadow cast on the wall (perhaps recalling a similar ending to Griffith’s 1912 Biograph film The School Teacher and the Waif). There is something a bit threatening about his approach, and Susie gives a start. (Rothman intriguingly reads this shadow as a ghost, and sees William’s final action of declaring his love metaphorically as a dead man coming to life; see “True Heart Griffith”, pp. 44–47.) When William proclaims he now knows the truth, Susie performs another of her unconsciously revealing actions, dipping her watering can, letting the water flow as she hears her lover’s discovery. She recovers, quickly, lifts the watering can and then, almost coyly, tries to hide behind it. As William’s shadow looms forward, she actually withdraws from the window, hiding from this long-desired proclamation. But she returns, framed by the window and the flowers (it must be the Spring so long awaited), as he asks her the key question of the film, “IS IT TOO LATE?” and declares, “I KNOW NOW THAT I HAVE LOVED YOU ALL MY LIFE”. The kiss that follows completes the one withheld in the opening and in the farewell scene. It is awkward, and makes this middle-aged couple appear again child-like. But Griffith understands the dynamic of temporality and time lost and regained implicit in this romance ending. A final complex authorial intertitle appears: AND WE MAY BELIEVE THEY WALK AGAIN AS THEY DID LONG YEARS AGO.

This is followed by the final shot of the film, a long shot of William and Susie in their adolescence walking down a country road away from the camera. Are we to believe that they have regained their childhood innocence and refound their love? Certainly the logic of the film argues against such a simple conclusion. It is only by overcoming innocence through wisdom that they can recognize the mistakes of their youth and undo them. And Griffith’s intertitle stresses, “we may believe”, as if we might also think something else. But the power of this return to the past reflects something more than narrative of character logic. It fulfills precisely the desire cancelled by the previous flashbacks: William at the tree, Susie reading her diary. Unlike the inert inscriptions in tree bark and on diary page, the flashback here does more than recall. It does not in fact belong to the memory of any of the characters, but as the intertitle tells us, to us, the audience, to our imagination and belief. Cinema shows time passing, but it also shows it returning, coming back with the promise it once held. This gives a promise that 26

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goes beyond (although it is founded upon) the happy ending of the traditional romance, where as Jean-Luc Godard says at the close of Bande à part (1964), “things end at a moment of impossible happiness”. Griffith does not give us an image of the happiness William and Susie will share. Instead, a bit like Dickens’ original ending to Great Expectations, he returns us to the beginning, subverting the idea of finality, or even fulfillment, with the eternal return of promise and desire. We watch these “poor simple idiots” as they walk away from us, holding in their ungainly carriage all the hope we have for love’s fulfillment. Tom Gunning

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584 THE NEW ART FILM COMPANY

NUGGET NELL Subititle: A Burlesque Travesty on the Wild and Movie West Filming date: Spring 1919 Location: Fine Arts studio, 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles; exteriors: Sierra Madre Mountains, California Presented by: The New Art Film Company Distribution: Famous Players-Lasky Corp.; Paramount Pictures New York premiere: week prior to 27 July 1919, Rialto Theatre Release date: 27 July 1919 Release length: five reels (“running time, fifty-five minutes”, according to Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 9 August 1919) Copyright date: 14 July 1919 (LP13965); “© D.W. Griffith” Supervision: D.W. Griffith Director: Elmer Clifton Story: John R. Cornish (crossed out in copyright records) and/or Sir Hugh R. Osborne (hand-written insert in copyright records) Camera: John Leezer, Lee Garmes Assistant director: Leigh R. Smith Cast: Dorothy Gish (Nugget Nell); David Butler (Big Hearted Jim [Sheriff Jim]); Raymond Cannon (The City Chap); Regina Sarle (The Cheild); James Farley (First Badman); Bob Fleming (Second Ditto); Wilbur Highby (Nell’s uncle); Emily Chichester (The Ingenue) Archival sources: none known Nugget Nell, the proud proprietress of an eating house in the mining country, sits in her big, neat, rough dining room and twirls her trusty six-gun. Idly, annoyed by strains of near-music that drift through the window, she fires outdoors. Two cowboys, whose voices lifted in song have attracted Nell’s attention, retire in disorder before the fusillade, as the warning comes close enough to puncture their heads. Big Hearted Jim, the Sheriff, comes to the eating house to declare his love for Nell. In spite of his bashfulness, Nell is about to step into his arms when her old Uncle, who assists her about the place, comes into the scene, and love-making is off – at least for the present. Anyway, Nell is not any too sure, yet, of her love for Big Hearted Jim. A letter brings Nell information that an old miner, whom she has once befriended, has died, and intrusted [sic] to her tender care a baby girl. Big Hearted Jim, astonished at the news, hurries off to prepare for the little stranger’s arrival – securing a high-chair and similiar [sic] necessities. But when the Chield [sic] arrived, on the next stage, she proves to be an overgrown young monster half again as tall as Nugget Nell herself. From the same stage that brings the Chield [sic], steps the City Chap. And in this slick stranger from parts unknown, Nugget Nell realizes at last her beau ideal. Never before has she fallen, completely, for any mere man, – but now she falls hard. In vain, The [sic] newcomer has no eyes for the would-be wiles and graces of this uncouth western girl in trousers, and with a pistol in her boot. Instead he makes up to a blond fellow-traveler. The Ingenue. Jealously, Nell watches the incipient flirtation. Desiring to imitate the lovely blond lady, she

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decides to purchase suitable clothes. But she finds that her Uncle has rifled the cash drawer, in order to finance himself for another crap game. Nothing daunted, Nell mounts her horse and rides to town, where she does her shopping at the point of a gun. Cloth is neatly measured of [sic] by the terrified sales girl and wrapped in a bundle at Nell’s direction; afterwards, the girl with the gun walks down the street and selects attractive articles of wearing apparel at random, – a hat from this girl, and shoes and stockings from the next – emphasizing her demands with the threatening muzzle. At home once more, she dolls up in the first “glad rags” of feminity [sic] that she has ever possessed – only to find that the Stranger is still unimpressed. Nell’s first high heeled slippers cripple her severely; she finds herself walking on her ankles. Big Hearted Jim, jealous, is about to vent his wrath on the City Chap, when Nell comes into the room, and his design is frustrated. A diversion occurs when an outlaw band decides to make away with the City Stranger, and file in their own names on claims that he is reported to have secured. They are not able to attack him unobserved before stage time, so decided to hold up the stage. After all have left – stage, City Chap and the holdup men – Nell learns of the fell design and rides in pursuit. The stage is held up and Nell’s hero captured. Then Nell comes on the scene. Standing on horseback behind a hugh [sic] rock, she in turn holds up the stage, giving order the whole [time?] to an imaginary band, and, singlehanded [sic], disarms the outlaws. With her rescued hero she rides to a deserted cabin, and then, leaving her trembling prize, dashed madly off in a vain attempt to throw the pursuers off the track. After various hairbreadth escapes, she returns to the cabin, only to be attacked by the outlaws. While the defense of the shack is in progress, Bell [sic] realizes that her dream is shattering into fragments about her; her hero proves to be an abject coward. The Cheild arrives upon the scene, and is captured by the outlaws, only to be rescued by Nugget Nell after a desperate sally. Big Hearted Jim[,] learning from Uncle of the doings, rides to avenge his sweetheart. One by one, he overcomes the members of the outlaw band, lassoing each in turn and dragging him prisoner, to a place of safety. Then, with all the perils at last overcome, Nell points out his road to the City Chap, and tells him to Go [sic]! At last, she finds herself in the arms of her one real and true love – big [sic] Hearted Jim. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, July 14, 1919, LP13965 [stamped with date July 21, 1919] Dependent largely upon the winning personality of Dorothy Gish, “Nugget Nell” has several bright spots, but the lively action is heavily encumbered with attempts to be facetious in the subtitles. With half of the subtitles out, particularly those explaining the obvious action, “Nugget Nell” would be vastly improved. Dorothy carries the whole burden of entertainment herself, the other roles being inconsequential and without enough real character to be of live human interest. She impersonates an amusing type of Western girl-boy, addicted to men’s clothing and cowboy style of life, riding well and shooting fast. She is charming in her conversion to woman’s conventional garb and her method of obtaining it, by holding up those who have it is decidedly unique, the brightest incident of the burlesque. The production has many of the elements of a sparkling satire – in skilled hands its material would suffice, and it gets over in places as it is, but the entertainment as a whole is below those in which Dorothy has appeared, and becomes almost wholly dependent on her amusing portraiture for interest. Counted a fair amusement by spectators at the Rialto. Louis Reeves Harrison, The Moving Picture World, Aug. 9, 1919, p. 878

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No print of this film is known to exist at the time of this writing. During the 1910s, Western fans spent a lot of time with miners and the folks that gathered in the communities near the places where prospectors toiled and competed for riches. Nugget Nell was New Art’s burlesque of the genre and their featured star, Dorothy Gish, was the focus of the fun. She played Nugget Nell, the britches-wearing, six-gun toting proprietress of an eating place in a Western mining town – “We do right by our men and drink our whiskey straight” (Gish, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, p. 86). Her hoydenish ways and misguided infatuation with a newly arrived Eastern city slicker (Raymond Cannon) provided the comedy. This gave her a chance to do her tomboy routine, chase bandits, hold-up a stage, rescue her “city slicker” and shoot it out with the bad guys. Her failed effort to wear “glad rags” for the first time (which she acquired at gun point) was a comic high spot. After teetering about in high heels, she reverted to type, gave the “slicker” the gate when she learned he was a coward and decided that “Big Hearted Jim”, the faithful sheriff (David Butler), was the guy for her. While it used elements from a number of films (and none was identified as the source), it borrowed generously from The Mountain Rat (James Kirkwood, 1914; see DWG Project, #508), one of Dorothy’s early featured roles. The Mountain Rat was a Griffith supervised production in which Dorothy played a tomboy who was also named Nell (and nicknamed the Mountain Rat) and who fell for the Easterner wh o came to town. The plot was not identical, but close enough to influence this parody. While the genre was eminently suitable for satire, this one was not entirely successful. The reviews were favorable, but not as enthusiastic as those for previous New Art productions. Flashes of Gish comedy pleased the critics, but both the anonymous critic for The New York Times (July 28, 1919) and the Exhibitor’s Trade Review’s George T. Pardy (August 9, 1919) complained of gaps, or dull spots in the plot. On the other hand, Edward Wagenknecht called it a brilliant burlesque and commented that Mack Sennett admired it (Movies in the Age of Innocence, p. 224). John Leezer and Lee Garmes were at the camera, and their panoramic shots of scenery in the Sierra Madre Mountains impressed Variety’s reviewer (August 1, 1919). The trade press credited the story to John R. Cornish, but in the description filed with the copyright Cornish’s name was scratched out and Sir Hugh R. Osborne’s substituted. Unless Sir Hugh is another of his pseudonyms, there is no indication that Griffith was involved in production beyond supervision. Paul Spehr

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585 D.W. GRIFFITH?

THE WORLD AT COLUMBUS Alternate title: The Wayfarer [?] Filming date: June–July 1919 Location: Columbus, Ohio Producer: D.W. Griffith Release date: not known Release length: six reels? Copyright date: not copyrighted Supervision: A.P. Hamberg for D.W. Griffith? Director: A.P. Hamberg? Photographer: J.C. Bitzer Archival Sources: none known A six-reel picture which visualizes the Methodist Exposition held in Columbus last June and its ambitious program for reconstruction at home and abroad, and gives an abbreviation of “The Wayfarer”. Literary Digest, May 15, 1920

At the time of this writing, no viewing material of this film is known to survive. But even “lost” films are supposed to leave traces of their existence, right? Some indication that the film was completed? That someone saw it? One would be ready to assume that this film, which definitely was planned and apparently shot, was perhaps later abandoned before completion. But that option is problematic because of the above reference in the Literary Digest. Unfortunately, while the article does clearly mention a film titled The World at Columbus, the reference makes no mention of D.W. Griffith or anyone else as having directed it. So what do we know about this mysterious entry in the Griffith canon? At first, the trail is an easy one to follow. Letters found in The D.W. Griffith Papers, and contemporary newspaper and magazine articles, tie Griffith to the Methodist Church and its plans for the upcoming Centenary of Methodist Missions. Griffith’s principal contact within the Methodist community seems to have been Christian F. Reisner, pastor of the Grace Methodist Church in New York City and one of the organizers of the Centenary. Reisner had used motion pictures in his church for several years (starting with Kalem’s 1912 film From the Manger to the Cross); and, in a letter dated 27 March 1919, he tells Griffith, “How I rejoice in the fine work you are doing for humanity with your pictures!” He writes again to Griffith in late May to remind the director of “our arrangement to meet in Columbus Tuesday, June 3rd”. Griffith was to view a rehearsal of the pageant that was to be the centerpiece of the Centenary and to discuss “the exhibits and the plans to take Motion Pictures of the daily events”. We learn that this was bigger than just a private arrangement between Griffith and the church. There is also a letter, dated 31 May 1919, from the executive secretary of the “National Association of the Motion Picture Industry”. It requests an acknowledgment of a previous letter (not found in The D.W. Griffith Papers) about “the special committee representing the Producers and Distributors which was appointed to cooperate” with the Centenary Committee. 31

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The popular press was also aware of these proceedings. An article headlined “Griffith to Advise Church on Films” (The New York Times, May 11, 1919, p. 22) says that “the motion picture producer is to become the advisor of the Methodist Church in its plan to spread its religious and moral teaching by use of the screen” and will be going to Columbus, Ohio, to confer “with the church’s committee in charge of motion picture activities”. By the time the Centenary celebration had begun, on 20 June, many papers had picked up the story. The Methodist publication Zion’s Herald (June 25, 1919, p.821) provides the most detailed account of Griffith’s thoughts regarding the project. It states that Griffith had offered “to preserve the Methodist Centenary Celebration in celluloid so that the great exposition at Columbus, O[H]., might be shown to the world for years to come” and says that he made the offer “as a memorial to his mother, who was a Methodist”. The article mentions that Griffith had been in Columbus a few weeks earlier and had “enthusiastically asserted he found great motion picture possibilities there and that he would turn his best directing and photographing talent to the big task of preserving the story” of the exposition and showing it to the “millions of Methodists who are unable to attend”. It goes on to quote Griffith: What particularly impressed me was the wonderful opportunity the Methodist Centenary Celebration gives the people to visit the entire world. Extraordinarily impressive are the foreign villages represented where not “supers” but real natives brought from foreign lands demonstrate the daily existence in those countries. I am astounded beyond depth by the magnificence of the prospect. The last Methodist celebration I attended was in Kentucky in my youth where we had ice cream in a thirty-by-fifty-foot church room and where the entertainment consisted of an organ and a soloist, the whole expense being about $7.50. And here you are giving a celebration that resembles a world’s fair on a scale as great as though a nation were behind it – the reawakened idealism and faith that are to bind up the wounds of a torn and outraged world.

More about the staff talent Griffith assigned to the task is found in the Ohio State Journal (July 8, 1919, p.10). In an article titled “Motion Pictures to Spread Exposition”, readers are told that Griffith had sent “two of his outdoor experts, A.P. Hanburg [sic] and J.C. Bitzer, from his studios in Los Angeles. They arrived at the grounds with orders from Mr. Griffith to carry out all the promises and arrangements Mr. Griffith made when he was in Columbus several weeks ago”. The Ohio State Journal says that Griffith had estimated a production cost of $30,000, and that “the cost was considered worthwhile in view of the fact that this was the best way to take the celebration to those shut-ins all over the world, who will not be permitted … to attend the centenary in person”. Alfred P. Hamberg was Griffith’s personal assistant at Artcraft, and, according to a personal communication from Russell Merritt, was on the payroll since some time in 1918. Johannes C. Bitzer (Billy Bitzer’s cousin and brother-in-law, also according to Russell Merritt) had started in 1912 as a Biograph cameraman, with the non-Griffith units. Bitzer was misidentified by the Ohio State Journal (July 14, 1919, p. 3) as the cinematographer of The Birth of a Nation, Hearts of the World and Intolerance. These two men apparently were in Columbus for the full 24 days of the Centenary. The Ohio State Journal (June 20, 1919, p. 3) has Hamberg, described as Griffith’s “right-hand man”, shooting the opening ceremonies which began at 11 a.m. on 20 June with a parade from City Hall into the exposition grounds. The same paper, at the end of the Centenary (July 14, 1919, p. 3), says that Hamberg and Bitzer had shot “more than 10,000 feet” of the 32

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pageants, special events, Centenary officials and special visitors such as Adolph Zukor, former President William Howard Taft, William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, former Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo and Sergeant Alvin C. York! The Centenary Celebration truly was an amazing event. The basic reason for the gathering was to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, organized 5 April 1819, and to raise money for future mission work. A brochure put out a year before the convocation described plans for “an unsurpassed program of lectures, pageants, stereopticon lectures” which would give thousands of American Methodists “the opportunity to visit and study the World’s races as they are brought together in Columbus at this time…. Everywhere will be found large models and panoramas of city and country, forests and lake, mission buildings and activities”. They were serious when they described the upcoming event as “The World at Columbus”. The Centenary was held on the Ohio State Fair Grounds. Columbus was chosen as the locale because it was considered a convenient destination to reach by train or private automobile. It was also a city with a strong Methodist presence – in 1919 there were twenty-nine Methodist Episcopal churches in Columbus plus ten “colored” M.E. churches. And it was within driving distance of the site of the first Methodist mission in the United States, where members of the Wyandot Indian tribe had been converted by an African-American preacher named John Stewart. The fairgrounds were large enough (fifty-four acres, or approximately twenty-two hectares) to comfortably accommodate some 50,000 visitors a day. Besides a lot of open space for strolling and picnicking, there were nine large exhibition halls, a coliseum (where pageants were performed) and a large oval amphitheater (about the size of two football fields and used at other times as a race track). There were worship services, band concerts, vocal recitals, parades and fireworks displays. The exhibition spaces contained lecture halls and photo galleries along with such exhibits as a Japanese street and garden, Shinto shrine, recreation of the Ganges River (with funeral pyres burning at the water’s edge!), Hindu temple, “Lepers Mission” house, recreations of roads in Peking, Chungking and Shanghai, Confucian temple, African Kraal, Bedouin tent, recreations of different areas in the United States such as the mountain regions, Latino communities, rural “Negro” cabins – and most of the halls had tea rooms and curio shops! Maps and detailed descriptions of all the exhibits and activities of the Centenary Celebration are found in the official brochures, copies graciously provided by Carol Holliger of Ohio Wesleyan University (see note at the end of this text). The amphitheater was the site of a huge movie screen, approximately 100 by 75 feet (the Ohio Avenue United Methodist Church’s 1972 yearbook/directory states that it was 136 by 166 feet). It was erected by representatives of the movie business, “to advertise their ‘wares’ to the religious community leaders” (Lindvall, The Silents of God, p. 215). The film industry also provided films – two of them with at least a tangential connection to Griffith: the Dorothy Gish feature Boots (1919) and the Donald Crisp-directed Johnny Get Your Gun (1919). There were also travelogues, documentaries and stereopticon slides. Various aspects of the Columbus exposition caught the attention of the entertainment press. The Moving Picture World (September 6, 1919, p. 1450), Photoplay (September 1919, pp. 46–48) and Variety (June 20, 1919, p. 12) all ran articles on the Centenary Celebration, its use of film, and the possible impact it would have on the future of religious work and teaching. The Christian Advocate (July 17, 1919, p. 915) raved that “it has been proved to multitudes of ministers that there are plenty of films now available which are fitted for use with Sunday evening congregations”. 33

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Besides the movie presentations, the other most remarked-on feature of the Centenary was the “The Wayfarer – A Pageant of the Kingdom”. As with the rest of the exposition, this pageant was done on a very grand scale – worthy of the director of Intolerance himself. The play, written by a Methodist minister, was “sweeping in scope. Framed by scenes of refugees of the recently completed Great War and a scene of the final blessing which included children of twenty-four nations and representatives of the armed forces as well as Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, this pageant/spectacle/morality play covered history from the Babylonian captivity to the discovery of the Resurrection” (Van Brunt, “Pageantry at the Methodist Centenary”, p. 107). The cast consisted of at least 1,000 actors (both amateurs and professionals, such as Blanche Yurka), a “seated chorus” of 1,500, a “stage chorus” of 100, and 75 members of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. The score combined new compositions with portions of Handel’s “Messiah” and similar classical-religious music. There was, additionally, scenery shipped from New York, a huge cyclorama and a $50,000 pipe organ. Records show that there were 140,800 tickets sold for the twenty-three performances of the three-hour-long play. Thousands of people were turned away each night (Van Brunt, op. cit., pp. 108–09). Part of Hamberg and Bitzer’s assignment was to film “The Wayfarer”, which they did on a specially built outdoor stage. The stage “was laid on tracks in order to maintain the best lighting angles” (Van Brunt, op. cit., p. 118). At the end of the Centenary, the Ohio State Journal (July 14, 1919, p. 3) once again mentions Griffith and company’s participation in recording the exposition, saying that “preparations are already underway in Griffith’s California studios for work to begin in making this new film…. Griffith’s leading scenario writer is weaving together the features of the exposition into a wonderful story”. Neither Griffith nor Hamberg nor anyone else is specifically quoted in the article, but the implication is that plans for the film are definitely going forward. And that’s where the trail goes cold. There are follow-up articles on various uses of motion pictures by the Methodist Church (The New York Times, June 27, 1920, p. 7; The Moving Picture Age, August 1920, p. 20; Literary Digest, February 21, 1920, p. 38), but none of these articles mention Griffith. A second Literary Digest article (May 15, 1920, pp. 46–47) talks about a Methodist “Division of Stereopticons, Motion Pictures, and Lectures, from which pastors may rent pictures at cost” and says that the “first movie sent out under the auspices of this new board was The World at Columbus”. The article goes on to describe a film that sounds much like the one Griffith had planned to make. But no director is mentioned. Is it possible that while Griffith was getting space in magazines and newspapers throughout the country (American Magazine in April 1921 called him the “greatest moving picture producer in the world”), his name would knowingly have been omitted from this article? It doesn’t seem likely. So does this lead to the inference that Griffith never completed the film that he started with such promise and hoopla? Perhaps he lost interest in it, and let Hamberg and others finish it for him. Maybe he wanted nothing to do with the end product for some unknown reason. The researcher longs to see a rental catalogue from the aforementioned Division of Stereopticons, etc., but none of the major Methodist archives has such a catalogue among its holdings. There is a letter in The D.W. Griffith Papers from Christian Reisner, dated 31 July 1919, that hints of trouble: I am almost ashamed to face you with a letter after waiting so long to acknowledge your helpful kindness and your delightful friendliness as shown through the work of your men at Columbus. I fear one or two of my telegrams may have seemed to have a wrong note in them, but I feel sure you know me well enough to understand the spirit of them. When they were sent I did not know exact conditions of affairs.

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Reisner goes on to suggest helping out with the production of the film, perhaps coming out to California to “co-operate with [Griffith]”. There is no record of the director’s reply to Reisner, and no more letters from Reisner in The D.W. Griffith Papers. Reisner wrote several books after this period, but in none of them does he mention Griffith or the film about the Centenary. One might reason that if the film were actually completed and shown, and if the trade publications didn’t pick up the story, local papers would have made some mention of the film being screened in area churches. There is nothing in The New York Times. There is nothing in the Dallas Times Herald, although that paper in the 1919–20 period was full of mentions of local religious happenings and also often contained articles on Griffith and ads for his films. A similar search of the Dallas Morning News had to be abandoned when the microfilm proved too faded and scratched to read. Calls to the Dallas Morning News led to the revelation that there are no actual archival copies of the paper maintained locally – apparently, all those newspapers have been shipped to a warehouse in Scotland. The researcher’s frustration only increases upon the discovery of a student paper written at Ohio Wesleyan University in 1995. The unnamed student (the relevant page of whose paper was supplied by Carol Holliger) wrote that in 1920 “when D.W. Griffiths [sic] showed his film, called ‘The Wayfarer’, in Nashville, observers pronounced the film a failure”. Besides not knowing how to spell the director’s name, the student didn’t cite any references to back up his statement. And inquiries made to various libraries in Nashville brought no answers. But if Griffith’s film was never completed, and if the film The World at Columbus was made by someone else, how did that title end up in the Griffith filmography? If there is proof out there somewhere that the film called The World at Columbus was indeed the film made by D.W. Griffith, why is that proof so elusive? And the most confounding question of all: if the foremost American filmmaker of that period made a film for the Methodist Church, why does no Methodist archive have any record of that fact, much less a copy of the film itself? It’s as if an artist of the caliber of Picasso had painted a mural on a church wall, only to have that mural painted over and completely forgotten. Perhaps further research in local newspapers or through local churches will lead to substantive information about this lost film. Until then, we can only wonder. I wish to express special thanks for the very generous help provided in my research by Carol Holliger, Acting Curator of the Archives of Ohio United Methodism at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio; Page Thomas of the Bridwell Library at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas; L. Dale Patterson of the United Methodist Church Archives at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey; and Dr. Rob Sledge, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History, McMurry University, Abilene, Texas. Thanks also to Madeline Matz of the Library of Congress and to J.B. Kaufman, who tried their best. Karen Latham Everson

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586 THE NEW ART FILM COMPANY

NOBODY HOME Alternate title: Out of Luck Filming date: Summer 1919 Location: Fine Arts studio, 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles Presented by: The New Art Film Company Distribution: Famous Players-Lasky Corp.; Paramount Pictures New York premiere: (week prior to?) 24 August 1919, Rivoli Theatre Release date: 24 August 1919 Release length: five reels, 4,794 feet Copyright date: 18 August 1919 (LP14086); “© D.W. Griffith (New Art Film Co., author)” Supervision: D.W. Griffith Director: Elmer Clifton Scenario: Lois Zellner Story: Lois Zellner Camera: John Leezer, Lee Garmes Assistant director: Leigh R. Smith Cast: Dorothy Gish (Frances Wadsworth); Ralph Graves (Malcolm Dale); Raymond Cannon (Crandall Park); Vera McGinnis (Mollie Rourke); George Fawcett (Rockaway Smith); Emily Chichester (Sally Smith); Rodolph [sic] Valentine [Valentino] (Maurice Rennard); Norman McNeil (Rosebud Miller); Kate V. Toncray (The strong minded aunt); Porter Strong (Eddie the Pup); Vivian Montrose (Florence Wellington) Archival sources: none known Frances Wadsworth believes in signs. She would no more think of walking under a ladder than of cutting two fingers off her right hand. Her friend, Florence Wellington, is in love. But her lover does not possess the social standing that the Wellingtons demand, since his grandfather was a brewer. Florence’s father intimates the lover’s presence is no longer desired – by kicking him out of the house. Florence ’phones [sic] to Frances. Frances consults the stars through the book that tells Past, Present and Future, for ten cents. “Venus is in the ascendant – the stars say elope!” The elopement is a complete success. Incidentally, it gives Frances the opportunity of fulfilling a prophecy of the cards: “A blonde man will enter your life.” The handsome stranger, Best Man at the marriage and elopement ceremony – Malcolm Dale – and Frances fall properly in love. The courtship moves forward rapidly, but unsteadily. For instance, Malcolm first proposes on Friday, the Thirteenth! Then, he tips over the salt! and [sic] finally – worst of all! – the cards insist that a Blonde Lady will enter his life – while Frances is a brunette! Also, the cards hint of a Dark Man in Frances’ life, although Malcolm is a blonde. Frances visits the Newlyweds, at the luxurious apartment in which they have set up housekeeping in another city. There she meets the “Dark Man” – a fortune-hunter who has discovered that Turtle Doves are easy picking. When Malcolm comes to town on business, the fortune-hunter, having resolved to win Frances for himself, leaves no stone unturned in seeking to discredit him. His big opportunity comes when Malcolm meets a jovial westerner, Rockaway Smith, at a cabaret on business. Trouble comes from the fact that Rockaway has with him his daughter, who

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is man-struck in the extreme[.] She is the “Blonde Lady” of the cards. Aided by chance, the fortune-hunter [shows] Malcolm to Frances in w[ha]t seems to be a compromising position, and an estrangement between the lovers follows. An announcement of the engagement of Malcolm Dale to Rockaway’s daughter is published, and before the mistake can be corrected, Frances through pique [sic], agrees to marry the fortunehunter. The cards were right. The Dark Man has entered her life! But, on the day set for Frances’ wedding, the Fates again intervene. A black cat spots the wedding dress with ink, and Frances insists that the wedding must be postponed. She returns to the Newlyweds’ deserted apartment, closed for the week end an hour before. At the railroad station, Mr. Newlywed meets Malcolm and sends him, also to the supposedly empty apartment, to get a good rest. In the apartment, Malcolm hears noises that convince him someone else is in the rooms. So does Frances. So, also do two burglars, who have entered the supposedly deserted apartment, through the connivance of the maid, to life [sic] the wedding silver. In the mix-up that results, the burglars sand-bag both Frances and Malcolm, and succeed in making their escape with the loot into the next apartment. There, however, they are apprehended by Rockaway Smith and marched back, to be turned over to the police. Frances and Malcolm recover consciousness in time to hear furious knocking on the door, where Mrs. Newlywed, friend fortune-hunter, and others, have congregated to demand admittance. It is one o’clock in the morning. Malcolm tried to make a getaway via the fire-escape, only to be caught by the police and returned – to Frances’ arms. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, August 18, 1919, LP14086 [stamped with date August 21, 1919] Making Fun of superstition is the principal business transacted in “OUT OF LUCK” a Paramount picture starring Dorothy Gish. The scenario is by Lois Zellner, and Elmer Clifton was the director. There is a constant stream of comic incidents running through the five parts of the story which is easy to laugh at, and the farce comedy spirit of the entertainment is never lost. The picture is liberally furnished with unusual bits of business and it is capably played by the entire cast. Director Clifton has made the most of every chance to give the production an air of good breeding, and the fun of the picture will please all classes. “OUT OF LUCK” is largely a comedy of situation, with some excellent character drawing to help matters along. Dorothy Gish as Frances Wadsworth, a wistful young person who believes in signs and omens and regulates her life by the decrees of a pack of cards, is right at home in the part. The Gish method of skipping along just on the edge of burlesque but always managing never to overstep the line fits her present part perfectly, and she shows a greater supply than ever of little individual tricks that round out her comedy scenes without delaying the action. Ralph Graves as Malcolm Dale, Raymond Cannon as Crandall Park, the always reliable George Fawcett as Rockaway Smith and Emily Chichester as Sally Smith are the members of the support next in importance to the star. Edward Weitzel, The Moving Picture World, September 6, 1919. p. 1527

No print of this film is known to survive at the time of this writing. Nobody Home (also titled Out of Luck) is another New Art vehicle created for the comic talents of the company’s leading lady, Dorothy Gish. To add variety to the company’s program, this one had a new twist – it was a parody on superstition. This lighthearted froth was written by Lois Zellner and directed by Elmer Clifton, who had directed all of Gish’s New Art productions. Most of the cast were Griffith and New Art regulars, but there was an interesting 37

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newcomer – Rudolph Valentino (listed in the credits as Valentine). Lillian Gish said he was one of Dorothy’s discoveries, though he had been around Hollywood for a year or more – but Dorothy, who had “found” Richard Barthelmess, seems to have had a good eye for male talent (Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, p. 211). The picture was first released and copyrighted as Nobody Home, but when it opened at New York’s Rivoli Theatre the title was changed to Out of Luck, a title that continued to be used during the subsequent release. This indecision about the title was reflected in the description filed for copyright, which had been typed with the phrase “Title decided later”. Since a title was required for registration, that was scratched out and Nobody Home was written in ink. The AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 1911–1920 says the last minute title change was forced by an objection from Guy Bolton, whose play Nobody Home was produced before the film was released. The reviews were generally favorable but not overly enthusiastic. Variety’s reviewer “Leed” commented that it was a new idea and a new treatment, and called it “one small peach of a comedy”. Although Griffith’s involvement was apparently minimal, Lillian Gish said he was on the set one day and suggested that Valentino, who was playing a gigolo, surreptitiously bite a pearl on the strand that a woman was wearing to see if it was real. Paul Spehr

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587 THE NEW ART FILM COMPANY

TURNING THE TABLES Alternate title: Who’s Which Working title: Who’s Which Filming date: Summer 1919 Location: Fine Arts studio, 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles Presented by: The New Art Film Company Distribution: Famous Players-Lasky; Paramount-Artcraft Pictures New York premiere: (week prior to?) 2 November 1919, Rialto Theatre Release date: 2 November 1919 Release length: five reels, 4,803 feet (“running time, fifty-five minutes”, according to Exhibitor’s Trade Review, November 15, 1919, p. 2055) Copyright date: 23 October 1919 (LP14344) Supervision: D.W. Griffith Director: Elmer Clifton Scenario: Lois Zellner Story: Wells Hastings Camera: George Hill [George William Hill?] (according to copyright records); W.R. Hills [Lieut. W.R. Hellis?] (according to Exhibitor’s Trade Review, November 15, 1919, p. 2054) Cast: Dorothy Gish (Doris Pennington); Raymond Cannon (Monty Feverill [Ferverill]); George Fawcett (Prof. Freno Palmer); Eugenie Besserer (Mrs. Feverill [Ferverill]); Kate Toncray (Erma Shirks); Fred Warren (Dr. Spinks); Rhea Haines (Ruth Strong); Porter Strong (Dr. Eddy); Norman McNeil (Swipes Conroy) NOTE: A Biograph film with the same title was produced in 1910. Archival sources: none known Doris Pennington is a “poor little rich girl”. Though an heiress she lives alone with her aunt and Guardian and is far from happy. Her aunt has no sympathy with the high spirits of youth and lives only to keep her house so clean that nobody is comfortable in it and to spend her ward’s income on her sly investments. However, Doris submits to her aunt in everything. The aunt, in turn, is under the dominance of a rascally spirit medium named Professor Freno Palmer. One day while the aunt and the medium are holding a séance in the house, Doris breaks in with a practical joke, arousing the ire of her aunt. Later she comes upon evidence of her aunt’s hidden accounts carried with Doris’s [sic] money and is caught looking over the papers by the aunt herself. This brings things to a climax. Doris is severely punished and feels pretty blue. She even has morose thoughts of hanging herself, but the rope is so uncomfortable and she decides to wait until after dinner. A small ray of sunshine comes into her life when she discovers that she has a new neighbor in the form of a young and very good looking man. She learns that his name is Monty Feverill and that, though perfectly strong and healthy, he has been so coddled by his mother that he believes himself a chronic invalid. Doris is much amused by the laxadaisical [sic] exercises which Monty goes through under the direction of a trainer hired by his doting mother. In the meantime the spiritualistic faker has discovered that the funds on which he has his eye belong not to the aunt, as he supposed, but to Doris. He immediately transfers his affections to

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the girl and is caught by the aunt making love to Doris. The old maid is thus made very jealous and fearful that Doris will find out all about her manipulation of the heiress’s [sic] funds. So she hits upon a wicked scheme. She plans to have Doris judged mentally incompetent by a doctor of a shady reputation and sent to a private sanitarium, where she will be out of the way. So far as the prim aunt is concerned, the girl’s exuberant spirits label her as weak in the head anyway. Doris plays into the fraudulent doctor’s hands when she plays a little trick on her aunt while he is watching her. Her actions appear so strange that the doctor, influenced by his large fee, thinks it safe to ship her away to the sanitarium. This institution happens to be shorthanded, and a nurse is engaged by telephone to bring Doris from her home. In the automobile the heiress plans a coup d’etat and at the very gates of the place she overcomes the nurse and takes her cape and official pin, disguising herself. When the guard opens the gate, it is the real nurse who is assumed to be the patient, while Doris soon discovers that a sanitarium is almost as hard a place for a nurse to get away from as it is for a patient. The psychic faker is still on the job and has learned of the spiriting away of Doris to the sanitarium. Following her there he succeeds in having himself admitted as a patient. To cap the climax, Monty Feverill is under anxious observation by his mother for his queer behavior since catching a glimpse of Doris over the wall and in alarm she has taken him to the sanitarium to be cured. This gives life a new interest for Doris and she might well have passed a pleasant existence there. But the aunt suspects something is up when she discovers that the medium has followed Doris and determines to find out for herself what is in the wind. When she finds her aunt on the ground[,] Doris still posing as a nurse knows she must act quickly if she is to keep up the deception. In the nick of time she puts a little scheme under way, driving away a patient who is expected at the sanitarium and then persuading the head doctor that her aunt is the long awaited inmate. So the scheming old maid is locked into a padded cell before she has a chance to explain. In the meantime the proprietor of the place has found out that an heiress is in his institution and thinks the nurse whose uniform Doris stole is the party in question. He makes violent love to the locked-up nurse and finally marries her, believing all the time it is Doris. When he discovers his mistake and who Doris really is, he is influriated [sic] and threatens to kill both the girl and Monty. They flee for their lives. Monty’s trainer interrupts them. He has been sent by Mrs. Feverill to remove her son. But Doris has made a man of Monty and taught him that his illness is all an illusion. So he starts a battle with fists with the trainer and while Doris gleefully referees the mill knocks the burly professional aside. All their enemies thus vanquished, the lovers kidnap a clergyman and escape with him over the sanitarium wall. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, October 23, 1919, LP14344 [stamped with date October 30, 1919] It comes almost in the nature of a surprise to see Dorothy Gish in a farce based on the “who’slooney-now” idea. The story starts as a light comedy with incipient love between a persecuted young heiress on one side of a garden wall and a young man who has become fond mother on the side, but the love story is swiftly abandoned for some animated scenes in a private sanatorium. All the characters are transported to the sanatorium under one pretext or another, and the fun soon becomes so rampant that all of the cast, lovers included, are made ridiculous through doubts of their sanity. Sane enough is the lively heiress, for she locks up her nurse as a patient and leads the imaginary invalid such a chase that the [hero] becomes abnormally strong, knocking out the toughest keeper in the place and distinguishing himself in an amusing attempt at escape. There are other melodramatic features half-absurd and half thrilling, but it is the little star’s bright revelation of thought and feeling throughout the comedy that holds spectators in a pleased frame of mind. She gets close to the hearts of her admirers by her optimistic personality, her undoubted skill as a

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screen comedienne and her native sense of humor. She is supported by a fine cast, including George Fawcett, Raymond Cannon and Porter Strong. Louis Reeves Harrison, The Moving Picture World, November 15, 1919, p. 363

No copy of this film is known to exist at the time of this writing. A “lunatic farce”. That’s how George Pardy characterized Turning the Tables (also titled Who’s Which) when he reviewed it for Exhibitor’s Trade Review (November 15, 1919). It seems an apt description. After a rather quiet, almost dramatic introduction, the film turned into no-holds-barred burlesque. Not surprisingly, the reviewers were unimpressed with the plot, but liked the film anyway. A plot was a matter of little importance in such a fast-paced comedy. The reviewer for The New York Times called it “the most unrestrained and cheerfully impossible farce in which Dorothy Gish has appeared” (November 3, 1919); Variety reported that the audience at New York’s Rialto Theatre was “convulsed most of the time” (November 7, 1919). Turning the Tables was the last New Art production made at the Griffith studio in Los Angeles. While the film was being made, Griffith was negotiating a move to New York, and by the time it was released operations had been moved from Los Angeles to the East Coast. There was confusion about the film’s title. It was copyrighted, premiered and initially released as Turning the Tables; however, it was listed in Famous Players’ release schedule as Who’s Which, which seems to have been the working title. Paul Spehr

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588 D.W. GRIFFITH

THE GREATEST QUESTION Working title: The Greatest Question; A Story of the Strange Meandering River of Life (from a continuity script) Filming date: August 1919 Location: Fine Arts studio, 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles Presented by: D.W. Griffith Distribution: First National Exhibitors Circuit, Inc. Release date: 28 December 1919 Release length: six reels, 6,224 feet Copyright date: 16 December 1919 (LP14554) Director: D.W. Griffith Scenario: D.W. Griffith or Stanner E.V. Taylor Story: William Hale Camera: G.W. Bitzer Film editor: James Smith Musical accompaniment arranged by: Albert Pesce Cast: Lillian Gish (Nellie Jarvis); George Fawcett (John Hilton); Eugenie Besserer (Mrs. Hilton); Robert Harron (Jimmie [Jimmy] Hilton); Ralph Graves (John Hilton, Jr.); George Nichols (Martin Cain [Mr. Scrubble]); Josephine Crowell (Mrs. Cain [Mrs. Scrubble]); Tom Wilson (Uncle Zeke) Archival sources: FILM – George Eastman House, 16mm acetate positive (William K. Everson/New York University Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm acetate fine grain master (from 35mm nitrate negative received from D.W. Griffith in 1938, no longer extant). MUSIC – University of Minnesota (Arthur Kleiner Collection, Austrian Institute), original score (unspecified parts); Library of Congress (The Museum of Modern Art Collection), orchestral parts (1,1,2,1; 2,2,1,0; drums, strings); microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Item 36 The only home that Nellie Jarvis [had] was a peddler’s wagon, but in that humble home she had found love and tenderness. When a little girl, she saw a young immigrant girl beaten to death by a man and a woman, but the memory faded. Years passed; her father died, and then finally her mother, leaving her alone. The Hiltons, although starvation poor themselves, found room for the friendless orphan. John, the eldest son, upon whom they relied to work the farm, was called to war, leaving the younger brother, the invalid father and a rheumatic old negro to keep the family going. Knowing she was a burden, Nellie went to work for the Scrubble family. Old man Scrubble proved to be a brute and his wife was insane with jealousy. The boy, John, lost his life on a submarine. The blow was too much for the old man’s faith, and bitterness and rebellion entered his heart. Meantime their material affairs grew steadily worse. The younger son couldn’t do much with the farm and at last the old Southerner ordered the farm sold and headed his family for the poor house. The mother went for the last time to the little shrine she had erected for her dead son in the country grave yard. In anguish she called upon God – upon her son to give her some token that she could tie her faltering faith to.

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It seemed to her that her son came back to her and stood over her. And the old father saw also. And to both of their hearts came the great answer; that there is no death and no evil – only eternal life and good. Meanwhile Nellie found herself in a position of terrible danger. Pursued by the old man into a garret, she is rescued form the situation by the old woman – […] rescued only for a more terrible fate. Mad with jealousy […] [o]ld hag is about to commit no one knows what evils, when su[d …] old situation flashes upon the child’s mind. She rec[ognizes] […] [p]air as the murderers of the girl she had seen beaten t[o death.] She confronts them with […] Terrified lest she reveal their guilt, they clo[…] [her. The] old man’s hand is upon her throat. But Jimmie […] some good news to tell his little sweetheart and rushed in just in time to save her. Oil had been discovered on the Scrubble [sic] farm, and this is what had taken him to her[.] Everything ends happily. T[h]e Hiltons are rich beyond their dreams. Wedding bells are in prosp[ec]t for Jimmie and Nellie. Uncle Zeke rivals King Solomon in splendor. Even the Scrubbles are led away to jail with a new light of resignation in their bad old hearts. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, December 16, 1919, LP14554 [document damaged by rips in paper]

As a child, Nellie Jarvis, traveling with her father, an itinerant peddler, witnesses a couple committing the murder of a servant girl and hiding the body. However. her parents ignore her account. Years later, after the death of her father, she returns to the same area, where her mother dies. Taken in by the kindly but impoverished Hilton family, she becomes a close companion to the youngest boy, Jimmy. However, after the elder Hilton son John is drafted into the army, the family reaches a financial crisis. Nellie decides to hire out as a servant to help out. She enters service with the Cain family, who in fact committed the murder she witnesses as a child, but she barely remembers them. She has premonitions of something being wrong in the house, but the financial need of her benefactors makes her repress her concerns. The Cains are cruel masters, the wife beating her viciously for breaking a plate and the husband lusting after her. On submarine patrol in the Atlantic, John Hilton is killed in an accident. At the exact moment of his death, his spiritual mother has a vision of him. Her husband is skeptical, but when the mother makes John’s spirit materialize in the local graveyard, he believes in life after death and his wife’s psychic gifts. But the family’s financial situation worsens, and they are about to sell the farm to a sharper who has secretly discovered oil on their land. The mother, however, has a premonition of the value of the land and calls in experts who inform the family of their unsuspected riches. Meanwhile, Nellie is caught between Mr. Cain’s lust and Mrs. Cain’s cruel jealousy. She is trapped in the attic by Mr. Cain while Mrs. Cain arrives with a pistol threatening to kill them both. However, Jimmy Hilton – rushing to inform Nellie of the family’s new fortune – arrives in time to save her, as Nellie has just recognized the couple as the murderers from her childhood. The Hiltons gain new wealth and the Cains under arrest realize their guilt and ask forgiveness. Love blooms between Jimmy and Nellie.

The Greatest Question remains one of Griffith’s most undeservedly neglected features films. It was one of several films that Griffith made quickly in 1919 to fulfill contractual obligations, and it lacks the big budget of Way Down East, the artistic trappings and publicity accorded 43

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to Broken Blossoms, and most certainly, the epic historical ambitions of The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, or Orphans of the Storm. It decidedly belongs to the intimate and pastoral Griffith, but unlike True Heart Susie or even The White Rose, it has never garnered passionate partisans. Although the main reason for its neglect lies in the lack of publicity build-up Griffith himself accorded it, I would have to confess The Greatest Question does not show the psychological complexity and formal perfection of narrative found in the two other modest Griffith masterpieces, True Heart Susie and The White Rose. In contrast to the sustained tragedy of woman’s martyrdom found in these films and Way Down East, The Greatest Question seems more like a pastiche, very much in the nineteenthcentury melodramatic tradition with stock characters and situations, alternations of low comedy and high drama, and Griffith resolves it with the most hackneyed of happy endings. This complaint may sound strange coming from a defender of the value of melodrama like myself, but whereas Griffith uses these elements in the other films to create social critique and nuanced characters, here one senses them using him, as the film veers along with an almost dream-like logic. But this is not all loss: if the film seems out of control at points, sometimes that dropping of logic or consistency of tone seems to lead Griffith into moments of intense experimentation, direct anticipations of the art cinema of the 1920s of Germany and the Soviet Union. For all its weaknesses, The Greatest Question offers some of Griffith’s boldest moments in the exploration of the portrayal of memory and cinematic metaphor, even as the film confronts its eponymous “greatest question” – the barrier between life and death. But perhaps the strongest case for this film as a minor masterpiece manqué comes from its richly visual pastoral style. Griffith and Bitzer never achieved more rapturous imagery of winding summer lanes, rail fences, sun dappled rural brooks, bountiful orchards and fields – the “beauty of the wind in the trees” that Griffith saw as central to cinematic style – than in this film. True Heart Susie portrays the lonely desolation of small-town life, while the rural imagery of Way Down East often teeters into the monumental (the ice floes and cataract climax). Recalling their best work at Biograph, in The Greatest Question Bitzer and Griffith capture a truly idyllic landscape in such scenes as Lillian Gish (playing Nellie Jarvis) fording a stream in her peddler’s wagon, or Gish and Bobby Harron (as Jimmy Hilton) cavorting like an archetypal innocent couple, whose dawning awareness of sexuality gives them energy and delight, rather than neuroses. (Contrast the aggressive first smooch between Harron and Gish in The Greatest Question or the warm and truly affectionate embrace and kiss they share as Nellie goes off into service, with the same actors’ agonized inability to kiss in True Heart Susie, and the different tone of each film becomes obvious.) Bitzer uses masterfully composed long shots frequently, nesting his characters into this gentle landscape, and framing for carefully composed background even in character-oriented medium shots (such as Nellie’s farewell). Bitzer also carefully threads the heavily symbolic stream through as many shots as possible, setting up a compositional as well as symbolic motif that flows through the film. Yet if the setting in The Greatest Question exudes a sense of bounty and beauty, and the characters of Nellie and Jimmy are free from the repression that William and Susie endure in True Heart Susie, Gothic overtones dominate the film’s plot. Melodrama relies upon the contrast between innocence and depravity, and in this film the intertitles pull out all the stops to characterize the dark side of this equation. The house of the villainous Cain family is described both as “THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS” and “THE CITADEL OF EVIL LEGIONS”, while the lust for Nellie that overcomes Martin Cain like a physical fever is described as “THE DEMON’S RUSHING WINGS”, and Mrs. Cain’s violence toward Nellie is explained as the result of an elemental discordance between Good and Evil: “THE GIRL’S INNOCENCE AND BEAUTY AROUSE THE WOMAN’S ENMITY AND SHE DECIDES TO DESTROY HER”. 44

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A few months before The Greatest Question, Griffith brought an unexpected range of emotional overtones to another elemental tale of Good and Evil in Broken Blossoms. In his authorial opening intertitles to that film, Griffith acknowledged that many viewers would doubt the existence of such an unalloyed melodramatic villain as Battling Burrows. Although Donald Crisp’s performance and make-up may demonize the character, Griffith nonetheless creates an archetypal patriarchal and racist bully in that film. One wonders if he ever thought anyone could believe in the Cain family in The Greatest Question, and the performances by George Nichols and Josephine Crowell could hardly be described as nuanced. When Crowell as Mrs. Cain brandishes her whip and Gish ducks behind the chair she is cleaning and cranks up the rate of her polishing, Griffith seems rather amused by these hackneyed roles and performances. If part of Griffith’s creativity lay in renewing melodramatic tradition cinematically, The Greatest Question walks the line between simply swallowing the clichés and bringing new perspectives to the old material. As Peter Brooks has shown (The Melodramatic Imagination, pp. 79–80; 201–02), the survival and transmutation of melodrama in the twentieth century owes a great deal to psychoanalysis, which seems to interiorize the Manichean duality that melodrama projects onto the world. Griffith’s knowledge of Freud at this point is uncertain (if not outright unlikely), but in his approach to melodrama he anticipated Freud’s sense of the contending powers of sexuality and repression. Thus the first powerfully Gothic sequence of the film occurs in the opening, when Nellie as a little girl runs along the brook that anchors the film’s rural locale. An image of complete innocence, her girlish games bring her to the place where she first encounters the Cains. In an extended sequence of “point of view” cutting, the Cains kill and then bury a servant girl, as the young Nellie watches from behind a tree. At first uncomprehending as she watches the struggle, Nellie laughs, but on the next cut back she is in tears. Besides Nellie’s own trauma in witnessing a violent adult scene she cannot understand (a scene with resonances of Freud’s “primal scene”), Griffith’s portrayal of her isolation in dealing with what she has seen gives this scene an emotional complexity. Nellie returns to her family’s wagon, but her sick mother and busy father neither hear nor understand her. This juxtaposition of evil and innocence, mediated through a traumatic and accidental act of voyeurism, carries a disturbing charge that Griffith threads through the whole film. If Mrs. Cain’s whip-brandishing and Martin Cain’s athletic lust seem simply exaggerations of stereotypes, Martin’s first glimpses of Nellie as an adolescent offers an originally conceived cinematic encounter between innocence and debauchery. Soon after their first kiss, Nellie and Jimmy are playing in the film’s recurrent stream. Nellie wades in the stream barefoot and playfully kicks water at Jimmy on the shore, each kick revealing her delicate, milk-white bare leg. An intertitle introduces this scene as “AN INNOCENT FROLIC”. But is it? This depends, of course, on one’s definition of innocence. If one can see adolescent eroticism as innocent (as I think we should and – as I would emphasize against clichéd views of Griffith as a Victorian puritan – Griffith does as well), then it certainly is innocent. Nellie simultaneously plays like a child while trying out her powers as a woman, aware of her attraction for Jimmy, if still unsure of all it means. But Griffith puts a spin on the complexity of this image, its combination of eroticism and innocence, with the next intertitle which grammatically completes and transforms the earlier one: “ – EXCEPT TO A HIDDEN LASCIVIOUS EYE”. A cut to Martin Cain standing further down the riverbank as he looks off redefines the scene of Nellie splashing in the water as his point of view. Picking up the theme of voyeurism introduced as Nellie witnessed the murder the Cains perpetrated years before, Griffith demonstrates the way in which cinematic editing and point of view can transform the overtones of a scene. 45

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If eroticism was an overtone in the previous appearance of this shot, it now comes to the fore and takes on a sinister quality. Perhaps most interesting (introducing a theme that will later be explored by Hitchcock), the transformation of the scene into a voyeuristic and sinister male gaze takes place through the optical involvement of the film viewer: sharing Cain’s point of view, we now see Nellie as a nubile erotic object on display. One wishes Griffith explored this theme further. Clearly it fascinated him, and Mrs. Cain’s later lethal jealousy is primarily expressed through her voyeurism of her husband’s attraction to Nellie. But unfortunately her “wicked witch” performance does not allow us to explore our own participation in this perverse eroticism and obsession. Griffith thus endows his melodrama with a novel theme of voyeurism, repressed memory and childhood trauma, supplying the most interesting aspect of the film’s plot. The idea of a buried memory slowly emerging clearly fascinated Griffith and led him to some visual expressivity, if not truly supplying a narrative structure. Unfortunately we as spectators are so aware of the Cain family’s absolute degeneracy that we cannot participate in Nellie’s gradual recall of their connection with her earlier trauma. However, Griffith does visually explore the relation between vision and memory here in a somewhat experimental fashion. Nellie’s brief flashback to the murder seems almost subliminal, and her final climactic identification of the Cains with the murderous couple she saw years before is expressed by the image coming into focus, an example of the metaphors of consciousness that film technique generated in the 1910s, already theorized in 1916 by Hugo Munsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. Cinematic metaphors play a key role in this film, and in at least one instance Griffith supplies a direct montage comparison of the sort he had pioneered in Intolerance, and which the European art cinema of the 1920s would elaborate, not only the Soviets, but also the French filmmakers such as Gance, Epstein and Dulac, all of whom we know watched Griffith very closely (although I have not found specific references to The Greatest Question). When, in a poor man’s version of the climax of Broken Blossoms, Martin Cain has chased Nellie into the attic, impelled by the “DEMON WINGS OF LUST”, she turns helplessly around in her final refuge, aware it has become a trap. Griffith cuts to a rat in a trap, snapping the clichéd, but visually vivid, comparison around his imperiled heroine. Thus, even in a film that seems to allow melodramatic characterization to dominate over its more innovative impulses, Griffith continues his experiments with editing and cinematic meaning. From his Biograph films on, Griffith had used editing as a means of creating psychic links between characters over expanses of space, a technique Michael Allen in his insightful study of the melodramatic tradition in Griffith’s features calls the “Doctrine of Sympathy” (Family Secrets, pp. 54–55). Through editing Griffith often expresses an occult psychic sympathy between characters, as Allen describes it: “characters gazing off-screen and ‘seeing’ a space physically distant from their own which contains the object of their bond, whether lover, family member or friend” (op. cit., p. 55). Perhaps no other Griffith film pushes this practice further than The Greatest Question. The clearest instance – which Allen analyses at some length: see Family Secrets, p. 108 – can be found in Mrs. Hilton (as Allen describes her, the Good Mother who contrasts with Mrs. Cain’s archetypal Cruel Mother: see p. 112) “seeing” the death of her sailor son John when a submarine submerges unexpectedly. The sequence is introduced textually with an intertitle quote from scripture: “VERILY, I SAY UNTO YOU, IF A MAN KEEP MY SAYING HE SHALL NEVER SEE DEATH – JOHN 8-51”. It begins with Griffith’s traditional intercutting between offscreen glance and distant scene, as the Bible-reading mother looks off and is intercut with her son’s death. This cutting from a mother or family at prayer and a son’s death in war had first appeared in Griffith’s Biograph film The Fugitive (1910), and reappeared in The Birth of a Nation. 46

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But the intercutting in these earlier films was restricted to a single cut, whereas this sequence lasts for eleven shots and three intertitles. Even more vividly, Griffith follows this edited portrayal of supernatural connections with a truly Gothic and carefully staged ghost scene, anticipating to some degree the uncanny aspects of Weimar cinema in Germany that came soon after this film. Introduced by a shot of lightning flashing over the Hilton home, we cut inside to Mrs. Hilton, still at the table reading her Bible in the glow of a lamp, while her husband sits across from her. Griffith cuts in to closer views as she reads and then seems not simply to look off, but to enter into a sort of trance. A shot of the Hilton house exterior follows, with lightning flashing as its lit windows and crooked gate recall the appearance of a skull. Inside, the rising wind blows the curtains and the father rises to shut the window. In a careful bit of deep staging worthy of European directors of the 1910s like Evgenij Bauer or Franz Hofer, as the father goes to the left background, the front door opens in the foreground concealing him from the camera, while the mother, now on her feet, stretches out her arms and stands in foreground right. Filmed in slightly slow motion, John then enters through the door, crosses to his mother and they embrace. The door closes, the room darkens and John disappears. The room then lightens as the father becomes visible again relighting the lamp (which apparently was extinguished by the wind). The mother continues to stand, arms outstretched. After a cut-in to medium shot she informs the father in an intertitle, “JOHN WAS HERE, FATHER”. This elaborate portrayal of the connection between the son and his mother at the moment of death derives, of course, from the centrality of this theme to the film’s narrative (giving the film, in fact, its title, the question being whether the dead communicate to us). The mother’s premonitions appear at other points in the film (as when Nellie is being beaten by Mrs. Cain, or her premonition that there is oil on the family farm, not to mention her ability to make John manifest himself to the doubting father in the graveyard). Perhaps the most interesting example in terms of anticipations of Weimar films is a sequence where the “doctrine of sympathies” tips into what Allen terms “the Transference of Energy” (Family Secrets, pp. 55–57), as editing conveys not only a transfer of knowledge, but a continuation of movement across cuts, often implying a sort of occult causality. But there is probably no example in Griffith’s cinema where the causal implication appears as strongly as in this film. The sequence comes as Mrs. Cain looms over the sleeping Nellie, brandishing a pistol, determined – as the intertitle tells us – to destroy her innocence and beauty. Griffith cuts from this situation to Mrs. Hilton summoning up the spirit of John in the graveyard. As John appears in superimposition over his cenotaph, Griffith cuts back to a medium close-up of Mrs. Cain seeming horrified, wiping her mouth and backing away from the sleeping Nellie. The implication, of course, is that the spiritual power of Mrs. Hilton has protected the innocent one in her bed. The question might be posed if Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau saw this sequence before he prepared his similar (if more beautifully conceived and composed) sequence of Count Orlok looming over Jonathan and seemingly being repelled by a cutaway to Nina calling out Jonathan’s name back in Wysborg in his 1922 film Nosferatu. In The Greatest Question Griffith confronted (some claim exploited) the renewed interest in the great American metaphysical movement of Spiritualism, which was having a resurgence after World War I due to the desire to communicate with the war dead. Although Griffith continues to pose the possibility of communication with the dead as a question, I do not believe his tendency toward a positive answer indicates only an opportunistic interest in capitalizing on current fashions (although Griffith was undoubtedly doing that as well). Although more elaborate than previous examples, the Spiritualist sequences in The Greatest Question rework devices that play central roles in Griffith’s narrative style and editing technique from the beginning. The relation in early psychoanalysis between depth psychology, the discovery 47

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of the unconscious, repressed memories and the Spiritualist phenomenon appears as well in Griffith’s film, indicating his theme of Spirit communication should not be seen as simply reviving old-fashioned superstition, but as actively engaging with current issues of psychology (see Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, 1970). But if the story of The Greatest Question fully endorses Mrs. Hilton’s psychic ability and indicates the dead can communicate with us, I think Griffith’s own response remains slightly skeptical, although clearly sympathetic (recall his opening authorial intertitle in which he claims “BEHIND THE STRONGEST FAITH, THERE IS A GREAT QUESTION”). Curiously, he precedes the sequence of John’s materialization in the graveyard with an outright parody of this action when Jimmy, Nellie and Uncle Zeke, the family retainer (whose black-faced comedy seems to me possibly more offensive than the outright racism of The Birth of A Nation), mistake a sleeping tramp for a ghost in the same graveyard. Griffith seems to identify with the skeptical Hilton father, suspicious of what he considers superstition, but who is finally converted by ocular proof. If, as historians of Spiritualism have claimed (see J. Stillson Judah, The History and Philosophy of the Metaphysical Movements in America, 1967), the movement could be seen as a popularization of New England Transcendentalism, its compatibility with Griffith’s work becomes clear. Griffith reworked the muted and sometimes ambiguous symbolism and allegory that the literary movement of the American Renaissance (and such writers as Poe, Hawthorne and Melville) developed out of its engagement with Transcendentalism, while giving this tradition a popular and even modern, mass-market twist, drawing on both current fashions and well-worn clichés. If Griffith’s cinematic symbols and metaphors in this film sometimes seem overly familiar, the interweaving of them through the film takes on considerable power. The film’s recurring image of the flowing steam carries this intermingling of cliché and expressivity. Besides providing a locale both recognizable and picturesque for most to the outdoor actions of the film (the witnessing of the murder, the death of Nellie’s mother, Jimmy and Nellie’s flirtation and her falling under Cain’s baleful gaze, the couple’s farewell and embrace, Jimmy’s race to the rescue), the river functions repeatedly as a symbol of life’s mysterious flow. After the death of Nellie’s mother, Griffith introduces the first of two clearly metaphorical shots of the river with the intertitle: “A LIFE FLOWING OUT TO MYSTERIOUS UNCHARTED SEAS”. Similarly, when Jimmy and Nellie must separate as she goes off to work at the Cains’, Griffith repeats the image seen after her mother’s death (sunlight glinting off the stream) followed by an intertitle poetic citation, from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s somewhat skeptical meditation on mortality, “A Farewell”: FLOW DOWN, COLD RIVULET, TO THE SEA, THY TRIBUTE WAVE DELIVER; NO MORE BY THEE MY STEPS SHALL BE, FOREVER AND FOREVER.

If the image seems ready-made, the beauty of its integration into the film – including the larger textural space created by the citation – seems to me undeniable, another case of Griffith renewing received images with his new medium. In this simple pastoral story, at its best moments, Griffith interweaves images of an everyday simplicity with echoes of another dimension. This union of the pastoral and a broader sense of eternity and memory may be best expressed by two instances, one whose meaning is clear, while the other remains somewhat enigmatic. The legible example comes with the first shot of the film, a pan over a pastoral landscape, recalling the opening shot of Griffith’s Biograph masterpiece, The Country Doctor 48

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from 1909. But while serving to set the scene with an introductory establishing shot, the pan also carries otherworldly echoes. Beginning with gravestones gathered around a country church, the pan moves over hillside and field, opening up to a broad vista, clearly evoking the question of death and eternity. The more enigmatic moment comes after the sequence of Jimmy and Nellie’s first innocent kiss and romp through their country world (and just before their frolic in the stream and Cain’s lustful gaze). Griffith (via Bitzer) shows the couple in long shot walking down a country lane away from the camera, almost reproducing the final shot of True Heart Susie. It is preceded by a curious intertitle: “AND WHEN SHE WAS GONE, IT WAS THUS THAT HE ALWAYS REMEMBERED HER”. The title intervenes on a sequence of youthful delight and suddenly invokes both a different time – the future – and a separation not previously hinted at. It suddenly transforms the shot, in effect, into a memory. Although it can certainly refer to the latter point in the narrative where Jimmy and Nellie are separated, it seems excessive in its foreshadowing. More than a narrative anticipation, the intertitle seems to me to express the essence of Griffith’s pastoral filmmaking, its sense of innocence and spontaneity viewed through a filter of later experience and loss. While The Greatest Question never achieves the psychology insight and tragedy of True Heart Susie, this single moment, the interaction between an intertitle and an image – both exquisite – contains the sweet bitterness of that film in miniature. Although the happy ending(s) of The Greatest Question have a certain naïve charm (especially the detail of the barrel of flour being delivered to Eugenie Besserer – earlier in the film – as the neighbor is willing to lend to the Hiltons in their poverty), I can’t find Griffith at his best in the film’s finale. That this story of transcendence resolves itself into a celebration of material goods has a certain typically American irony. Michael Allen draws a nice relation between the uncovering of riches from the earth (the oil which lies beneath the Hilton farm) and the theme of burying and disinterring throughout the film (the murdered servant girl, John’s drowning and reappearance, Nellie’s submerged memory), but the resolution of sudden wealth too closely recalls The Beverly Hillbillies for me to take it seriously. Finally, although Lillian Gish does not reach the depths of acting here that she does in Broken Blossoms or True Heart Susie, her charm and beauty have never been more vivid. As “Little Miss Yes’m” with her ringlets and broad-brimmed hat, Gish projects precisely the innocence and resilience the role calls for. In the soft-focus, backlit close-ups that serve, with their darkened surroundings, as vignetted portraits of the actress, Griffith (and Bitzer – or are these soft-focus shots the work of an uncredited Hendrik Sartov?) create one of our most enduring images of this child/woman, erotic and tender, sweet yet strong. Tom Gunning

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589 D.W. GRIFFITH

SCARLET DAYS Filming date: July–September 1919 Location: Fine Arts studio, 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles; Exteriors: Tuolumne County, California Presented by: D.W. Griffith Producer: D.W. Griffith Distribution: Paramount-Artcraft Pictures Boston premiere: 8 November 1919, Modern Theatre and Beacon Theatre New York premiere: 9 November 1919, Rivoli Theatre Release date: 30 November 1919 Release length: seven reels, 6,916 feet (also listed as five reels in some sources) Copyright date: 24 October 1919 (LP14367) Director: D.W. Griffith Scenario: Stanner E.V. Taylor Story: Stanner E.V. Taylor Camera: G.W. Bitzer Film editor: James Smith Music arrangements: not known Cast: Richard Barthelmess (The Wandering Knight, Don Maria Alvarez [Alverez]); Clarine Seymour (Chiquita, a Mexican dance hall girl [Little Flameheart]); Eugenie Besserer (Rosie [Rosy] Nell); Carol Dempster (Lady Fair, her daughter [an Eastern girl]); Ralph Graves (Sir Whiteheart [John Randolph, a Virginian gentleman]); Walter Long (King Bagley, the dance hall proprietor); George Fawcett (The sheriff); [not credited:] Kate Bruce (The aunt); Rhea Haines (Spasm Sal); Adolphe Lestina (Randolph’s partner); Herbert Sutch (The Marshal); J. Wesley Warner (Alvarez’s man) NOTE: The film has a subtitle, “A Tale of the Old West”, and a title guaranteeing authenticity of authorship: “Anyone advertising a picture as a Griffith production without the name ‘Griffith’ and the trademark ‘DG’ on each film is guilty of fraudulent advertising.” Archival sources: Gosfilmofond of Russia, 35mm acetate negative Rosy Nell, the inmate of a dance hall in one of the smaller towns of California, is startled to learn that her daughter has arrived from Boston. The girl has no suspicion that her mother is not a respectable woman, and fortune throws her into the hands of three men who are touched by her youth and innocence and she is taken to the cabin of two of her new found friends, on the edge of the town. The mother, who has killed one of her companions at the dance hall for robbing her of money which was to take her back to her child and respectability, has been condemned to be hung, but is granted three days in which to visit her daughter. From this point on the story tells of the efforts of the dance hall keeper to get hold of the young girl and of the fight made in her defense by her new champions. One of these men is a desperado named Alvarez. The Moving Picture World, November 22, 1919, p. 453 […] [s]ection of California in the […] has been able to send her […] [gi]rl, who is very beautiful, […] [Ros]y Nell, who has great […] to leave California and […] [a]mid new surroundings. Two

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[…] savings. Seeing all of […] be […] fiercely and in the tussle […] a sudde[n] […] and dies. […], Spasm Sal, […] [favo]rite with the men who frequent the […] [a]re enraged at […l because they believe she has killed […] assembles and, […] by much red liquor, threatens to lynch […] and carried toward a convenient tree. At that moment there […] scene Don Maria Alverez, famed throughout the West as a crack […], […] horseman and a most chivalrous bandit king. The mob has a whole- […] Alverez and quickly yields to his demand that Rosy Nell be spared, […] […] meantime, Rosy Nel[l’]s daughter, now grown into a cultured young […] arrives [un]expectedly from her school. The condemned woman begs the mob to […][…]t her daughter from learning of the fatal fight, and urged on by Alvarez, they agree. It is agreed that for three days Rosy Nell shall be permitted to live with her daughter in a miner’s cabin and all hands are pledged not to reveal a word to the girl about her mother. The next few days are full of happiness for mother and daughter. They review old times together[.] A gallant young Virginian named John Randolph appears on the scene and at once t[akes] an interest in the girl. However, disaster lurks just outside the door. [T]he bully of the camp and the black-hearted propriotor [sic] of the dance-hall dive is King Bagley. He has seen the beautiful girl and is anxious to secure her for himself. On one of his bandit adventures Alverez has stolen a large quantity of gold dust. Bagley now pretends that he thinks the […] is hidden in the cabin where Rosy Nell and her daughter are staying. Assembling a gang he attacks the house. The women are stoutly defended […] [Randolph], and one or two others who sympathize with them. A wild figh[t] […] a battle against ter[r]ific odds, with the occupants of the house […] fi[g]ht. The girl learns the terrible truth about the scarlet […] [B]oth the Virginian [an]d Alverez try to sacrifice their lives […] […]olph goes out to [yi]eld himself to the mob in the hope that […] […] of Alverez […] […]bler and vastly more clever. For years […] [lau]ghing stock of […] [s]heriff until the latter would almost […] him. Now Alve[rez] […] to give himself up to the […] him on […] [re]scue the daughter of Rosy Nell. […] disperses Bagley’s disreputable […] with a bullet through her […] […] law at last, comes little […] Sheriff to give the big […] beneath his rough exterio[r] […] to do his full duty. […] horsemanship that have won […] dashes away at breakneck […] […], but somehow his aim goes […]. So the brave Mexican […] [in]to his arms the beautiful […] […]ob’s bullets. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, October 24, 1919, LP14367 [stamped with date November 3, 1919. Document heavily damaged by chemical deterioration.]

In the time of the 1849 gold rush, a woman in a mining town dance hall/brothel has a daughter back east raised in respectability and innocence. When the guardian dies suddenly before she can tell Rosie Nell’s daughter the truth, the girl sets out to find her mother. At first protected by the men of the camp by virtue of her innocence, the girl finally learns about her mother’s profession before the mother dies. A “Robin Hood” character rescues the gold that the mother had saved for the daughter’s education. The daughter is desired by all the Westerners but she accepts the hand of one of the miners, a Southern gentleman.

Long considered a lost film, Scarlet Days was recovered by the Museum of Modern Art from the Soviet film archive, Gosfilmofond, in the early 1970s. The original English titles were restored from title sheets marked “corrected” and dated 19 September 1919, in the D.W. 51

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Griffith Collection at the Museum, but were not printed in an appropriate typeface or even in a large enough size. To this date, the restoration of Scarlet Days remains incomplete. Some of the sources for Scarlet Days are provided by an introductory title: THIS STORY CORROBORATES THE OLD SAYING THAT TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION – INCIDENTS BEING TAKEN FROM ACTUAL EPISODES OF THOSE STIRRING DAYS. WE REFER YOU TO “REMINISCENCES OF A RANGER” BY HORACE BELL, H. C. MERWIN’S “BRET HARTE,” OR HITTELL’S “HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA”. Although not acknowledged in the credits, the story is also based in part on the real-life adventures or myths of an actual Western outlaw, known as a sort of Robin Hood, Joaquin Murieta. In the response to one of those claims of plagiarism that constantly trouble the movie industry, the author of the scenario for Scarlet Days, Stanner E.V. Taylor, wrote a letter that sheds some light on how Griffith’s scripts were prepared:

About a year ago, Mr. Griffith told me he wanted a Western story, but made no suggestions about plot, locale or characters. Two weeks later.... I outlined the plot I had conceived verbally to him.... This plot was the same as that presented on the screen with these exceptions. The locale was not California, but Arizona, the time was not 1849, but 1875.... Later, when Mr. Griffith began to prepare for his production, the location and time of the story was changed, the bandit was altered to assume the aspects of Joaquin Murietta [sic] and three or four historic incidents were introduced.... If [the studio scenarist] made any suggestions about Murietta and early California these came from his own mind and were the result of his study of and interest in the history of early California. (Stanner E.V. Taylor, letter dated December 1919, in The D.W. Griffith Papers)

The intertitles of Scarlet Days equate the romance of the old West with the age of medieval chivalry, which accounts for some of the fanciful character names, such as The Wandering Knight, Lady Fair, and Sir Whiteheart. Another intertitle introduces “THESE SIR KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN WEST”. This is a long way from the gritty one-reel Western melodramas that Griffith made at Biograph, such as The Last Drop of Water (1911), Under Burning Skies (1912), The Female of the Species (1912) or Man’s Lust For Gold (1912), among many others: they portrayed authentic aspects of the harsh existence of the gold miners and the hardships of the early settlers of the West, the dust, the hot sun and the spacious landscapes of the West. In Scarlet Days, the Western as genre has become an exercise in nostalgia and romance. In the opening scene Don Maria Alvarez (Richard Barthelmess), the Robin Hood character, an aristocratic Spanish gentleman sitting easily on his horse, experiences a flashback of memory that supplies both background narrative and character information, a flashback consisting of several shots and intertitles: as a prank, while wearing a mask, Alvarez held up the sheriff of Angel’s Camp for the reward offered for his own capture. In the outlaw’s glee, there is more than a touch of the joyous and mischievous character that Douglas Fairbanks played in his comedies. The same Fairbanks spirit is portrayed later in the film, when John Randolph (Ralph Graves), the Virginian gentleman, escapes from his sleeping guard by using his feet and knees to lift the guard’s knife to cut himself free of his ropes. The flashback in Scarlet Days is no longer just a “flash”, as it was when used in The Girl Who Stayed at Home. Now it is part of the narrative. Nevertheless, as though to be sure that the spectator is not confused by it, the flashback is introduced with an intertitle that describes Alvarez as “DREAMING OF PAST EVENTS”: here is the redundancy that characterized the classic cinema. The Spanish don is not to win the fair maiden despite his aristocratic background, even in the leading role. Another Hispanic, the little Mexican girl (Clarine Seymour) who loves him with blind devotion, is awarded to him at the very end. By the rules of casting and the emphasis of the narrative, we could expect that Richard Barthelmess would win any contest 52

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with Ralph Graves to be the romantic hero. But the “white” heroine is won by the gentleman from Virginia, who reads poetry to her. It would be nice to think that this was an innovation, an unexpected resolution, but I am afraid it must be taken for an example of the miscegenation taboo of this time. Griffith had had the possibility to hire the not-yet-famed Rudolph Valentino for this role, but preferred Richard Barthelmess, who looks altogether too wholesome for the good-bad man role and does not look the least Spanish. In the very next year, the Latin lover finally comes into his own, but not yet, at least not in Griffith’s films. The plot unrolls in action-filled scenes. Angel’s Camp is filled with rough miners, yet in the mythic chivalric tradition of the West they are determined to protect the girl’s innocence. She learns the truth about her mother only when hiding under the floor boards during a shootout. The villain of the piece is Bagley, played by Walter Long, the owner of the dance hall, who takes Rosie Nell’s money after Spasm Sal, the original thief, dies in a heart attack. Bagley is equally ready to hand over Rosie Nell for a murder charge, although she is granted three days to be with her daughter. He lusts with evil intent for the young Lady Fair: he is a voyeur watching her undress through the cabin window, and he is the would-be rapist when he finds the two women hiding in the cave. Eugenie Besserer was much admired for her acting in the role of Rosie Nell by Frances Agnew, the critic for the Morning Telegraph of 16 November 1919, who called it “a dramatic performance seldom seen on the screen”. The role embodies a popular theme in melodrama, in which the mother works at a disreputable profession in order to provide a respectable upbringing for her daughter. It was not an original idea, but a change from the saintly whitehaired mothers found in so many other silent films. As Rosie Nell, Besserer rocks an imaginary baby in her arms, and keeps a costume of respectable mother-type clothes deep in her closet that she can wear when meeting her daughter. She fights fiercely against another woman, Spasm Sal, to protect her savings because they mean a hope for a decent life for her and her daughter. She is the good-bad woman. For all her praise for Besserer, Agnew does complain of two scenes that she said should have been caught by the censors, featuring Dempster and Walter Long. I suppose that what she objected to was the following: Long thrusts his knee into the ruffles of Dempster’s skirt in one scene, and then in the other, the rape scene, with Dempster’s dress pulled off her shoulders, Long starts to lift her skirts, both rather explicit and crude gestures for 1919. But Rosie Nell’s character as a prostitute, or dance-hall girl in the euphemism of 1919, was not offered up for criticism. Scarlet Days is a minor film in the Griffith canon. It was probably made in haste, because Griffith was doing a lot of things at once in 1919. Scarlet Days was the last of the Artcraft contract, and Griffith’s mind was on his new enterprise, one that he hoped would bring him independence, the partnership of United Artists, although he first had to make the three films for First National with which he hoped to finance his own studio at Mamaroneck, New York. He described Scarlet Days to Adolph Zukor (in The D.W. Griffith Papers) as “a big drama with lots of comedy, real scenery, big action”. I would call it a small drama with a little comedy, a little real scenery, and lots of action. Eileen Bowser

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590 THE NEW ART FILM COMPANY

MARY ELLEN COMES TO TOWN Filming date: finished by October–November 1919 Location: Fine Arts studio, 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles Presented by: The New Art Film Company Distribution: Famous Players-Lasky Corp.; Paramount-Artcraft Pictures Release date: 14 March 1920 Release length: five reels, 4,704 feet Copyright date: 17 January 1920 (LP14680) Director: Elmer Clifton Scenario: Wells Hastings Story: Helen G. Smith Camera: George W. Hill Cast: Dorothy Gish (Mary Ellen); Kate Bruce (Mary Ellen’s mother); Ralph Graves (Bob Fairacres [Norman Cabell]); Adolphe Lestina (Colonel Fairacres [Colonel Cabell]); Charles Gerrard (William Gurson, alias “Will the Weasel”); Raymond Cannon (“Beauty” Bender); Bert Apling (“Hard” Harris); Rhea Haines (Flossie Fleurette) Archival sources: None known. For some time, a 35mm nitrate positive (with Portuguese intertitles) at the Cinemateca Brasileira of São Paulo with the title Inclinação pelo palco had been identified as Mary Ellen Comes to Town. According to Carlos Roberto de Souza, this is a print of Stage Struck (Allan Dwan, 1925). The Cinemateca Brasileira made a 35mm acetate negative from the nitrate, destroyed ca. 1987; the Museum of Modern Art in New York has a 35mm acetate positive derived from this source. Mary Ellen […] dispenses soda at the fountain in the drug store in a little sleepy Southern town. She is a “regular girl” and anxious to see more of the world than her rural surroundings offer. One day the northern flyer becomes stalled near the village. Mary Ellen happens along while a beautiful woman whom she recognizes as a well known actress is leaving the train to take the air. She speaks to the vision and the conversation makes her more determined to visit the Big City. So she starts off. In the meantime, Bob Fairacres, son of the richest man in the village returns from the war. Shortly afterward a letter comes to him advising him to look after some property of his in New York. He starts out on the same train that Mary Ellen takes, though they are unknown to each other. In New York Mary Ellen finally gets a job as singer in a cabaret. The manager of the place, who is a crook, has been tipped off that Bob Fairacres is carrying around a bundle of cash. He decides to rid the Southerner, who has become a frequenter of the cabaret, of the roll. The other girls in the place failing in their efforts to act as decoys, Gurson, the proprietor, drafts Mary Ellen for the task, thinking her youthful innocence will lure Fairacres. To make sure she will do his dirty work, Gurson plants some money with her, then accuses her of stealing it and forces her to be his tool or go to jail. She inveigles Bob into a park and pretends to faint in his arms. He thinks she is hungry and takes her to a restaurant, where Mary Ellen loses her nerve and her heart and confesses everything to him. Between them they concoct a scheme to foil the crook and do so handily. Meanwhile, Cupid is hard at work, and Mr. and Mrs. Bob Fairacres spend their honeymoon in the same little country town whence they both have sprung. Paramount press book synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, January 17, 1920, LP14680

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“Mary Ellen Comes to Town” concerns a young stage-struck girl in a sleepy little southern town, who is the dispenser at the only modern soda fountain in the place. She spends most of her time day-dreaming, and never fails to go down to the depot to see the New York train go by. One day, after some hundreds of trips on which it does not even hesitate, a combination of a hot-box and a cow on the track brings the train to a stop. During the wait a famous actress descends to take the air and Mary Ellen prevails upon her to give her a card to a theatrical agency. She then coaxes her mother for permission to go to New York to “make her fortune”. On the train with her is a young man recently returned from the army, who is the only person in town she has never met. She lands a job in a shady cabaret, whose manager runs it merely as a blind to cover his criminal activities. He puts up a scheme to rob Mary Ellen’s townfellow, and forces her, by staging a fake robbery implicating her, to help him work the badger game. However, at the last moment, Mary Ellen, who has fallen in love with the proposed victim, refuses to go on with the game, and the tables are turned on the villain. The finale finds Mary Ellen, on her honeymoon trip, back in her home town, a wiser and happier girl. The Moving Picture World, March 6, 1920, p. 1680

The last in a popular series of Dorothy Gish vehicles directed by Griffith protégé Elmer Clifton for Paramount-Artcraft in the late 1910s (seven films were released in 1919 alone), Mary Ellen Comes to Town is now lost. Contemporary reviews were mixed, as the sample below indicates: This Paramount-Artcraft story, apparently written with the sole purpose of affording Dorothy Gish an opportunity to display her peculiar talents, serves its purpose admirably. Miss Gish makes excellent use of her features and feet to the amusement of the audiences, and the laughs average about one a minute throughout the running of the picture. […] Miss Gish’s comedy is delightful, some of the funniest bits being her attempt to cry through a liberal application of grease paint and cold cream; her method of measuring her hall bed room, and her singing of “Sweet Adeline.” If the latter effort sounded anything like it looks, it must have been a “scream”. (H. Clyde Levi, The Moving Picture World, March 6, 1920, p. 1680) Dorothy Gish does much to put life and fun into the old story of the innocent country girl at the mercy of city villains in “Mary Ellen Comes to Town,” at the Rialto this week. The story itself follows well-worn lines, but Miss Gish’s antics make it refreshing. [She] does not burlesque it, and missed an opportunity in not doing so, but at least she does not take it seriously, and accordingly has not done so badly as she might have. (The New York Times, March 22, 1920, p. 12) Where, oh where is the “Little Disturber” of “Hearts of the World,” “Boots,” “I’ll Get Him Yet” and other photoplays of more ancient vintage? Surely, Dorothy Gish has not had a real good vehicle since “I’ll Get Him Yet” and more’s the pity, for there is no question that this peppy little bit of femininity has plenty of star ability. […] The blame can hardly be placed on Elmer Clifton, the director, for it was he that directed the youngest member of the Gish family when she made some of her best pictures. The fault must lie in the story – a rather queer mixture of melodrama and comedy, but the right balance has not been attained. […] The settings are few and yet wholly convincing, but it is a shame to see Dorothy Gish in such a production, when she has shown what she can do with the right material. (Geo. P. Bishop, Motion Picture News, March 6, 1920, p. 2389) Here is a feature that starts out with all the indications that it is to develop into a whale of a comedy, but that is about all that it does. After the opening is set it does a flop and Miss Gish is

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far from delivering what is expected of her in this production. […] The early country scenes looked as though they had been laid out by D.W. himself as far as Miss Gish’s work was concerned, but after that there was nothing to indicate that he had ever looked at the picture again. […] There isn’t much to the production. (“Fred.”, Variety, March 26, 1920, p. 51)

The Variety reviewer’s allusion to D.W. Griffith is the only contemporary reference that I have found to suggest that Griffith was in any way involved in the making of Mary Ellen Comes to Town, and it is tenuous, at best. Given Elmer Clifton’s long service in Griffith’s company, first as an actor and assistant, and then as a director in his own right, it is far more likely that the younger man simply turned to the example of his mentor’s best work in an effort to impart a nostalgic sheen to the film’s opening scenes of small town life, than it is that Griffith himself ever appeared on the set. Steven Higgins

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591 D.W. GRIFFITH, INC.

THE LOVE FLOWER Working titles: Black Beach; The Gamest Girl; The Gamiest Girl; The Girl Who Dared; Love and the Law; The Endless Trail Filming date: 14–29 December 1919 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York; Nassau, Bahamas Islands; Florida? Producer: D.W. Griffith Distribution: United Artists Corp. (see note below) New York premiere: 22 August 1920, Strand Theatre Release date: 5 September 1920 Release length: seven reels (title on George Eastman House print: “NOTE TO THE OPERATOR: This picture should be run eighty feet to a minute or twelve and one-half minutes to each reel” [= 21 fps]) Copyright date: 14 August 1920 (LP15502) Director: D.W. Griffith Adaptation: D.W. Griffith Source: “Black Beach”, the short story by Ralph Stock in Collier’s National Weekly (September 13, 1919) Camera: G.W. Bitzer, Paul H. Allen Production assistant: Elmer Clifton Music arranged and synchronized by: Albert Pesce Cast: Richard Barthelmess (Bruce Sanders [Jerry Trevethan]); Carol Dempster (Stella [Margaret] Bevan); George MacQuarrie (Thomas Bevan, Stella’s [Margaret’s] father); Anders Randolf (Matthew Crane); Florence Short (Mrs. [Clara] Bevan); Crauford Kent (Her visitor); Adolphe Lestina (Bevan’s old servant); William James (Crane’s assistant); Jack Manning NOTE: Russell Merritt to the Editor (December 1, 2005): “The Love Flower was produced as a First National (the ledgers refer to it as N-3), shot on the same trip to Florida as The Idol Dancer. But once again Griffith bought it from his would-be distributor to release it instead as his second United Artists film.” Prints of this film have an original DWG title card in the leader, indicating that the film should be projected at 80 feet per minute, corresponding to ca. 21 frames per second. Modern sources suggest 20 fps as the appropriate projection speed for this title. Archival sources: FILM – George Eastman House, 16mm acetate positive (William K. Everson Collection/New York University); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm acetate fine grain master (from 35mm nitrate negative received from D.W. Griffith in 1938, no longer extant); Gosfilmofond of Russia, 35mm acetate negative. MUSIC – University of Minnesota (Arthur Kleiner Collection, Austrian Institute), original score (unspecified parts); Library of Congress (The Museum of Modern Art Collection), orchestral parts (1,1,2,1; 2,2,1,0; tympani and drums; harp; strings); microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Item 50 Bevan returns from serving an undeserved sentence in prison to find himself a social alien in his home town and the breach between him and his unsympathetic wife is widened by Bevan’s affection and his wife’s hatred for his daughter by his first wife.

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Bevan meets the man, Crane, who “sent him up” and Bevan and his daughter decide to go away and start over again. On their way, Bevan is waylaid by a servant who tells him of his wife’s infidelity and he goes back to prove the charge, incidentally killing the man. Crane hears of the murder and intercepts the daughter on her way to the boat but Bevan coming up from the rear makes a captive of Crane, until he and his daughter have embarked. They land on a South Sea uncharted island and live there lone [sic] with one servant. Visiting a nearby island, Stella meets a young chap on his way to the port from which she and her father fled. In the knowledge of the mutual attraction which springs up between them, this Boy does not understand her terror of him, but yields to her unexplained entreaties to go away. The Boy, Sanders, arrives at the port he was making for, and Crane, who has heard rumors of a man and a girl living on a desert island, arranges pass[a]ge back with the unsuspicious Sanders on his cargo vessel. On their arrival at the island, Stella, seeing Crane, refuses to talk to Sanders, believing that he has brought Crane there deliberately. Stella sinks Sanders’ boat and attempts by various means to murder either Crane or both Crane and Sanders, in spite of which Sanders persists in his suit and, when his sunken boat is brought to shore by the tide, he repairs it and proves his good faith by sinking it again. This brings about an understanding between him and Stella. In the meantime, Crane has attracted the attention of his assistants by a signal fire and they arrive to rescue him. Stella, fearing that rescue means the gallows for her father, again plans to murder Crane, though her plan means going to her death with him. Sanders’ timely arrival prevents the execution of her plan. Sanders himself tries to detain Crane on the island, but is foiled by an inadvertent act of a servant, and Crane making a dash for the boat comes to grips with Bevan on a cliff, from which they are both cast into the sea. Bevan, a good swimmer, gets under cover and Crane, believing him dead, sails away with Stella and Sanders, who knowing that Bevan has saved himself, come back later as man and wife to join him on the island. Press book synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, August 14, 1920, LP15502 [stamped with date September 4, 1920]

Plagued by a past financial indiscretion, Thomas Bevan ekes out a living as a trader on the West Indies island of Mennanee. Their living conditions fail to satisfy his wife, Clara, who tries to find happiness in affairs. About to depart on a business trip, Bevan is told by a servant that his wife is entertaining another man in their home. When Bevan confronts them, the lover draws a gun and is shot accidentally in the ensuing struggle. Bevan’s devoted daughter Margaret observes the incident and agrees to join her father in his escape from the island. A lawman who has been tracking Bevan for years, named Crane, unsuccessfully tries to prevent their departure. The Bevans head for a South Seas island named Monaki where they live in virtual isolation. One day a wealthy young man, Jerry Trevethan, who is sailing in the region, lands on the island and is taken with Margaret. Fearing he might be searching for her father, she asks him to leave. Upon arrival at a nearby port, Jerry encounters Crane, who convinces Jerry to take him to the island the young man recently visited. When Jerry returns accompanied by Crane, Margaret assumes Jerry must be a paid informer and will have nothing to do with him. She also damages Jerry’s boat and sinks it so that Crane will not be able to take her father back to justice. A police boat heads out to search for Crane, who is sending out smoke signals to draw attention to his whereabouts. Convinced that Crane will send her father to the gallows, Margaret makes several attempts on Crane’s life, but is thwarted in each instance. Jerry convinces Margaret of his integrity by voluntarily sending his boat under again after it resurfaces with the receding tide. He then locks Crane in the Bevan cabin to allow the fugitives to escape, but Crane escapes and confronts Bevan on a cliff overlooking the sea. They both fall over after struggling and when Bevan fails to resurface, Crane assumes he has died. Just 58

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prior to leaving the island, Jerry and Margaret discover that her father is still alive and tell him to remain hidden on the island until they can return.

The Love Flower, filmed quickly around Nassau in the Bahamas, as part of a three-picture deal with First National, is typically dismissed by most Griffith scholars as a potboiler the director made for the money. The convoluted narrative and often perfunctory technique Griffith applies to its telling do little to dispel that negative assessment. While The Love Flower boasts some atmospheric cinematography by Billy Bitzer, an engaged performance by Richard Barthelmess and occasionally delirious demonstrations of daughterly devotion, it usually seems like the work of a director marking time until his next important project, in this case, Way Down East. When one wonders how Griffith’s reputation as a director of merit suffered such a marked decline in the 1920s, films like The Love Flower provide ample evidence. Placed within the context of 1920 studio filmmaking, The Love Flower is certainly no worse than the average feature. What is dispiriting is that those aspects of the film which seem definably Griffithian reside on the same level of mediocrity as those moments which one might attribute to any journeyman director of the era. At this point, Griffith’s depiction of the womanchild as a product of nature was becoming almost parodic. Watching Carol Dempster gambol in the surf, repeatedly tossing her arms up in the spray, or demurely posed in a garden, gazing dewily at bowers of roses, one is struck by the predictable shallowness of Griffith’s conception of female innocence. The Love Flower reaches its nadir in this regard when Dempster dresses up the requisite kitten in baby clothes and then encourages a feline embrace of a tiny goat kid. Remarkably, this moment of enforced zoological affection is meant to convey the character’s emerging maternal instincts. More successful at demonstrating Margaret Bevan’s emotional growth is the brief moment when she views an obviously enamoured island couple. Rather than relying on animal substitutes, Griffith here provides undiluted desire through point of view; coupled with the lush atmospherics of the mise-en-scène and Bitzer’s sense of mood, this relatively straightforward approach proves Griffith could achieve more contemporary effects. The slowly developing relationship between Margaret and Jerry finds its major obstacle in her belief that he means to aid in the capture of her father. The fact that Margaret chooses to construe the remedy to her sexual isolation as a threat to her intense bond with her father provides a few moments of invigorating fury, most obviously when she takes an axe to Jerry’s boat and causes it to sink. But the narrative constantly distracts from the psychosexual frisson her attraction to Jerry produces by making the figure of Crane the main object of her anger. Margaret attempts to kill Crane no less than three times, most spectacularly when she tries drowning him, creating the opportunity for some exciting underwater filming. But overall, the figure of Crane is an impediment to the film developing its most intriguing situation: Margaret’s dilemma in choosing between Jerry and her father. Rather improbably, the solution ultimately devised is that she need not make a choice, as the narrative allows her to keep both. (Even so, the film implies that the threesome can only sustain their relationship by continuing to live on the island, isolated from “the law”.) But while we are told that Margaret will return with Jerry to her father, what we are shown conveys the opposite. The film ends with the police file photograph of Thomas Bevan (pictured with his daughter, no less) marked “Dead”, followed directly by the young couple featured alone on a boat surrounded by the emblem of their relationship: the love flower. The insistence on imagery associated with Jerry and Margaret’s love further confirms the negation of the father stressed in the previous shot. The urge to maintain the intensity of the father/daughter bond even as it is supplanted by the union of the couple results in this strangely contradictory conclusion, where visual representation refutes the assurances of the title cards. Were all of The Love Flower as suggestive as the tensions produced within its final moments, it would warrant a more extended reappraisal. Charlie Keil 59

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592 D.W. GRIFFITH

THE IDOL DANCER Alternate title: The Idol Dancer, A Story of the Southern Seas Working title: Fires of Love Filming date: 24 November–1 December 1919 (Florida); 12 January–16 February 1920 (Mamaroneck) Location: in and around Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Distribution: First National Exhibitors Circuit, Inc. New York premiere: 21 March 1920, Strand Theatre Release date: 21 March 1920 Release length: seven reels, 7,033 feet Copyright date: 7 May 1920 (LP15114) Director: D.W. Griffith Scenario: Stanner E.V. Taylor Story: Gordon Ray Young Source: “Heathens” and/or “Blood of the Covenanters”, the short stories (publication undetermined) by Gordan Ray Young Camera: G.W. Bitzer, Paul H. Allen Production assistant: Elmer Clifton Film editor: James Smith Cast: Clarine Seymour (Mary, also known as White Almond Flower); Richard Barthelmess (Dan McGuire [the Beachcomber]); George MacQuarrie (Rev. Franklyn Blythe); Creighton Hale (Walter Kincaid); Kate Bruce (Mrs. Blythe); Thomas Carr (Donald Blythe); Anders Randolf (The Blackbirder); Porter Strong (The Rev. Peter, a native minister); Herbert Sutch (Old Thomas); Walter James (Chief Wando); Adolphe Lestina (Black slave); Florence Short (Pansy); Ben Graver (Native boy [Pago]); Walter Kolomoku (Native musician) Archival sources: George Eastman House, 16mm acetate positive (William K. Everson/New York University Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm acetate fine grain master, 6,817 ft. (from 35mm nitrate negative received from D.W. Griffith, no longer extant); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) On Rainbow Beach, an island under the Southern Cross, the story is laid. A tale of love and adventure, of men out-stripped and buffeted by eddying fortune. The natives of the little village go about their peaceful tasks, under the spiritual guidance of the Reverend Franklyn Blythe, a missionary, stern as the granite hills of his New England home. Much stress is laid on the clothing worn by the women and clothes are a matter of feud between Donald, the missionary’s little son[,] and Pago, a native heathen much opposed to “pants”. The Reverend Blythe’s household, besides his wife and son, consist of Pansy, a savage girl, who yields to missionary gingham but wriggles free from all other convention, and Peter, the missionary’s first convert and most faithful assistant. Peter is fond of his religion – especially the high hat and frock coat part of it. Between Pansy and Peter there is considerable attraction but Peter cannot allow his dignity to be ruffled by the atrocious wriggles of the savage girl. Among the few white people on the island, Old Thomas[,] a trader on the beach, is the most interesting. He lives with his foster-daughter, a vivacious, dark-skinned, dark-eyed creature, [a]

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strange mixture of races and disposition. He has long ago given up trying to understand her but makes a last desperate effort to induce her to give up her savage costume of a grass skirt and a few beads and don the missionary gingham. But she cajoles and, as usual, has her own way. A bit of human wreckage somehow or other cast upon Rainbow Beach, is Dan McGuire, the Beachcomber. Without the courage to run the race – without illusions – without dreams, save sometimes perhaps that he might have been a better man in the distant land from which he came. He finds it easy to eke out a living here where nature supplies most of the wants of life and with plenty of gin he does not lack consolation. Lying on the b[eac]h in a drunken stupor, he is found by Mary, dancing on her way in and out of the waves in happy abandon. Not realizing that the man is intoxicated she tries to warn him of his danger from the incoming tide. But one whiff of his breath and she knows but still she helps him to his feet and staggers to Old Thomas’ hut with him. The trader is d[i]sgusted with her find and tries to get some information from the stranger. But somehow Mary has taken a fancy to the drunken beachcomber and persuades her fosterfather to keep him with them until he sobers up. The man had seen much and travelled far but it pleased his fancy to tell the old man and girl wild tales of adventures never really known – of cities never visited. Old Thomas was something of a liar himself but the superior quality of the Beachcomber’s yarns win [sic] his admiration and undying friendship while Mary only laughs. Thousands of miles away in a New England village, Walter Kincaid, the missionary’s nephew[,] decides that he must seek a softer climate for the menace of a dangerous illness. Walter has led a narrow[,] restricted life – his most serious moral offense has been kissing his cousin in a dark hallway – and perhaps it is as much to escape his dull, repressed life as to seek a softer climate, that he sets forth for the South Seas. There is much preparation at Rainbow Island for the coming of the white lad. The girls are given new gowns and Pansy is vainly scolded for her strange antics. Coming to Old Thomas[’] hut to try to induce Mary to wear the missionary gingham, Reverend Blythe and Peter encounter the Beachcomber. He laughs at their invitation to come to church and they turn to Mary with the gingham dress. She refuses absolutely and when Peter stays behind to try to succeed where Mr. Blythe had failed she drives him away with anything coming handy. Finally Walter Kincaid arrives and a trader’s boat b[r]ings him from the steamer. He is met by the natives in gala attire and is much shocked by Pansy’s wriggles for his especial benefit. Camped on the other side of Rainbow Island is a notorious Blackbirder and his band of tawny natives, black head-hunters and fierce cannibals from the Solomon Islands. He hears of loot stored in the missionary village and wanders down at the head of his band which he keeps in practical slavery by generous use of the lash and of gin. The argument concerning pants – to wear them or not to wear them – is getting serious between the two little boys. It is now a question of their respective God’s choice in the matter and is settled to the black boy’s satisfaction by blows. The black’s triumph is great until the missionary comes along and finds the little savage holding his son under water. He declares it is all right – that the white god is so strong he will not let Donald drown. The missionary leads Donald away but in Donald’s heart is a fierce vow to make the black wear those pants yet! Another conflict of wills between atheist and believer is going on between the Beachcomber and Walter Kincaid. In half fearful admiration of the Beachcomber’s creed – To live to love – to wander strange cities – to know life – he feels a stirring of his sluggish blood and a vague, tempting dream that some day he too may lead a life of mad adventure, the right of youth in springtime. His dream is colored by visions of the gorgeous Mary in barbaric array flashing in and out of the waves and through the tropic[al] forest. She early takes a fancy to the white boy and invites him to share with the Beachcomber the hospitality of the Trader’s hut. Here Kincaid was given an opportunity to see [an entirely] different phase of life. As Mary danced the ancient heathen dances of her people he watched – and wondered. His puritan blood sometimes pounded guiltily at his cheeks but he could not help but feel flattered when she snatched

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the musical board away from the Beachcomber and gave it to him to play, after the Beachcomber, through jealousy of the frail boy, had twice purposely beat out of time. In the swooning odor of magnolia bloom in the tropic[al] night, the Beachcomber swept away by his passionate love for this alluring feminine flower sweeps her into his arms and coming down to the beach prepares to take her for his own in a lawless love on a distant island. But the memory of what Old Thomas had done for him and his love for the girl, Mary, hold him back and he releases her. But she draws a dangerous knife from her belt and threatens that if he ever dares to touch her again she will not hesitate to use her weapon. The girl slips away from the trader’s cottage to dance her heathen dances before a secret idol in the heart of the jungle. Here the savage chief, on his search for treasure, sees her and decides she is a pearl more radiant than any nestled in the translucent bosom of the sea. As Mary dances, ignorant of any danger[,] on one side Kincaid watches admiringly, on the other the Beachcomber watches with adoring, jealous eyes, while the black chief and the blackbirder watch with lascivious, profane eyes as they circle closer to grasp their prey. As Kincaid sits watching, rapt in admiration, the black Chief comes slowly behind him and is not discover[ed] until he stands over the weak boy. He is frightened beyond words and the Chief’s jest that “Me stick one man – one knock on head – maybe you next” strikes panic to Walter’s very soul. But somehow managing to secure his revolver he holds it shakily into the black’s face and he retreats. In the meantime the blackbirder has come upon the Beachcomber where he stands watch but a vicious knife and the command to “Get back – find yourself where you came from” – is enough to make him fall back and for the present, leave Mary alone. He returns to his camp but has not given up the idea of securing this dainty morsel for his Kava house. Mary’s high spirits and Kincaid’s infatuation lead them into play that is too rough for his delicate strength and when a fit of coughing weakens him the primitive motherhood of all girl children goes out to the boy and maybe too, something more. The Beachcomber sees the growing attachment of the two and again seeks consolation in his old friend – rum. Mary finds him on the beach, and at first thinking him only asleep places behind his ear the flower of love – a binding pledge between man and maid. However when his real condition dawns on her she angrily throws the flowers away and leaves him. The Chief in his wanderings has met Pansy and all her savage nature responds to his fierceness and she cheerfully agrees to the tribal ceremony of matrimony – having her front teeth knocked out. Peter is duly shocked, if not a little sorry when he witnesses this ceremony. Sunday morning and the huge gun that once called the natives to battle now brings the converts to church. Kincaid is particularly interested in this gun, whose boom can be heard for twenty miles. At last Donald Blythe’s revenge comes when he successfully gets the pants on the black and has the satisfaction of forcing him to go to church in them. While the converts on the island are at church the blackbirder and the Chief are plotting[;] Mary and Walter Kincaid are together at her shrine in the jungle. She half playfully persuades him to call on the devil-devil to drive away the evil spirits that make him cough. Together they dance and weave the spell of heathen worship until the missionary, taking a short cut to church – happens on them. His anger at finding his nephew with the wreath, a heathen symbol, around his neck in such a place with Mary whom he calls “A loose girl!” is terrible and he orders the boy home. The boy resents the reference to Mary but a coughing spell that prostrates him stops all further argument. In the meantime the black chief is using Pansy as a means to attack the village. He instructs her to bring him all the fire arms from the missionary house which she does and the blackbirder and his gang prepare the attack. As Mary prays before her idol in the forest after Kincaid leaves[,] the Beachcomber comes to her and furious with jealousy he upbraids her. He tells her that she considers herself too good

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for him to even touch – but hour after hour she is with the sick boy. In his jealous rage he accuses her and almost striking her stalks away through the forest to spend a love tortured, sleepless night. But through the same night Mary wanders also along the beach, trying to read her own heart. The boy, deathly ill[,] calls for his companions and conquering his prejudice the missionary goes for Mary and the Beachcomber. Surprised they come to the sick boy’s bedside and he seems to find comfort in their presence. Taking the beachcomber’s hand he tells him “Remember, there IS something afterwards! My – my own brother.” The boy falls into a healthful sleep after their visit and the Beachcomber goes out on the beach turning over and over in his mind that sweet new word “Brother”. Mary anxiously inquires of the missionary if there is not something she can do but she [sic] tells him they can only trust in God. With a new idea she goes to her idol in the woods and taking it from its place throws it into the sea. Then she returns to see whether or not God has found such favor in her act as to cure the boy. The beachcomber throws himself on the beach in a great prayer of renunciation – in his new repentance he prays that if Mary find [sic] greater happiness in the love of Kincaid that she may have him. At the blackbirder’s camp he cruelly beats a sick slave, who runs away to the missionary for protection. The blackbirder hearing that the men have all left the village prepares the attack. Old Thomas is astounded when the Beachcomber comes to him for work and takes him as one of his crew on an expedition to a distant island. [W]hen all the men have left the village the blackbirder takes the missing slave as an excuse and comes down and demands permission to search the missionary’s house. This the missionar[y] refuses and the blacks point to Old Thomas’ burning hut which they have lit. But the missionary, protecting his flock and the poor, beaten slave defies the villains. They barricade the house and prepare for fight. They discover their weapons have been stolen. Walter Kincaid, recovered from his illness, thinks of the great gun outside and sees at last the Great Adventure – he will risk his life to beat it and call back the men of the village. While the savages beat at doors and windows and the frightened women hide within the house he goes out and fighting his way thru the blacks beats the huge tom-tom again and again. At the distant island the villagers hear the strange call and immediately set off for home. Old Thomas also and the Beachcomber turn in their track and row swiftly back to the Island. The blacks succeed in breaking into the house and the last door is being broken down. A blow from a native axe strikes the boy and he falls at his heroic task. The trader’s boat is the first to land and the men quickly go to the rescue. There is a fight outside the house and the girl is rescued just as the blackbirder has her in his arms ready for flight. The blacks thoroughly routed they [sic] find the boy dying by the side of the drum. He dies in the Beachcomber[’]s arms and to him he calls “Brother”. Frantically the missionary and his wife search for their son. He and the native boy, however, have been safely tucked away in a cupboard and are safe and sound. While the savage excitedly tells his side of the story Donald has trouble in keeping him properly clothed. The savages chase Peter through the woods but when they see all is lost for them abandon the chase and Peter immediately resumes his dignity. The Beachcomber decides to seek a new life and comes to his canoe with all his worldly belongings when Mary comes down and he discovers that she has loved him all the time. Then there is a great celebration on the island and at last the Beachcomber comes to church – to be married to Mary, at last in the hated gingham gown but with roses in her hands and flowers behind her ears. And they travel at last the warm white path of velvet moonflowers to the Land of Dreams fulfilled. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, May 7, 1920, LP15114

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At Rainbow Beach, a beautiful South Seas orphan named White Almond Flower is a magnet for the island’s white men. She lives with Old Thomas, a trader who has adopted her, and worships strange gods with her ancient dances. Dan McGuire, a drunken beachcomber who has come to the island to escape his demons, falls under her spell after she rescues him from drowning. The brutal Blackbirder, who with a band of cannibals and headhunters searches for island treasure, desires her too. And when she tends to Walter Kincaid, the sickly nephew of the island’s devout missionary, she finds yet another admirer on her hands. Frail Walter becomes Dan McGuire’s rival, and he must defy his godly uncle in order to declare his love for the pagan siren. Walter becomes seriously ill and – nearing death – his selflessness and piety inspire his uncle, White Almond Flower, and Dan McGuire to reconcile. McGuire gets a job and the flinty minister learns to tolerate the half-caste woman. Reconciliation is interrupted when Blackbirder and his men swoop down on the village to rape and plunder. With all able-bodied men away on a trading expedition, the villagers appear easy prey. Aroused to protect the women and children, the enfeebled Walter uses his last strength to summon a rescue party by striking an ancient drum outside the missionary’s house. The rescuers arrive, the village is saved, Walter dies, and a rehabilitated Dan McGuire marries the newly converted White Almond Flower.

I tried a high-minded approach to The Idol Dancer, which was a great mistake. It was naïve, I suppose, to think that I could brush this one aside as a potboiler, the notorious five-day wonder that Griffith shot in Fort Lauderdale while waiting to occupy his new Mamaroneck studio. But the film clearly called for a breezy sociological treatment. Best to consider it as part of the post-war vogue for South Seas romance, spice things up with a witty reference to the ukulele craze, notice the strange mix of stereotypes Griffith uses to paste together his Polynesian islanders, make a daring connection to Somerset Maugham’s Rain and maybe W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, and then move on to better Griffith. I hadn’t seen The Idol Dancer for a long time. But if ever a film were immune from critical redemption, this was it. What could a rescreening possibly redeem? Wando, the overweight tribal chief with a bone through his nose and two large skulls hung down his chest like a low-slung brassiere? The lineup of impossible performances? Porter Strong’s blackface? The bleeding Christianity, whence all the critical commentary has been directed? True, there was the haunting shot of the Flatiron Building in snow, still vivid in my mind forty-five years after I first saw it, but there must be limits even to what a Griffith maven like me will put up with. William K. Everson’s 1959 program note for the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society seemed to set the right tone: Not having seen Scarlet Days, One Exciting Night, or Sally of the Sawdust, I cannot categorically state that this is [Griffith’s] worst picture, but I think it [is] safe to assume that all three were infinitely better and that The Idol Dancer was perhaps the only really bad film D.W. made (even later, weak entries like [The] Drums of Love and the remake of The Battle of the Sexes had really worthwhile qualities). (unpublished note, April 24, 1959)

But then the fateful Saturday afternoon when I saw the film again, I realized that I really do have the capacity to put up with Griffith’s cheesiest products – revel in them, actually. The Idol Dancer is arguably Griffith’s most out-of-control work since the stage drama War and the poem The Wild Duck, those formless effusions written during his theatre days. It’s tempting 64

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to work it into current arguments about trash and kitsch. But even as a degraded text The Idol Dancer is unlikely to be reclaimed as a species of camp that generates cult audiences. There is little chance this work will be reborn even by a community of cult filmgoers reading against the grain. True, it has the requisite naïveté and failed seriousness that defined camp for Susan Sontag. But it simply isn’t entertaining enough. For specialists, however, The Idol Dancer is required viewing. As an eruption of primal Griffith fantasies exposing strains and anxieties that were redirected, sublimated, or repressed in better films, this South Seas movie is in a class by itself. This isn’t a lazy day at the beach – the logical but wrong-headed assumption historians have made about a movie shot quickly in a vacation locale. If anything, the filmmaker seems terrorized by the idea of idleness, using his drunken hero played by Richard Barthelmess to illustrate the ghastliness of indolence, aimlessness, and drift. The movie itself suffers from a superabundance of ambition – darting uncontrollably from one underdeveloped idea to another as the director tries to control a story that turns earlier signature themes on their heads. As he had with Broken Blossoms (1919), Griffith is working with material obviously taboo in his earliest features – miscegenation, autoeroticism, and voyeurism – and making them desirable. Most striking is the way it flips The Birth of a Nation (1915). In her book on Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation, Susan Courtney notices how, despite its affinities to The Birth of a Nation’s last-minute rescue formula, The Idol Dancer inverts the racial order. Whereas The Birth of a Nation, Courtney argues, divides the world into black and white and vilifies mulattos precisely because they blur the line between those worlds, The Idol Dancer – set on “Rainbow Beach, Romance Island under the Southern Cross” where men of all shades co-mingle – makes its heroine a woman whose mixed blood proves irresistible to a variety of white and non-white males. In Courtney’s words: [T]he woman who falls most clearly in the middle of these black and white extremes, far from being vilified, is the favorite object of desire for men of all shades. Aptly named ‘“White Almond Flower”, her whiteness inheres primarily in the pale skin of the actress who plays her (Clarine Seymour) and in her relation to her adopted, and depicted, white father; her “almond[ness]” reading that as the signifier of her not-so-white parts, is filmically marked once by an intertitle (“the blood of vivacious France, inscrutable Java, and languorous Samoa mingles in her veins”) and perpetually through her visual representation. She wears, alternately a grass skirt and palm frond tube top ensemble and a floral sarong, and until her last-minute Christian conversion, she worships a pagan idol, and is prone to primitive, and explicitly tinted dancing. The mystic visions of her people move though the exotic coloring of her dance. (Courtney, pp. 150–51)

But what makes this new Griffith infatuation with a “tinted” heroine and his relaxed attitude toward racial co-mingling so particularly intriguing is how they are intertwined with expressions of homoeroticism. It is as though the license to fantasize about interracial coupling on Rainbow Island has unleashed opportunities to move onto even darker taboos. The homoerotic imagery is still coded; none of it is as explicit as the sexual attractions the Beachcomber, Kincaid, the Blackbirder, and Wando the lip-licking cannibal share for White Almond Flower. But scenes are constantly being constructed in such a way that the object of desire is displaced from female to male. What starts as a familiar tug of war between two men for an exotic South Seas woman culminates in a scene of adoration of the sickly male rival; and that adoration in turn resolves itself with the surviving rival holding the dying man in his arms, burying his head in his chest. Sickbed saints surrounded by weeping, worshipful, and penitential onlookers have been a staple of American melodrama since the death of Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) on through the death of Annie Johnson in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959). Griffith himself would direct a classic prototype in Way Down East where a weakened, 65

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beatified Anna Moore, lying on a makeshift cot in a sugar shack, dispenses forgiveness to those who have wronged and misjudged her. But The Idol Dancer is that rare instance of a bedridden male victim taking on the role of inspirational healer. Kincaid, the male Little Eva, inspirits everyone around him, but the film highlights the special new bond the sickbed creates between Kincaid and the Beachcomber – “OVER AND OVER, THAT SWEET NEW WORLD – ‘BROTHER!’” – as the two men hold hands. The Idol Dancer starts as a film about the Clarine Seymour character, then turns into a film about frail Creighton Hale’s soul struggle, all the while keeping Richard Barthelmess its visual center of attention. Part of the strangeness of the film is that it makes its drunken Beachcomber more glamorous and desirable than its South Seas exotic dancer. This is not just a matter of performance. The dreamy close-ups taken with Hendrik Sartov’s distinctive soft-edged diffusion lens and illuminated with strong three-point lighting are almost entirely reserved for Barthelmess. For the most part the lighting on Clarine Seymour, even during her dances and for her introduction as the “STRANGE, SWEET, EXOTIC” maiden, is flat and even. But whether he is the center of action, part of a collective activity, or simply an onlooker, Barthelmess is almost always displayed in highly sculpted light. Nor is he ever offscreen for long. Regardless of how marginal he becomes to the narrative, he dominates the film visually by the sheer amount of screen time he is given (by my calculation, practically one-third of the film). Symptomatically, when Griffith sets up parallel scenes of Repentance and Renunciation for the Beachcomber and White Almond Flower, crosscutting between the two of them, Griffith dispenses with Clarine Seymour’s tossing away her Devil-Devil totem pole in three shots (two medium and one long) that take up roughly fourteen seconds of screen time. But he uses no fewer than thirteen shots (seven of them soft-edge close-ups) lasting close to a minute and a half to dramatize weepy Barthelmess throwing away his gin bottles and sinking to his knees in prayer. One sequence in particular provides a consummate example of this erotic displacement, where collective voyeurism directed at a woman culminates in men staring at each other. In a clearing near the beach, White Almond Flower dances to a wooden idol, oblivious to the pressure of gazes that effectively catch her in a crossfire of staring men. From one side, the alcoholic Beachcomber ogles with “ADORING, JEALOUS EYES”, on the other the weakly Walter Kincaid looks with “ADMIRING EYES”, and somewhere between them the brutish Blackbirder and his headhunter Wando salivate and watch with “PROFANE EYES”. The scene starts as an elaboration of the one in Broken Blossoms where, gazing at the bric-à-brac in the Yellow Man’s window, Lucy is pinched between the gazes of Cheng Huan and Evil Eye. But in Broken Blossoms, self-absorbed Lucy is unambiguously the target of male attention. In The Idol Dancer, the target grows strangely divided (I’ll come back to that in a moment), and gets lost as the men turn to confront each other in a series of standoffs. Even as an object of desire, White Almond Flower is discussed in terms of exchange among the men. Blackbirder doesn’t want her for himself: he wants her for Wando. His precise words: “SHE WOULD LOOK GOOD IN THY KAVA HOUSE, THOU PIG WITH A BLACK FACE”. This is the dark variant of the reformed Beachcomber ultimately deciding to give White Almond Flower to selfless Walter Kincaid. But the woman literally disappears once she is alerted to the voyeurs, uninvolved in the rest of the scene. Instead, Griffith isolates the men as they pair off, each one shaking a weapon at a rival. Wando jabs a spear at Kincaid, indicating he might eat him and add his skull to the trophies draped across his chest; Kincaid retaliates by taking a revolver from his pocket and poking it at him. The Blackbirder reaches for his whip to intimidate the Beachcomber; the Beachcomber unfolds his knife to jab him away. Nothing is consummated. Wando and the 66

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Blackbirder, temporarily overwhelmed, sulk back to their encampment. But when we see them next, they are invading the missionary’s village, prompted by the pursuit of a half-naked black slave whom the Blackbirder wants returned so that he may resume his whipping. Just as our scene of heterosexual staring transposes to a pair of male couples threatening each other with knives and spears, an invasion prompted by the pursuit of a black male transposes none too logically into a scene of heterosexual rape and pillage. Even the totem pole to which Clarine Seymour dances grows suggestive. This is the wooden idol with which Seymour shares equal space in shots that reveal her as the object of the voyeurs’ collective gazes. The men never see her in close-up, only in a two-shot as she is framed gyrating to this carved wooden object while continually darting glances toward it. It’s hard to miss the phallic look of the pole, enormously complicating the question of what is arousing the men. One could go on, but it may be time to move on. Griffith is, even in his best films, a Freudian’s delight, but a film as out of control as this one can turn even a Freud-hater into a Viennese witchdoctor. The film screams for against-the-grain readings that almost invariably wind up involving masturbatory or homoerotic fantasy. Our idol’s pole morphs into a log that a revitalized Walter uses to beat on a war drum, summoning men from near and far, while declaring “MY FINISH – IS WILDER THAN – YOUR WILDEST DREAMS” before the exhausted man dies in the Beachcomber’s arms. Donald Blythe forces pants on his playmate that don’t quite fit, emphasizing Pago’s semi-naked buttocks. The jittery blackface missionary assistant, dressed like a church deacon, trembles in front of women while clinging to the Reverend Franklyn Blythe’s side, and looks on impotently while his arch-rival steals away his would-be sweetheart by knocking her teeth out. It all seems to be filmed in the spirit of play, but the play Griffith evidently has in mind are the pleasures of a tease or, more precisely, of a director trying to distance himself from his material by patronizing it, only occasionally aware of what he’s getting into. If one of the great obstacles to appreciating The Idol Dancer is Griffith’s smug condescension to his ostensible material, its naïveté may be what makes the film bearable. Its idea of exotic tropical delights could not be more innocuous or derivative, the limitations of the bland Florida cinematography underscored by the disciplined, powerful handful of images of New York. The stories that those New York images accompany have the striking effect of making the allusions to hometown America more colorful and remote than the banal morality tales set on Rainbow Beach. But within the “middle-class-bland-parading-as-exotic” framework, Griffith has created an “exotic-parading-as-middle-class-bland” subtext. Try as he might to make themes of brotherhood, missionary work, blackface clowns, and idol dancing as mainstream as his island scenery and love story, his excesses keep tempting us into rear-door readings. Russell Merritt

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593 THE NEW ART FILM COMPANY

REMODELING HER HUSBAND Working title: She Made Him Behave Filming date: November 1919–late December 1919 or early January 1920 Location: Thanhouser studio, New Rochelle, New York, and Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York; exteriors: Fifth Avenue, New York City Presented by: The New Art Film Company Distribution: Famous Players-Lasky Corp.; Paramount-Artcraft Pictures New York premiere: week of 6 June 1920, Rivoli and/or Rialto Theatre Release date: 13 June 1920 Release length: five reels, 4,844 feet (“running time, fifty-five minutes”, according to Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 19 June 1920, p. 286) Copyright date: 2 June 1920 (LP15218) Supervision: D.W. Griffith Director: Lillian Gish Scenario: Dorothy Elizabeth Carter (pseudonym of Dorothy and Lillian Gish) Story: Dorothy Elizabeth Carter (pseudonym of Dorothy and Lillian Gish) Camera: George William Hill Set design supervisor: Lillian Gish Set construction: Frank “Huck” Wortman Costumes supervisor: Lillian Gish Props supervisor: Lillian Gish Titles: Dorothy Parker (according to Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, p. 224) Cast: Dorothy Gish (Janie Wakefield [Wakeman]); Downing Clarke (Mr. Wakefield, her father); Marie Burke (Mrs. Wakefield, her mother); Mildred Marsh (Her chum); James Rennie (Jack Valentine); Frank Kingdon (Mr. Valentine, Jack’s father); Harda Daube (A flirtatious lady) Archival sources: none known Jack Valentine is a fine young man with an eye for feminine beauty. When he meets Janie Wakeman, he forgets all other women he ever had met and pays court to her with the result that they are married. Janie enters her marital life with confidence, despite the assurances of her girl friends that Jack is a terrible fellow with the ladies. All goes well until one day when Jack helps a flirtatious young woman with her heavy suitcases into a taxicab. As there is no one to help her at the other end of the line Jack rides with her, blissfully unaware that Janie is riding on top of a Fifth avenue bus and observes their tete-a-tete. When the young woman gets home, Jack carries her suitcases upstairs and presently, without knowing just why, he kisses her. Of course, Janie stands at the door and when she witnesses this osculatory exercise, she is justly indignant. Jack wiggles out of this difficulty in time, but one day a manicure girl crosses his path. It is an innocent flirtation, but Janie packs up disgustedly and goes home to mother. Being a practical minded girl, she assists her father by taking charge of a department of his big important business. Although she is immersed in business, she cannot help thinking of Jack and she frequently cries herself to sleep like a wornout [sic] child. Jack finds himself lonely and goes to Janie’s house to make up, but she refuses to see him. He goes to her business office and is forced to cool his heels

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in a big reception room. He finally manages to make an appointment with her and in as much as Janie still loves her husband, they kiss and make up. But Jack puts his foot in it again. Flushed with victory, he begins to lay down the conjugal laws with lordly superiority whereupon Janie presses a button and presto! Jack finds himself in the cold world once again. He implores, pleads, writes notes in which he threatens to kill himself if she doesn’t relent. What was a poor loving little wife to do in the premises? Janie begins to fear that Jack will destroy himself in despair and one day she lets him enter her presence. Of course, there is a reconciliation and as Jack has been duly chastened, he promises never to offend again. And so it is presumed they lived happily ever after. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, June 2, 1920, LP15218 [stamped with date June 9, 1920]

Film historians, Griffith afficionados and Lillian Gish’s fans would give anything for a copy of this film to turn up in a garage, closet, barn or some other neglected location. It was the only film that Lillian directed during her long, memorable career and because it was made at the peak of her popularity as a young actress, viewing it would provide new insights to her career. Gish never directed again because, she said, the work involved was too difficult for her, but her decision may have been influenced by the film’s unenthusiastic critical response. The critics were not harsh, but the reviews were negative enough to discourage a first-time director. The production was a family effort. It was made for New Art, Griffith’s production company, which made comedies featuring her sister Dorothy. Apparently, Griffith asked Lillian to direct this production as a way to keep her occupied while he went to Florida to direct two films with other actresses in leading roles. Though she was reluctant, Griffith pressed her until she consented. But there is reason to suspect that Lillian may have welcomed the opportunity. She was a student of film technique with a reputation for paying a great deal of attention to the key elements of filmmaking, from scripting and editing to lighting, camera movement, shot length. It is even possible that she asked Griffith for the chance to direct. Beyond this, Griffith had practical reasons for giving Lillian her chance. He needed a new director for Dorothy’s films because he was taking Elmer Clifton to Florida as assistant director for The Idol Dancer and The Love Flower. Clifton had directed all of Dorothy’s New Art comedies and they proved to be both popular and profitable. Although he was taking a chance with a first-time director, the risk was slight. Lillian’s name on a Dorothy Gish film would give the public added incentive to buy a ticket. Moreover, Griffith needed the added income that Dorothy’s films provided. After the creation of United Artists, he moved production from California to New York. The studio he was building in Mamaroneck was not ready to use. Workmen had to be paid, and he still had commitments to Famous Players and First National that had to be completed before he could devote full time to United Artists. The Florida productions would be two of three films he agreed to make for First National, and Dorothy’s films were still being made for Famous Players. The income from Dorothy’s films would help pay a rising pile of bills. Work on Remodeling Her Husband started in November 1919. After going over preliminary plans with Lillian Gish, Griffith succumbed to the lure of the sun and left for Florida. Winter was at hand and the new studio was far from complete, so while directing her film, Lillian also had to monitor progress at Mamaroneck. Because it lacked heat and electricity, Gish rented the former Thanhouser studio in nearby New Rochelle to use while the Mamaroneck studio was made habitable. When the facilities were in better shape, the production was finished in Mamaroneck. Griffith later claimed that he knew that work on the new studio would go faster with the workmen responding to Lillian’s demands. 69

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Lillian said that the original idea for the film came from Dorothy. She saw a cartoon in a magazine that showed a wife winning a wager with her husband. He had accused her of being dowdy and she bet him she could get men to react to her as she walked down the street. With her husband trailing behind her, she got attention from the men she met by making faces at them. Using this as inspiration, Lillian and Dorothy (apparently working together under the pseudonym of Dorothy Elizabeth Carter) wrote a script about the problems a young bride had with a husband who could not resist flirting with other women (Gish, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, p. 94). According to Lillian, Griffith agreed to having witty subtitles written by the Gishes’ friend Dorothy Parker. The wife in their story was a spunky sort, who finally left her husband when he persisted in his dalliances. She went to work in her father’s importing business and was successful enough that when her husband came seeking a reconciliation, he was surprised to find himself cooling his heels in her reception room. When they were reunited, she rejected his attempt to assert husbandly domination. But the Gishes were not quite ready for complete liberation. Independence and success in business didn’t bring happiness – one scene showed the husbandless bride crying herself to sleep. At least two scenes were shot in New York City. The sequence inspired by the cartoon was filmed on Fifth Avenue, with the husband following Dorothy while she made faces and stuck her tongue out to the amazement of the men on the street. It was the kind of comedy that suited Dorothy well, and Lillian was pleased that the scene was reprised in Easter Parade (Charles Walters, 1948) with Fred Astaire trailing after Judy Garland. A scene showing Dorothy, as the wife, spotting her husband with another woman while riding on the upper deck of a bus was also shot on Fifth Avenue. They did not have a filming permit, and a policeman was about to stop her when he recognized Lillian and let her go on with the scene. He signaled his recognition by pushing up the corners of his mouth in imitation of Gish’s gesture in Broken Blossoms (Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, p. 225). The male lead was James Rennie, a Canadian-born stage actor. He was one of Dorothy Gish’s discoveries. She saw him on stage and recommended him for the part, and she was apparently attracted by more than his talent. During the course of production their love scenes became quite passionate – they married a year later. Mildred Marsh, one of Mae Marsh’s many sisters, played Dorothy’s chum. Lillian ran over the film’s $50,000 budget, completing it for $58,000. The filming was finished in late December or early January, but the production was not released until June 1920. In the interim, Griffith returned from Florida and started Way Down East. Remodeling Her Husband premiered at New York’s Rivoli Theatre the week of 6 June 1920 and was put in general release the following week. The review in Variety (June 11, 1920) said the picture opened with a title that said the time had come when women were asserting themselves in all of the arts and that Lillian was now taking her place as a director. As mentioned, the reviews were unfavorable. The critic of The New York Times (June 7, 1920) complained of too many dead spots in the story, and Variety’s “Fred.” said the story “was not a world beater…. It is a picture that is Dorothy Gish, hook, line and sinker, and it would sink if it weren’t for her.” Despite the negative reviews, Lillian said it was the second biggest moneymaker of Dorothy’s New Art productions (Gish, op. cit., p. 226). If it should turn up in some forgotten corner, perhaps we would find that the critics were too hard on Miss Lillian! Paul Spehr

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594 DORIS KEANE AND ALBERT L. GREY FOR UNITED ARTISTS

ROMANCE Filming date: December 1919–early 1920 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Producer: D.W. Griffith (see note) Distribution: United Artists Corp. New York premiere: week prior to 17 May 1920, Strand Theatre Release date: 30 May 1920 Release length: six or seven reels Copyright date: 25 May 1920 (LP15220); “© Doris Keane and Albert L. Grey” Director: Chet Withey Scenario: Wells Hastings Source: Romance, the play (1913) by Edward Sheldon Camera: Louis Bitzer Cast: [Prologue:] Basil Sydney (Bishop Armstrong); June Ellen [Eileen] Terry (Suzette Armstrong); Arthur Rankin (Harry Armstrong); Vangie Valentine (Marion Ward); [Main Story:] Doris Keane (Rita [Margherita] [La] Cavallini [Cavallina]); Basil Sydney (Tom Armstrong); Norman Trevor (Cornelius Van Tuyl); Betty Ross Clarke (Susan Van Tuyl); Amelia Summerville (Miss Armstrong, Tom’s aunt); A.J. Herbert (Mr. Livingston[e]); Gilda Varesi (Vanucci, Cavallina’s servant); John Davidson (Beppo [Betto]) NOTE: D.W. Griffith originally was to produce this film. However, The D.W. Griffith Papers indicate that his name was not to appear in advertisements in connection with the film. See AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 1911–1920 (p. 782) and a letter in The D.W. Griffith Papers dated 15 November 1919. Archival sources: none known In the beginning of the story a young man of today, who has made up his mind to marry an actress, comes to ask the consent of his uncle, who is the Bishop of New York. When the old man endeavors to dissuade him from his purpose, the youth accuses him of having forgotten what it is to be young and eagerly in love. Thereupon the Bishop leans back in his armchair by the fire and tells the story of his own love, over forty years before for the famous Opera singer, Cavallini. At the conclusion of this recital of the old romance, the young man insists that he is more than ever determined to marry the woman he has chosen and the Bishop, awakened to sympathy by his own pathetic recollections, finally consents and gives the youth his blessings. It is the Bishop’s love-story that constitutes the picture. […] It is at a soiree in the lower Fifth Avenue mansion of a wealthy merchant that the young rector first lays eyes upon La Cavallini. He falls in love with her at once and she rallies him for his guilelessness; but during the course of a very short period that follows, she learns to love this innocent young man, with a love that she had never [felt] before. Therefore when he asks her to marry him, she cannot help confessing to him that her past life has been unchaste. He believes so deeply in her inherent purity that he is willing to forgive the errors of youth; and he is still urging her eagerly to be his wife when he discovers that she has recently been the mistress of the wealthy merchant. The merchant has been his best friend and this blow breaks the heart of the young rector. For hours he walks the streets, asking comfort of his God and battering himself into a religious frenzy. Then, late at night, he goes to her apartment with the purpose of saving her soul.

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But, although he knows it not, her soul has already risen high above his reach, on the wings of the great love that he has taught her. He exhorts her to repent and then, amazed by the terrible and thrilling nearness of her, he breaks down and takes her into his arms. He implores her to surrender herself to his passion, but she loves him now too utterly to yield. She calms him like an angel mothering a child, and sends him away from her forever. Unidentified article (press book?), from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, May 25, 1920, LP15220 [stamped June 9, 1920] The Bishop of St. Giles listens while his young nephew tells him he is to marry an actress. The young boy believes his uncle knows nothing of love and romance and so the old man unfolds a story. When he was rector of St. Giles he met, through Cornelius Van Tuyl, the fascinating opera singer, Rita Cavallina who had captured the hearts of Europe and is duplicating her success in America. The rector, Tom Armstrong has heard rumors that Rita is the mistress of Van Tuyl, a man of wealth, of distinction, and a vestryman of the church. Tom falls madly in love with Rita and she strangely falls as madly in love with him. She knows that she could never be a minister’s wife and she endeavors to break away from Tom, but finds herself unable to do so. Then the day comes when Tom asks about her past. He asks Van Tuyl if the rumors he has heard are true. Van Tuyl denies them but Rita, because she loves Tom, admits that up to the day she met him she belonged to Van Tuyl. Tom is heartbroken and leaves her but after tramping about in the snow for hours he comes to beg her to pray for her sins. Then he realizes he has not come for that but to possess her. When Rita tells him that it is up to him to choose the sort of woman she shall be for the rest of her life, he leaves. The Bishop finishes his story. His small granddaughter comes in to read the evening paper and in the news comes upon an inconsequential bit – that Mme. Cavallina has died in Milan, and that, strangely, she never married. Exhibitor’s Trade Review, May 29, 1920, p. 2962 The character of Mme. Margherita Cavallini, the Italian opera singer, in Mr. Sheldon’s play has, through the efforts of Miss Keane, become one of the classics of the theatre, and in securing the signature of this player Mr. Griffith has added another artistic link to his chain of achievements. Mr. Griffith, who is now at Miami, Fla., will be joined by Miss Keane and her husband, Basil Sydney, in a few days to discuss the preliminary work on the film version, the exteriors of which probably will be taken in Florida. The earlier scenes will be photographed early in December. The Moving Picture World, December 13, 1919, p. 828

No print of this film is known to survive at the time of this writing. Before Garbo there was Doris Keane. Garbo’s fans, or, for that matter, almost anyone familiar with the films of the 1930s and 1940s associate the film titled Romance (Clarence Brown, 1930) with Greta Garbo, but in 1920 the role of opera diva Rita Cavallini belonged to Doris Keane. When Edward Sheldon’s play opened in 1913, a relatively unknown Doris Keane had the role. The play was a hit and overnight she became an internationally known star. By December 1919, when she and her husband Basil Sydney signed with Griffith to recreate their roles, she had been playing the part for six years and, if the publicity surrounding the film can be believed, had acted the role more than 3,000 times. After two years in New York, it played for four years in London. In 1919 she returned to New York for a revival and it was after this run that Griffith contracted to produce the play. In December, Keane and her husband went to Florida to discuss the filming with Griffith. Griffith assigned Chet Withey to direct the film from a scenario by Wells Hastings, a writer who had done several scripts for Griffith’s New Art Film Company. The film version remained 72

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faithful to the structure of the play. It opened with an epilogue in which an elderly Bishop (Basil Sydney) counseled his nephew (Arthur Rankin) and his fiancée (June Ellen Terry) about marriage. This led to the main body of the film, a flashback to a story of forbidden romance: the love affair of the Bishop, then a young clergyman, and a worldly Italian opera singer who was the mistress of one of his close friends. Torrid love scenes between the wouldbe saint and the sinner were one of the highlights of the play and they became a feature of the film version. The reviewer for The New York Times thought that “one of these, in particular, is quite sufficient to insure a goodly life for the picture”. The New York Times reviewer was apparently wrong. According to Richard Schickel (D.W. Griffith: An American Life, pp. 426–28), Romance proved to be a thorn in Griffith’s side. It was an expensive production and it failed to earn its cost. Keane and her husband had rights to the play and Griffith paid them $150,000 for its film adaptation. He also committed to pay them fifty percent of the profits over one million dollars – though meeting this expense was apparently never a problem. To fulfill his obligations, Griffith turned to United Artists and the company secured a loan of $350,000 to pay Keane and cover production costs. The picture did not earn back the investment, and it left Griffith mired in debt at a crucial period of his struggle for independence. Schickel does not document this, but he probably found information in The D.W. Griffith Papers. It would certainly explain why, in later life, Griffith insisted that his name not be associated with this production. Paul Spehr

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595 ROBERTSON-COLE CO.

A GREAT FEATURE IN THE MAKING Series: Screen Snapshots Filming date: Spring–Summer 1920 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Producer: Louis Lewyn Release date: 1920 Length: one reel Director: not known Camera: not known On camera: D.W. Griffith, Richard Barthelmess, Lillian Gish, Vivia Ogden, G.W. Bitzer Archival sources: National Film and Television Archive (London), 35mm nitrate positive (tinted)

A Great Feature in the Making is the only graphic footage we have of Griffith actually directing. In fact, he is rehearsing Richard Barthelmess, Lillian Gish, Vivia Ogden and several other members of the cast of Way Down East. G.W. Bitzer can be seen operating a Bell & Howell 2709 camera rather than his faithful Pathé. Most of this footage can be seen in the documentary for television D.W. Griffith, Father of Film (Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, 1993). This “making of” film was clearly set up for the Screen Snapshots camera, and not filmed from the sidelines. Knowing Griffith’s habits, it was probably rehearsed as intensively as for one of his own films (he even rehearsed his home movies). The invaluable Screen Snapshots series was produced by Marion Mack’s husband Louis Lewyn, and ran for many years. I think there is even a silver anniversary edition. Kevin Brownlow

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596 D.W. GRIFFITH, INC.; DOROTHY GISH PRODUCTIONS

THE COUNTRY FLAPPER Working titles (?): Oh, Jo!; Oh, Jo; Oh Jo (see AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 1921–1930, p. 182; AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 1921–1930, p. 558) Alternate titles: Her First Love; The Cynic Effect Filming date: finished August 1920 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Presented by: D.W. Griffith Producer: D.W. Griffith Distribution: Producers Security Corp. (in March 1922); State Rights (in July 1922) Release date: 29 July 1922; (scheduled release as Oh, Jo!: 15 May 1921) Release length: five reels, 5,000 ft.; 4,956 ft. (as Oh, Jo!) Copyright date: 19 July 1922 (LP18060) Supervision: D.W. Griffith (see note) Director: F. Richard Jones Scenario: Harry Carr Adaptation: Harry Carr Source: “The Cynic Effect”, the short story by Nalbro Isadorah Bartley, in The Red Book Magazine (no. 34, February 1920, pp. 34–38, 162–173) Camera: Fred Chaston Film editor: Joseph W. Farnham Additional titles: Joseph W. Farnham Cast: [in The Cynic Effect:] Dorothy Gish (Jolanda, the Flapper); Glenn Hunter (Nathaniel [“Natty”] Huggins, the Boy); Mildred Marsh (The Other Flapper); Harlan Knight (Ezra Huggins, the Boy’s Father); Tom Douglas (Lemuell Philpotts, the Bashful Boy); Raymond Hackett (One brother); Albert Hackett (Another brother); Kathleen Collins (The Sister). [in The Country Flapper:] Dorothy Gish (The country flapper); Glenn Hunter (The village dude); Mildred Marsh (Another flapper); Harlan Knight (The dude’s father); Tommy Douglas (The Bashful Boy); Raymond Hackett (“Hopp”); Albert Hackett (“Skipp”); Catherine Collins (The Sister) Archival sources: George Eastman House, 35mm acetate negative (as The Country Flapper); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) Jolanda, THE COUNTRY FLAPPER, dreamed of Love and Romance. Nathaniel Huggins, village dude, son of Ezra Huggins the town druggist[,] was the apple of her eye. In spite of Old Grouch Huggins[’] objections the romance was progressing nicely until the [C]ity Flapper just through finishing school returned to the village. Her vampish vaporings [sic] captivated “Natty”. He fell for her charms but little Jolanda was not to be jilted. “Natty”’s father[,] besides being a druggist and a churchman, was also conducting a whisky still, information of which came to the town newspaper. When the Editor demanded that Huggins buy the bankrupt paper under threat of an expose, Jolanda, concealed in a trunk[,] heard the shady transaction and saw Ezra pay over money belonging to the church. Having Huggins in her power, she forced him to approve of her engagement to “Natty”. He presented the lovers with a horse and buggy as a silence bribe, and then set fire to the barn in which his still was located.

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In a runaway Jolanda is thrown out of the buggy and the horse sprints back to the burning barn taking Jolanda’s “Natty” right into the flames. Jolanda hastens to the fire and saves her “Natty”, but is trapped in it herself. While Lemuell Philpotts the bashful boy who always loved Jolanda dashes into the flames to save her, the City Flapper appears and steals “Natty” away. True love always wins out and Jolanda realized it was Lemuel [sic] she really loved after all, and left the [C]ity Flapper to the fickle Nathaniel. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, July 19, 1922, LP18060 [stamped with date July 20, 1922]

Country girl Jolanda is in love with the village Lothario, but is constantly frustrated by his fickle ways and by his cranky father. After adventures involving an illegal still, blackmail, and a burning barn, Jo washes her hands of her inconstant boyfriend and settles for the shy, quiet boy who has always loved her.

This film is distinguished from other Dorothy Gish vehicles of the period mainly by its checkered production history. Produced in 1920 under the title The Cynic Effect, it was held up, reworked, re-reworked, and finally released in 1922 as The Country Flapper, having gained and lost a couple of other provisional titles along the way. Such a history suggests a film that was embarrassingly unreleasable, and it’s not difficult to see why Griffith’s company was uncomfortable with this film. Director F. Richard Jones was a veteran of the Sennett studio (he had directed Mabel Normand’s 1918 hit Mickey), and his roots are unmistakable; the story may be a rural romance, but there’s far more of Sennett than of Griffith in The Country Flapper. As released, the film was also “enhanced” with titles by Joseph Farnham, burdening the slight story with contemporary slang and an endless succession of tired puns. For the hardy viewer the film does have several points of interest, including an early joint appearance by Raymond and Albert Hackett, both of whom would go on to far greater distinction in their careers. Interestingly, Dorothy has a couple of quick moments that seem like teasing references to her sister Lillian’s famous gesture of the forced smile in Broken Blossoms. (Although they may be unintentional, one can also spot near-subliminal suggestions of Joseph De Grasse’s The Old Swimmin’ Hole, which had been released in 1921 during this film’s troubled evolution, and of Dorothy’s considerably more prestigious release Orphans of the Storm, just coming into general release in 1922.) Even more interestingly, when The Country Flapper finally was released it was not universally regarded as a disaster. Reviews were mixed, but some were quite positive, The Moving Picture World (August 12, 1922, p. 528) hailing the film as “another distinct hit for Dorothy Gish” and “something new in cinematographic offerings”. J.B. Kaufman

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597 THE NEW ART FILM COMPANY

LITTLE MISS REBELLION Filming date: Summer 1920 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Presented by: The New Art Film Company Distribution: Famous Players-Lasky Corp.; Paramount Pictures New York premiere: 19 September 1920, Rialto Theatre Release date: 26 September 1920 (26 August 1920, according to Exhibitor’s Trade Review, September 25, 1920, p. 1901) Release length: five reels, 4,835 feet (“running time, fifty-five minutes”, according to Exhibitor’s Trade Review, October 9, 1920, p. 1998) Copyright date: 26 July 1920 (LP15421) Supervision: D.W. Griffith Director: George Fawcett Scenario: Wells Hastings Story: Harry Carr Camera: Walter Hill Music: “Music for the Photoplay”, Exhibitor’s Trade Review, September 11, 1920, p. 1660 (“timing based on a speed of 15 minutes per reel of 1000 feet”) Cast: Dorothy Gish (Grand Duchess Marie Louise [Anastacia]); Ralph Graves (Sergeant Richard Ellis); George Siegmann (Colonel Moro); William Riley Hatch (Stephen); Marie Burke (Lady-in-waiting) Archival sources: none known Constantly surrounded by the palace guard, Her Grace, the Grand Duchess Anastacia, at the age of one year, her sole companion being a doll, is a lonely pathetic figure. She stands forlornly at the palace gate and peers through the bars wondering when good fortune is to provide her with a playmate. A tall grenadier observes her sympathetically, for he[,] too, is almost as lonely as the titled child. Years pass and the little duchess is lonely still. She dines alone with half a dozen footmen waiting upon her and one day when she looks out of her window she observes a boy riding a donkey. She wants to ride a donkey of her own, and when the boy waves his hand at her, she returns his salute. What, a Grand Duchess ride a donkey! Shocking! She wants to go out for a ride and attended by a large and glittering retinue, she leaves the palace in state. The cavalcade is halted by an ox team in the road, and oh joy! the Grand Duchess finds herself free. She rides away along a by-path and soon meets the boy with the donkey. When her absence is discovered and riders rush in pursuit, they find her astride the donkey. The riders beat the boy whereupon the Grand Duchess displays the spirit of her ancestors by lashing the retainers with her riding whip. She borrows a gold piece from one of the men and gives it to the boy who bows gratefully. On the way home, the Grand Duchess sees a group of Yankee soldiers playing baseball. She becomes interested, but the stern retainers carry her on and she finally reaches the palace, her blood afire from her experience. The spirit of democracy has been born within her and she is rejuvenated. Through the window bars, she sees two soldiers playing numbly-peg. She gets a fruit knife and imitates them with poor success. She decides to go for a ride and passes a field where

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some American soldiers are playing baseball. Later she looks down from her window and sees another group of Yankees playing baseball. She steals out of the palace and makes her way to a gate which is guarded by a grizzled grenadier. The grenadier is not permitted to let her leave the palace grounds. She begs, pleads, then weeps despairingly. The heart of the grenadier is moved. He permits her to slip through just as the frightened governess and two equerries appear. The grenadier’s horse closes the opening and they cannot follow. The Grand Duchess watches the players and being invited to take a bat, knocks out a home run. The umpire declares her out and a near riot ensues, during which Sergeant Ellis threatens the umpire. He calls her “Kid” and she finally breaks away and despite the warm reception accorded her by her guardians, she counts this the happiest day of her life. A revolution comes and the Grand Duchess is dethroned. Penniless, she and the grenadier escape to America where they run a restaurant in company. Meanwhile the soldier boy returns to the United States. He is engaged to a rich girl, but the match is not to his taste. He meets the Grand Duchess in the hash foundry one day and there is a grand reunion. With the old grenadier on watch, they decide to travel the road of life together in soulful company. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, July 26, 1920, LP15421 [stamped with date August 11, 1920] Grand Duchess Marie Louise of Bulgravia longs for freedom from the duties and dignity of her rank. Colonel Moro, head of the Guards, is plotting with revolutionists against her. Marie persuades the old grenadier standing sentry at the Palace gate to allow her egress. She meets a company of American dough boys, plays ball with them and is much attracted by Sergeant Dick Ellis. She accepts an invitation to a jazz party with the soldiers that evening. They are leaving for America next day. Marie is the belle of the ball, but her ladies-in-waiting appear and take her home. The revolution takes place, Marie is dethroned and escapes to New York with the faithful grenadier. They live under assumed names on the East Side. Colonel Moro and his aide follow with the intention of recovering the crown which Marie has carried off. Marie is working as waitress in a restaurant. Dick Ellis finds her. Moro and his confederates go to Marie’s rooms and lie in wait for her. But Ellis intervenes, the revolutionists are arrested and Dick and Marie united. Exhibitor’s Trade Review, October 9, 1920, p. 1998

No print of this film is known to survive at the time of this writing. Another in the series of New Art comedies featuring Dorothy Gish, Little Miss Rebellion was Ruritanian romance updated to the post-World War I era. In the right hands, this nonsensical tale of a mythical principality lost “somewhere between comic opera and Dumas romance” (Variety, September 24, 1920) might have worked, but first-time director George Fawcett apparently couldn’t pull it off. Dorothy’s regular director, Elmer Clifton, was helping Griffith with The Idol Dancer, The Love Flower and Way Down East, so Dorothy needed a new director. Lillian Gish had directed Dorothy’s previous film, Remodeling Her Husband, and now it was George Fawcett’s turn. Stroheim, von Sternberg, Wyler – or even Franz Lehar – might have done something with the material, but Fawcett was on the wrong side of the camera. He was a highly regarded character actor who had given Dorothy solid support in several of her New Art comedies. The reviewer for The New York Times (September 20, 1920, p. 13) complained that Fawcett “did little or nothing to compensate the public for his absence from the screen”. He or she (the reviewer was not identified) felt that Dorothy Gish had not had a really good part since Hearts of the World (1918). Variety’s critic, also unidentified, was bothered by unpredictable shifts in the plot: “it starts out as a sort of ‘Prisoner of Zenda’ tale with a hoydenish heroine; turns into a satire on Bolshevism; makes a side excur78

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sion into the field of mystery ... thinks better of the Bolshevism satire and makes it broad burlesque and then ... rounds up in a free-for-all fight and a romantic hero-heroine clinch”. All of which, according to the reviewer, left the audience feeling rather “dizzy”. As noted, D.W. Griffith was busy with a variety of productions and after putting George Fawcett in the director’s chair, seems to have had little to do with Little Miss Rebellion. Paul Spehr

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598 D.W. GRIFFITH, INC .

WAY DOWN EAST Filming date: mid-March–late Summer 1920 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York; White River Junction and other locations in Vermont Presented by: D.W. Griffith Distribution: Road Show; United Artists Corp. Middletown and Kingston, NewYork previews: August 1920 New York premiere: 2 September 1920, 44th Street Theatre Release date: 21 August 1921 (according to Schickel, D.W. Griffith: An American Life, p. 645) to ca. 25 September 1921 (Russell Merritt to the Editor, 19 November 2005) Release length: thirteen reels Copyright date: 3 September 1920 (LP15906) Director: D.W. Griffith Production manager: Albert L. Grey Scenario: Anthony Paul Kelly Source: Way Down East, the play (1903) by Lottie Blair Parker as elaborated by Joseph R. Grismer Camera: G.W. Bitzer, Hendrik Sartov, Paul H. Allen Director of some exterior scenes in White River Junction: Elmer Clifton Production assistants for some exterior scenes in White River Junction: Leigh Smith, Herbert Sutch Art director: Charles O. Seessel, Clifford Pember Set builder: Clark Robinson Lillian Gish gowns designed by: Madame Lisette Film editors: James Smith, Rose Smith Musical accompaniment composed and selected by: Louis Silvers, William Frederick Peters Titles artist: Victor Georg Color process (fashion show sequence): Handschiegl and/or (in some prints?) Prizmacolor process; see the correspondence between Gustav Brock (on the Handschiegl process) and D.W. Griffith (1924) in The D.W. Griffith Papers Technical director: Frank Wortman Cast: Lillian Gish (Anna Moore); Richard Barthelmess (David Bartlett); Mrs. David Landau (Anne’s mother); Lowell Sherman (Lennox Sanderson); Burr McIntosh (Squire Bartlett); Josephine Bernard (Mrs. Tremont); Mrs. Morgan Belmont (Diana Tremont); Patricia Fruen (Her sister); Florence Short (The eccentric aunt); Kate Bruce (Mrs. Bartlett); Vivia Ogden (Martha Perkins); Porter Strong (Seth Holcomb); George Neville (Reuben [Rube] Whipple); Edgar Nelson (Hi Holler); Mary Hay (Kate Brewster); Creighton Hale (Professor Sterling); Emily Fitzroy (Maria Poole); Norma Shearer (Barn dancer); unidentified native Vermonters (fiddler and dancers in the country dance scenes) NOTE: Reissued in 1931 with synchronized sound added. Russell Merritt to the Editor (November 19, 2005): “Way Down East opened at the 44th St. Theatre [in New York] on September 2 and ran for an amazing 42 weeks. This was the start of the roadshow run – that is, tours around the country where the film was booked in legitimate theatres with reserved seats at top prices (generally scaled from 50 cents to two dollars) and was 80

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accompanied by a large orchestra. The general release marks the start of the film’s run in first run movie houses, where the movie was shown around the clock in the palaces with less elaborate accompaniment and trappings, sometimes shortened to accommodate the theatre’s surrounding program – the newsreel, or maybe some live acts.” Archival sources: FILM – Academy Film Archive, two 16mm acetate negatives; three 16mm acetate positives (generation undetermined for all elements); Cineteca Italiana (Milan), 35mm nitrate positive, tinted, Italian intertitles (fragment, ca. 700 m., poor condition); 35mm nitrate positive, tinted, Italian intertitles (fragment, ca. 645 m.); Cineteca Nazionale (Rome), 35mm nitrate positive, tinted, Italian intertitles (incomplete); 35mm nitrate positive, English intertitles (fragments); Filmoteka Narodowa (Warszawa), 35mm acetate positive (generation undetermined); George Eastman House, 35mm acetate negative; 16mm acetate reversal positive; Gosfilmofond of Russia, 35mm acetate negative; Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate negative; 35mm nitrate track negative (Raymond Rohauer Collection); 35mm nitrate positive, AFI/National Film and Sound Archive of Australia Collection; 16mm acetate positive, AFI/Triangle Laboratories Estate Collection (with soundtrack); 16mm acetate positive (Killiam reissue, tinted); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate positive (reels 1, 3, 8–11 only; printed on 1924–27 Kodak stock; acquired 1982); 35mm diacetate composite print (with soundtrack, 9,413 ft., acquired 1936; printed from abridged original picture negative, cut for sound reissue); National Film and Television Archive (London), 35mm nitrate positive (tinted); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate positive (generation undetermined); 35mm acetate negative (generation undetermined); 16mm acetate negative (generation undetermined); 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined). MUSIC – Library of Congress, a) piano score (“music by” William Frederick Peters), 2 vols., 77 and 83 pages; copyright C1 E 693809, 26 June 1928, Julia Peters; location: LC M1527.P55W2; microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3212, Item 144; b) piano conductor and orchestral parts “composed and selected by Louis Silvers and William Frederick Peters” (1,1,2,1; 2,2,1,1; tympani, drums; harps; strings), 2 vols., 78 and 85 pages; copyright C1 E 693809, 26 June 1928, Julia Peters; microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Items 78 and 78a; c) cue sheet (typescript, carbon), 4 pages. Note: “Griffith” appears on page 1; microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Item 829; d) cue sheet (typescript, carbon), 5 pages. Note: “Made by E.[rnst] Luz Orig [?]” marked on ink on page 1; “(Changed)” marked in pencil on page 1; microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Item 830. Documents b, c, d are from the Museum of Modern Art Collection Anna Moore [pencil note: Lillian Gish], a country girl visiting rich relatives in Boston, meets Lenox [sic] Sanderson [pencil note: Lowell Sherman], who betrays her through a mock marriage and deserts her. Her mother dies and she goes to a small village hotel, where she has a baby, which dies. She goes to work on the farm of Squire Bartlett, where she lives happily until the Squire learns of her past through the landlady of the hotel where her baby was born. He drives her out in the snow storm. She runs to a river and falls exhausted on the ice, which breaks up, rushing with her to the falls. David Bartlett [pencil note: Richard Barthelmess], the Squire’s son, who loves Anna, runs after her and, seeing her on a block of ice nearing the falls, jumps from ice block to ice block and rescues her just at the brink of the falls. The Squire [pencil note: Burr McIntosh] learning the truth about Sanderson, who is a guest at his house, orders him out, forgives Anna and she marries David. [pencil note: (two names illegible) Kate – Mary Kay] Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, September 3, 1920, LP15906 [stamped with date December 13, 1920]

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Anna Moore is sent by her mother to their wealthy relations in Boston to borrow money. The relations prove unsympathetic, but while Anna stays with them she meets Lennox Sanderson, also from a wealthy family. Sanderson tries to seduce Anna and, when rebuffed, tricks her with a sham marriage which he tells her she must keep secret because of difficulties likely to be posed by his family. Anna returns home to her mother, where she discovers she is pregnant and is abandoned by Sanderson. Following her mother’s death, Anna retires to a boarding house in the town of Belden, where the baby is born and soon dies. She is turned out of the boarding house by the landlady, Mrs. Poole, who suspects that she is not married. She is hired to work on the Bartlett farm, although Squire Bartlett harbors some suspicions about her character. That evening, Anna discovers that Sanderson lives on a neighboring estate. Sanderson demands that she leave, afraid that her presence will provide a roadblock to his courtship of the Bartletts’ niece, Kate. Anna contemplates going, but is persuaded to stay by the Squire’s son, David Bartlett, who – ignorant of her past – is falling in love with her. After some months, David declares his love, and Anna sadly tells him that he must not speak of it again. That winter, Martha Perkins, the town gossip, encounters Mrs. Poole and learns of Anna’s past. After several delays, Martha finally conveys her news to the Squire at a neighbor’s Christmas barn dance. Meanwhile, at the Bartlett home, David proposes to Anna and is told she can “never be any man’s wife”. The next day, the Squire leaves for Belden and confirms Mrs. Poole’s story. Upon arriving home, he orders Anna out of the house. Before she goes, she reveals that Sanderson, present as a guest at the Squire’s table, is the man who deceived her. Anna departs into a raging blizzard followed shortly by David, concerned for her safety. The Squire orders Sanderson out of the house. He makes his way to a maple cabin, there encountering David, who bests him in a tussle. Meanwhile, Anna struggles through the storm to the river and faints on the ice at the river’s edge. The ice begins to break up and the ice floe that holds her drifts free, moving dangerously toward a waterfall. David discovers her and, leaping from floe to floe, manages to catch her just before she is tumbled over the falls. He carries her to the maple cabin, where the Squire begs her forgiveness, she refuses Sanderson’s belated offer of marriage, and she is accepted into the Bartlett family as David’s wife.

Way Down East fits into two trends in Griffith’s filmmaking in the late 1910s. Like True Heart Susie and A Romance of Happy Valley, it is a nostalgic story of pre-World War I rural life, “a simple story of plain folks”. Tol’able David also fits this mold; Griffith bought the rights to the story by Joseph Hergesheimer while making Way Down East and eventually sold them to Way Down East’s male lead, Richard Barthelmess, for a film that was directed by Henry King in 1921. Way Down East is also one of two extremely popular, and therefore high-priced, theatrical properties that Griffith acquired in 1920. Romance, a play by the American Edward Sheldon, was first produced in 1913, but only became a big success in England, where it starred Doris Keane and Basil Sydney. Griffith’s contract with Keane called for an advance of $150,000 as well as a percentage of the profits, a deal which Richard Schickel calls “unprecedented for its day” (D.W. Griffith: An American Life, p. 427). Way Down East proved even more expensive, with Griffith paying the producer William Brady $175,000 as well as making payments to the original writer, Lottie Blair Parker, and to Joseph Grismer, who had rewritten Parker’s script for Brady and also prepared a novelization of the play (this text is discussed by David Mayer in his essay in this volume). While the film of Romance, directed by Griffith’s assistant Chet Withey, lost money, Way Down East was enormously successful and thus seems to have 82

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motivated a third theatrical adaptation in 1921, Orphans of the Storm, based on the play The Two Orphans by Adolphe d’Ennery and Eugène Cormon. Way Down East was made at a time when Griffith was heavily in debt, both for the construction of his studio on a country estate in Mamaroneck, on Long Island Sound, and for money owed to United Artists, which had helped underwrite the purchase price and production costs of Romance. In addition, although without elaborate sets or crowds of extras, Way Down East turned out to be extremely costly to produce. Richard Schickel states that Griffith’s crew and studio were tied up in production for six months, much longer than his usual schedule, as the crews waited for the appropriate weather to film the blizzard and the scenes on the ice (Schickel, op. cit., p. 429). Griffith’s extensive debt led to rather strained relations with United Artists over the distribution of the film. Griffith sought to retain the lion’s share of profit by roadshowing the film himself, rather than releasing it immediately through United Artists. The newly formed company, itself strapped for cash and for product (Chaplin had yet to release a single feature), pressured Griffith for the film, and for a time it looked as if Griffith would break with Pickford, Fairbanks and Chaplin over the distribution rights. Although the breach was eventually healed, Richard Schickel argues that neither Griffith’s production company, the D.W. Griffith Corporation, nor United Artists ever effectively solved the problem of how he was to finance his films. Because Griffith had to mortgage most of the potential profits on a film simply to get it made, he was never in a position to use the profits from one production to pay for another (Schickel, op. cit., pp. 428–29, 443–49). While the fantastic success of Way Down East temporarily eased his debt, even more modest successes, such as that of Orphans of the Storm, not to mention the more unpopular ventures, put his company in a very difficult position by 1924. Although Way Down East was a popular hit, and lauded in unusually glowing terms by critics, its reception was marked by a degree of condescension toward the source material, at least in the metropolitan press. This attitude is epitomized by playwright and director Winchell Smith’s letter of congratulation to Griffith (September 5, 1920; in The D.W. Griffith Papers): “One of these days theatre people will wake up to what you’ve done. To make a big feature picture from the old plot of Way Down East – chuck it into a regular [i.e., legitimate] theatre – and get away with it! It’s nothing less than wonderful!” Most of the big New York papers followed in this vein, although it is instructive first to consider an editorial from the hinterlands, in The Evening World-Herald of Omaha, Nebraska (February 9, 1921; in The D.W. Griffith Papers), which took the film straight: “David Wark Griffith is not merely a keen business man exploiting ‘the movies’. He is a man of culture and refinement and ideals – a true and a great artist…. And he has shown us, in this ‘simple story of plain people’, how the screen can be used, with true art of a high order of excellence, not alone to entertain the people but to serve them. He has made the combination of beauty with truth. He has put art to its loftiest practical use as the hand-maiden of simple goodness.” In contrast, the New York trade press were almost all at pains to distance the film from the original play, frequently dubbed a mere “melodrama”. Variety (September 10, 1920), extremely enthusiastic about the film (“it would be sacrilege to cut a single foot”), saw Griffith’s role as that of transforming an old warhorse: “‘D.W.’ has taken a simple, elemental, old-fashioned, bucolic melodrama and ‘milked’ it for 12 reels of absorbing entertainment.” Wid’s Daily (September 12, 1920), which thought the film “the biggest box office attraction of the times”, was more respectful of the play as a big money-maker and a likely draw for audiences, but nevertheless noted that the original “never reached the public finished off as artistically and as powerfully, as Griffith’s picture”. Frederick James Smith (“The Celluloid Critic”, in Motion Picture Classic, November 1920, pp. 43, 86, 98, 100) also predicted commercial success for the film and called it Griffith’s “greatest since his epic, ‘The Birth of a Nation’”. 83

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But while approving the morality of the original play, the reviewer notes: “Not that we consider ‘Way Down East’ for a moment as a thing of literary or dramatic value. It was a melodrama of fearful dialogue and even more fearful construction. But a compelling message and a compelling background were there.” The highbrow critics were even more vehement in their rejection of the play, although the film version usually came in for praise. In 1918, George Jean Nathan had compiled a list of popular plays he considered “pish and platitude”. In addition to Tosca, East Lynne, Camille and The Old Homestead, he included The Two Orphans and Way Down East (Nathan, The Popular Theatre, p. 19). For many, the story Griffith had chosen to tell simply overwhelmed his treatment of it: they could see the appeal of the film, especially of its last-minute rescue over the ice, but they still could not take it seriously. Writing anonymously in The New York Times, Alexander Woollcott quipped: Anna Moore, the wronged heroine of Way Down East, was turned out into the snowstorm again last evening, but it was such a blizzard as she had never been turned out into in all the days since Lottie Blair Parker first told her woes nearly twenty-five years ago. For this was the screen version of that prime old New England romance, and the audience that sat in rapture at the Forty-fourth Street Theatre to watch its first unfolding here realized finally why it was that D.W. Griffith has selected it for a picture. It was not for its fame. Nor for its heroine. Not for the wrong done her. It was for the snowstorm. (Alexander Woollcott, “The Screen,” The New York Times, September 4, 1920, p. 7, reprinted in Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness, p. 252; for some reason, this review does not appear in the anthology The New York Times Film Reviews 1913–1968)

Robert Benchley, in an often-quoted joshing review of the film in the pages of the humor magazine Life, noted: “The whole picture, captions and all (‘There stands the man who deceived me!’), might very well serve as a delightful burlesque just as it stands were it not for the fact that Nature, who is reputed to be even more prodigal than Mr. Griffith, has furnished some remarkably beautiful scenery and snow effects which make the whole picture worth sitting through” (“Drama”, Life, September 23, 1920, pp. 542–43). Robert Sherwood, one of the first critics dedicated solely to reviewing film (both Benchley and Woollcott were theatre critics) discussed Way Down East in the context of Hugo Ballin’s production of East Lynne: “East Lynne” and “Way Down East” have been removed long since from the theatrical time-tables, and their revival in film form is only a means of reviving unpleasant memories. Westward the course of empire takes its way, and all the David Wark Griffiths and Hugo Ballins in the world can’t controvert the force of that famous platitude. The town-hall-to-night melodramas should be relegated to the eternal graveyard, along with the gold brick, the shell game and the notion that Boston (Mass.) is the Hub of the Universe; and those ghoulish producers who seek to dig up that which is better buried are wasting their own talents and imposing on the public. Stay West, young men – stay West. (Robert Sherwood, “The Silent Drama,” Life, March 31, 1921, p. 468)

While Sherwood thought the adaptation of plays like Way Down East a bad strategy for the film industry, Ludwig Lewisohn, whose interest in psychoanalysis undergirded his attacks on what was then called “Puritanism”, felt the film reinforced backward and repressive sexual taboos. Granting the “magnificence” of the snow scenes, and the film’s widespread appeal, he complained that Griffith had taken the tawdry old fable of “Way Down East” – the betrayal, the mock marriage, the villain’s downfall, the happy ending – and left it, in all essentials, precisely what it was. The written legends

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on the screen that interpret the action in a style of inimitably stale sugariness serve but to intensify the coarse and blundering insufficiency of the moral involved. These hectic appeals to the mob in favor of conventions as stiff as granite and as merciless as gangrene are powerfully calculated to tighten thongs that even now often cut to the very heart and to increase the already dreadful sum of social intolerance and festering pain. (Ludwig Lewisohn, “Drama: An Evening at the Movies”, The Nation, September 18, 1920, p. 332)

Many present-day critics continue to consider the plot rather old-fashioned, and praise the film as an instance of Griffith’s triumph over his material. Discussions of the blizzard and the rescue over the ice remain central to this argument. Thus, Richard Schickel: “It is the ability to show real sleigh rides and spacious barn dances, to place Gish and Barthelmess in a real blizzard, and on a real river as the winter ice breaks, that gives the film an insuperable advantage over the stage” (Schickel, op. cit., p. 431; see also one of the best known celebrations of this sequence and this film, although tied to notions of character expressivity rather than realism, in Vsevolod I. Pudovkin’s Film Technique and Film Acting, pp. 100–01). Thus, an argument that has persisted throughout the history of critical writing on Way Down East is that Griffith was able to update what was widely perceived as an outdated play through the medium of film itself, a medium which permitted the dramatic climax to be rendered in both a more realistic and a more spectacular way. A second argument, which sometimes co-exists uneasily alongside the first, is that Griffith does not transcend his material, but, rather, embraces it. This argument appears as early as Alfred K. Kuttner’s review in Exceptional Photoplays (December 1920, p. 3) and is still to be found in a 1972 article by Stanley Kaufmann (“Griffith’s ‘Way Down East’”, pp. 50–57). Griffith is praised precisely for taking it “straight” rather than as the burlesque anticipated by Robert Benchley. The film offers a distillation of a melodrama which, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Old Homestead, has survived for generations and thus can be assumed to solicit deeply held collective moral or affective responses. More recently, in the hands of critics as diverse as Robert Lang and Linda Williams, the film, with its links to nineteenth-century theatre, has been held as exemplary of melodrama’s narrative structures and treatment of gender – in many ways, it has come to define the genre of melodrama for us, or at least the genre as it existed in silent film (Lang, American Film Melodrama, pp. 65–78; Williams, Playing the Race Card, pp. 26–42). Both of these lines of argument present difficulties. The snow scenes constitute but ten minutes of a film that runs for over two hours. The emphasis on the realistic and/or spectacular nature of these scenes has turned attention away from the much more complex and far-reaching transformation of the original material that Griffith achieves through alternation. The insistence upon the generic continuity between the play and the film versions of Way Down East, while instructive in some ways, has masked what, in my view, are equally important discontinuities. This is not to agree with the critic that described the play as “a melodrama of fearful dialogue and even more fearful construction”. But it is to say that the film achieves its effects in different ways than the stage version, and that generic conventions are therefore inevitably rendered differently. A word is in order about the status of the material I have viewed, a 16mm reduction of the version released with a musical soundtrack in 1931, and the DVD released by Film Preservation Associates, which is accompanied by a very similar soundtrack. The DVD seems more complete and has more titles, but as Griffith was notorious for tinkering with his films, both during their initial roadshow runs, and on re-release, it is probable that these are only two versions among many. Moreover, the sonorised release was projected at 24 frames per second, whereas the 1920 silent screenings may well have had variable speed projection, but possibly 85

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ran at around 20 frames per second, as does apparently the DVD. Discussions of timings in what follows are those in the sound print at sound speed. Finally, although the score for the sound version undoubtedly includes many tunes and motifs named in Griffith’s correspondence and reviews at the time of the first release, some elements prominent in those 1920 sources – notably the use of the Dutchman’s theme from the overture to The Flying Dutchman and Liszt’s Préludes – are not in the sound release score. In June 1928, the Photophone Corporation, the company handling the release of the sound version, signed a contract with William Frederick Peters, a composer of the original score (with Louis Silvers), to provide music to replace copyrighted material in that score (see Peters’ documents in The D.W. Griffith Papers, June 1928). Given the known hostility of the Wagner estate to the cinema – Decla-Bioscop was unable to persuade them to allow music from the Ring to be used to accompany Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), for example – themes from Wagner operas like The Flying Dutchman would have been impossible in European prints of Way Down East at the beginning of the 1930s. Liszt’s music, too, would still have been in copyright under the Berne Convention. In the sound version, there are borrowings from the storm music in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (the “Pastoral”), perhaps replacing the Wagner and the Liszt. Another puzzle is that in the DVD (but not the 16mm print I viewed, which lacks this incident) the comic character Rube Whipple does a dance in the Bartlett parlor, the music indicated by a title that shows us the words and two bars of the music to “Big Hat All Bound ’Round with a Woollen String”, a song associated with Rube in the play. However, the music for the 1931 reissue actually reprises “Pop Goes the Weasel” and “Little Brown Jug” for Rube’s dance. The song identified in the title may thus also have been eliminated in the reissue due to copyright restrictions. Despite these changes, I think it is reasonable to assume that the score in the sound version is similar in effect to the original, given contemporary commentary, not all of it favorable, about the film’s music. The film is divided into four parts. The prologue, which has no equivalent in the play but does in the Grismer novelization of it, recounts the story of Anna’s seduction by Sanderson, desertion, and the death of her baby. Act 1, which closely follows the play, shows Anna’s arrival at the Bartlett farm, the Squire being persuaded to hire her and her discovery that Sanderson lives nearby. Act 2 follows the play more loosely, but does include Martha’s revelation of Anna’s past to the Squire and Anna’s refusal to marry David, as in the stage version. Act 3 includes both the action of Act 3 in the play, in which the Squire drives Anna out into the snowy night, and the action of Act 4, in which Anna is rescued by David and forgiven by the Squire. (The brevity of the sequence of Anna’s expulsion in the film – it takes about 8 minutes – is quite different from the play, in which the characters spend a great deal more time in conversation building suspense before the Squire’s entrance. This leads me to classify this action as only part of Act 3 for Griffith, whereas it stands alone as Act 3 in the stage version.) Although the final rescue of Anna in Act 3 is built out of an alternation between David and Anna, it is relatively simple in form. The two lines of action – David’s search and Anna’s frenzied run toward the river – quickly converge into one – the rescue itself. This action is unified visually by the frequently praised mise-en-scène of water and ice that encompasses them both, and aurally by the music, which – unlike the brief folk melodies and motivic construction typical of the rest of the score – is accompanied by programmatic music (probably adapted initially from The Flying Dutchman, and in the sonorised version from Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony as discussed above) tied to the idea of the storm and the breaking of the ice jam. Unlike the final act, the prologue and second act present a relatively more complex form of alternation, experimental enough, and disunified enough, to have provoked some negative comment at the time of the film’s first release. 86

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While the action of the prologue draws from Grismer’s novelization of the play, it differs from it in that the mother becomes a much more sympathetic character (thus preparing for the ending in which Mrs. Bartlett clearly comes to take the place of Anna’s mother), and also in the addition of the scene, taken from Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in which Anna herself baptizes her baby on the eve of its death (Kozloff, “Where Wessex Meets New England: Griffith’s Way Down East and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, pp. 35–41). It also incorporates proleptic introductions of the characters in Bartlett village, and David’s dream at the time of the mock marriage. In addition, there are numerous subjective shots – Sanderson’s fantasies and visions. The interpolations and interruptions of the main line of action may be laid out as follows: 1. The scene of the bridge party at which Anna first meets the wealthy and snobbish Tremonts, and is first seen by Lennox Sanderson, is followed by the introduction of Bartlett village (more evocatively called Wakefield in the play), which a title informs us is near the Sanderson family’s country estate. We see the farm, David, the Squire and Mrs. Bartlett. 2. During the ball at the Tremonts’, Sanderson is introduced to Anna, now dressed up by the eccentric aunt of the Tremont sisters. He takes her off alone into an alcove and with the title “IN YOUR BEAUTY LIVES AGAIN ELAINE, THE LILY MAID, LOVE DREAMING AT ASTOLAT” there is an iris in to Sanderson’s vision: Gish is shown in a flowing white train that frames her head and flows the length of her body. It is highly backlit, by far the brightest object in the frame, set against a dark painted backdrop and bordered by willow leaves above her head. After a cut-in, a return to the long-shot framing and an iris out, it becomes evident that Anna shares this vision, indicated by the next title in which Anna asks him to “TELL ME MORE”, as the film returns to the scene of the party. 3. The mock marriage between Anna and Sanderson is interrupted by the title FAR AWAY IT HAPPENS THAT DAVID BARTLETT IS DREAMING A TROUBLED DREAM. We see David asleep in his

room. In the apartment of the false minister, Sanderson drops the ring before he can put it on Anna’s finger and it rolls away. In his room, David wakes up, looking worried. Then the false minister’s female accomplice finds the ring and the “wedding” continues. (It should be noted that the incident of dropping the ring is in Grismer’s novelisation, but Griffith’s interpolations are his own.) 4. During the “honeymoon” at the Rose Tree Inn, Sanderson stares at Anna in the lacy negligé he has bought as a wedding present, a tilt up her body indicating his gaze. A title also grants us access to his subjectivity: HERE CONSCIENCE KNOCKS AT THE DOOR – PERHAPS THE SLIGHTEST INTERRUPTION MIGHT STILL OVERT THIS TRAGEDY, BUT –. He and Anna sit at a side table. In a close-up, she smiles at him trustingly, followed by a dialogue title: “MY – MY HUSBAND”, whereupon she lowers her head. Lowell Sherman’s facial expression indicates Sanderson’s momentary pang of conscience, but this is then overwhelmed by his desire for her, a point driven home by a close-up of Gish’s feet and ankles (one of several sexually charged shots of women’s feet in the film). As Sanderson leads Anna off, the film cuts to comic scenes of life in Bartlett village. In the fields, David horses around with the hired hands to the accompaniment of “Pop Goes the Weasel”. We see various rustic types, including Rube Whipple, THE DREAD MINION OF THE LAW, asleep in front of the country store. Engaged in fanning Rube, a boy and his kitten gradually fall asleep. The comic pair of Seth and Martha are introduced. They arrive at Bartlett farm followed by Rube, with a dialogue title taken almost directly from the play: “GREAT NEWS! POST 87

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OFFICE BIN ROBBED! DOLLAR EIGHTY-TWO CENTS IN POSTAGE STAMPS, EIGHTEEN POSTAL CARDS! HEAVY LOSS TO THE GOV’MENT”. After the departure of Rube Whipple, we return to the Rose Tree Inn the next morning, where Sanderson bids Anna goodbye and she sets out for home.

5. Anna remains with her mother, her supposed marriage still a secret. We are informed that Sanderson’s visits become less frequent. Following the title THE OLD WAY TOO PLEASANT TO GIVE UP, we see Sanderson at a party in his apartment, watching a woman dancer with her legs bare performing high kicks. A cut in to a medium close-up shows the dancer’s legs and feet. At home, Anna rocks an imaginary baby in her arms. As Anna studies a paper, we are shown an insert: different written versions of Anna’s “married” name. She kisses the ring, which she usually hides in a chain around her neck. Sanderson flirts at his party, then stops, his thoughts indicated by a dissolve to an interpolated shot of Anna from the honeymoon sequence; it is similar to the shot which follows the title “MY – MY HUSBAND”, except in this case she raises her head, looks at him trustingly and then lowers her head again. Dissolve back to the party, where Sanderson clearly looks down at the feet of the dancer who now is next to him, followed by other close-ups of tempting women. At first he shakes his head but then gives way and walks off with several of the women. Anthony P. Kelly, who is credited as the screenwriter but does not seem to have had much to do with the film’s final form, wrote a letter to Griffith (August 14, 1920, in The D.W. Griffith Papers) after Way Down East had previewed strongly objecting to the organization of this prologue: There is an inviolable rule in dramatic construction – which you are undoubtedly aware of – to the effect that if a plot revolves about a central character – and surely the plot of “WAY DOWN EAST” revolves about Anna Moore – the successive and coherent episodes that comprise the story of that character must be followed without digression, save here and there to more clearly illuminate a certain character or to bring in comedy relief. It seems to me that this standard is unquestionably violated when, during Anna’s stay in Boston, the Bartletts and the other attendant characters are introduced…. Therefore, I most ardently advise that none of these scenes be shown until just prior to the advent of Anna.

But Griffith’s “digressions” actually serve several important functions. First, they allow him to deal with the exposition very efficiently. After the dramatic high point of the death of Anna’s baby, it would have been very awkward to have her meet in turn all of the characters – both primary and secondary – that make up Bartlett village. Her story would have to stop while she visited the general store and met its somnolent occupants, figured out that Martha was a gossip and Seth wanted to marry her, that the Squire was a strict, Old Testament figure while the son, like the mother, represented the spirit of the New. Second, and as is typical of his use of alternation in previous films, Griffith also uses two of the digressions to cover important temporal gaps in his main line of action. Thus, the first set of introductions of Bartlett characters covers the period between Anna’s arrival at the Tremonts’ and the great ball, by which point she has presumably lived in Boston for some time. Similarly, the cut from the honeymoon evening to the next set of Bartlett characters covers the period of the honeymoon night. This temporal relationship is made very precise, since we see Sanderson leading Anna off at night and we return to Anna’s story the next morning. Thus, Griffith establishes the fact of the seduction very clearly without having to show it directly, which, of course, would not have been possible at the time. In addition, all of the interpolations – including Sanderson’s visions – work to establish 88

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moral contrasts, what Tom Gunning, in his discussion of A Corner in Wheat (1909), calls the “editorial” function of Griffith’s employment of alternation as a narrational device (D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, pp. 231–54). Thus, Anna’s first encounter with the snobbish and fashionable Tremonts – her aunt disdainfully discarding the handmade “hug-me-tight” knitted by Anna’s mother – is immediately contrasted with the homespun characters and activities on the Bartlett farm – David Bartlett at the well, Mrs. Bartlett reading aloud from her Bible to her husband. The second set of images of village life presents the “crime” of the post office robbery which is not only humorously trivial (as in the original play) but, also, stresses the innocence of country life in contrast with Sanderson’s “tragic” betrayal of Anna on her honeymoon night. The progress of the affair for Sanderson is expressed through a symmetrical series of markedly subjective shots. The vision of Anna as Elaine of Astolat at the Tremont ball is matched by the shot of Anna in her negligé on the night of her honeymoon. In both the honeymoon scene and the scene at his party, the film employs a close-up of Gish, her facial expression conveying her happy faith in her husband, to indicate what motivates his moral qualms. And, in both scenes, close shots of women’s feet and legs – in the first case belonging to Anna and in the second to the dancer – express the sexual fascination which overwhelms his scruples. In contrast with this whole set of imagery is David’s dream. The cutaways to David, which suggest an emotional connection between lovers outside the normal logic of time and space, have precedents in other Griffith films. For example, Jacques Aumont has discussed at length the cut in Enoch Arden (1911) between the shipwreck that maroons Enoch on the deserted isle and Annie Lee sitting on the beach with her children (Aumont, “Griffith, le cadre, la figure”, pp. 51–67). After showing Enoch and his shipmates thrashing about in the water, the film cuts back to Annie and she reacts as if she can see what is happening. These cuts and Annie’s reaction can be understood if one posits two distinct levels of narration, considering the shots as a representation of what objectively happens to Enoch and, simultaneously, a subjective representation of Annie’s fears, what she imagines might happen to Enoch at sea. In Way Down East, the alternation between Anna’s mock marriage and David’s troubled dream takes the suspension of narrative logic one step further. Since David does not yet know of Anna’s existence, we cannot plausibly read the images of the mock marriage as what he imagines or fears for her. Rather, like the editing in A Corner in Wheat that makes connections between the disparate lives and spaces of the stock speculator, the farmers and the starving workers, the narration connects spaces that have (as yet) no causal connection at the level of the story. The narration proleptically anticipates David’s tender concern for Anna at the very moment that Sanderson is most false, and implicitly sets up a contrast between the form of David’s desire and Sanderson’s lustful and fleeting visions. Griffith’s reworking of Grismer’s novelization and of the exposition presented as “backstory” in the play certainly is not new in the sense that the plot, or the moral framework of the original, is drastically changed. Nonetheless, the form of the alternation in Griffith’s prologue transforms the play’s already nostalgic evocation of a rural past by contrasting it with modern, amoral, city life. This strategy was noted as a fault at the level of costuming at the time of the film’s release: “A minor plaint can be made against the seeming confusion of time in the city and country scenes. Lucile and 1920 reign in the wicked metropolis, while the country is still in the nineties sartorially” (Frederick James Smith, “The Celluloid Critic”, cit., p. 86). But the confusion of fashions, as well as the editing in the prologue, works more forcefully to construct the life of the village as distinct from the city, a source of value and a potential haven for the heroine. It might also be said, to update the play by acknowledging the existence of an urban world outside the confines of the village, from which vantage point the “old-fashioned” pleasures and values of the village are thrown into relief. 89

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The alternation in Act 2 of Way Down East, in my view one of Griffith’s best edited sequences, takes its inspiration from the play. Woollcott asserts that Griffith chose to adapt Way Down East so that he could do the final snow storm, but I think it is just as plausible that Griffith was inspired by the following scene from the play (all references to the play text are to the printed – not published – version, copyrighted by Lottie Blair Parker in 1899, and found in The D.W. Griffith Papers). Martha enters the parlor at the Bartletts’ and hints that she has news for the Squire, she has been “sewin’ down to Warrin Center”. Seth enters, jokes about his rheumatism medicine and quarrels with Martha. A sleigh and singing is heard off, and Doc Wiggins and Rube enter, with others. Rube figures out that Seth’s medicine is whiskey. Singing is heard off, and this motivates Rube’s song, “Big Hat All Bound ’Round with a Woollen String”. All exit to go to the party on the sleigh, leaving Martha alone with the Squire, whereupon she makes her revelation about Anna’s past. In Griffith’s hands, the suspension of Martha’s revelation is greatly extended: all of the action of the play’s second act is interposed between Martha’s discovery of what has happened to Anna and her revelation of this information to the Squire. This is the alternation, starting from the point at which Martha leaves the sewing circle (I have included references to the narratively relevant musical motifs for purposes of discussion, below): Interior, sewing circle. Martha: “It’s my bounden duty to go and expose this woman to the Squire!” Martha rises. Interior, Bartlett parlor. David tells Kate they can not marry without proper love. She rises and exits. Interior to Exterior, sewing circle. Cautioning Mrs. Poole to remain silent, Martha exits. (Martha’s six note flourish, which has been heard repeatedly throughout her prior conversation with Mrs. Poole.) Interior, Bartlett parlor. Anna enters, David sits back to fire. (“In the Gloaming”, first heard in the prior scene between Anna and David by the river) Exterior, road. Three shots of Martha marching towards the lens, all from same axial position: a long shot, a medium tracking shot in which the camera moves back as she moves forward, a medium long shot in which she walks until she passes camera. (Martha’s six note flourish.) Interior, Bartlett parlor. Anna sits to the left of the fire to sew. David moves to sit beside her, stares at her, gets up and stands in back of her chair, then exits. (David’s theme, Charles Wakefield Cadman’s “At Dawning”, also called “I love you”.) Anna turns to speak to him, sees he is gone and cries. (David’s theme arranged for harp and violin.) Interior, Bartlett hall to parlor. Cut to the Squire in the hall, then to Anna quickly drying her tears. The Squire enters, stands by the mantel. She approaches and lights his pipe. (No change in music) Exterior, road. Martha walking. (No change in music) Interior, Bartlett parlor. Anna asks if there would be any hope of forgiveness if she had “sinned” and the Squire says no. (Squire’s theme, slow, minor key, arranged for cellos and basses) Exterior, road. Tracking shot of sleigh. (“Jingle Bells”) Exterior to Interior, Bartlett’s. Martha enters the parlor and glares at Anna. (Martha’s flourish, followed by Squire’s theme) Anna goes up to her room. Martha rocks in the chair next to the Squire. Mrs. Bartlett enters and sits beside her husband. Dialogue title [Martha]: “MARIA POOLE, FROM BELDEN, WAS AT THE SEWING CIRCLE, AND SHE SAYS – ” Interior, Anna’s Bedroom. She looks upset and is listening. (No change in music) Interior, Bartlett parlor. Dialogue Title [Martha]: “NO, I SHOULDN’T TELL YOU”. (Martha’s flourish) She turns away.

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Dialogue Title [Martha]: “IT’S THAT – ” She turns away again. Exterior to Interior, Bartlett house. The revelers get off the sleigh and enter the kitchen. (“Jingle Bells”) Interior, Bartlett parlor. Dialogue Title [Martha]: “OH, IT’S AWFUL – ” The revelers enter the parlor. Narrative Title: BUT BEFORE MARTHA TELLS HER THRILLING NEWS – The revelers proceed to clear the floor and dance a Virginia Reel. (Two dance tunes: “Arkansas Traveler”, then “Turkey in the Straw”.) Anna enters with drinks, but when David asks her if she is going to dance, she says she is not invited. The Professor attempts to dance the Virginia Reel with Kate as his partner (“Pop Goes the Weasel”). The floor clears as David dances with his mother (“Little Brown Jug”). Martha stares at Anna (Martha’s flourish). Rube Whipple dances (reprise of “Pop Goes the Weasel” and “Little Brown Jug”). The revelers, including Martha, exit. (Unidentified folk tune) Interior, David’s room. (David’s theme) Exterior, Bartlett’s. Revelers mount on sleigh. (“Reuben and Rachel”) Interior, barn dance. The Professor and Kate enter. (Unidentified dance tune) Exterior to Interior, Bartlett parlor. Sanderson arrives and finds Anna in the living room. (Suspenseful theme, first heard when Lennox is initially introduced.) In an effort to get her to leave the vicinity, he threatens to reveal her past, while assuring her that no one would condemn him for his past. David enters and glares at Lennox, who exits. (David’s theme) David approaches Anna. Interior, barn dance. Martha approaches the Squire. (Martha’s flourish) Interior, Bartlett parlor. Anna sits sewing, David sitting beside her, proposes. She stops sewing, gazes upward. (David’s theme) Interior, barn dance. Dialogue Title [Martha]: “IT’S ABOUT ANNA MOORE. SHE LIVED IN BELDEN UNDER THE NAME OF ‘LENNOX’ – MRS. LENNOX’!” (Martha’s flourish) New Dialogue Title: “A BABY WAS BORN – ” Added to existing title: “BUT THEY WARN’T NO WEDDIN’ RING” Added to existing title: “TO HER FINGER!” Martha smiles maliciously and rocks in her chair. (Secondary Squire theme, associated with the trip to Belden) The Squire threatens to drive Anna out. Mrs. Bartlett holds him back and tells him he needs proof. He decides to go to Belden in the morning. Fade out on Squire gesticulating angrily. Interior, Bartlett parlor to Anna’s bedroom. Anna tries to exit, David stops and kisses her. She tells him she can never be any man’s wife, then runs upstairs and closes the door to her room. Alternate between Anna sobbing on one side of the door and David trying to talk to her on the other. Fade out on David. (Several phrases from prior tunes in the score, many chromatic shifts to increase tension)

All of the important phases of this action appear in Act 2 of the play version in this order: David and Kate decide not to marry; Anna, lighting the Squire’s pipe as in the film, asks if there is any possibility of forgiveness; then the conversation between Martha and the Squire, interrupted by the revelers; the threatening conversation between Anna and Sanderson; and finally David’s proposal (these are intermixed with comic scenes between Kate, the Professor and Hi Holler). Individual scenes in play and film are thus very similar and in many cases Griffith has used lines from the play for the intertitles (they are marked in the printed copy of the playscript of Way Down East in The D.W. Griffith Papers). But Griffith has elaborated 91

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on this material and reordered it so that all of the action occurs under the cloud of the impending conversation between Martha and the Squire – the deferral of which is almost jokingly alluded to in the title BUT BEFORE MARTHA TELLS HER THRILLING NEWS, a title which I think verges on the kind of burlesque Benchley thought appropriate for this adaptation. In keeping with Griffith’s tradition of crosscutting, the Martha/Squire subplot and the Anna/David subplot both come to a head simultaneously: Martha reveals Anna’s guilty past at the same moment that Anna’s guilt prevents her from accepting David’s proposal. Even here, the two lines of action do not converge. The suspense continues into Act 3, and only with the return of the Squire from Belden do the parallel plot lines finally meet, exploding into violence: Anna’s denunciation of Sanderson, David’s smashing of the plate and attack on his rival, and, finally, the snowstorm. It seems to me that the scenes on the ice owe much of their power to Griffith’s careful preparation through crosscutting. Despite the breathtaking cinematography, and the allure of a real river, real ice and real danger, it is the painstaking deferral of the final confrontation in the kitchen that gives its violent outcome such force. In a famous essay that takes away from Griffith with one hand what it gives with the other, Sergei Eisenstein argues that Griffith’s montage is built out of simple oppositions that never find a higher unity (unlike the dialectical oppositions which structure Soviet montage). He claims that Griffith’s is an art of tempo, one scene simply juxtaposed with another, repeatedly, in accelerating beats (Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves”, in S.M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. III, pp. 193–238). One of the distinctive aspects of the alternation in Act 2 of Way Down East is that, unlike many analogous suspenseful passages in Griffith’s work, such as the last-minute rescue at the end of The Birth of a Nation, it does not follow this pattern. Instead, it might be said to be organized around tonal contrasts, a point to which Eisenstein gives us the key in his apt citation of Dickens: It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky wellcured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth her dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals…. (Eisenstein cites from the beginning of chapter 17, Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist [London: Penguin Books, 1985], pp. 168–69)

Like a good murderous melodrama, the play Way Down East alternates dramatic and comic scenes (not to mention songs). In Griffith’s version, the story is unified at one level by the suspense generated by Martha’s threatened disclosure. But, within the confines of this narrative armature, Griffith seems to strive his utmost for tonal variation from scene to scene, calling upon the resources of camera movement, mise-en-scène and music to enhance the streaky bacon effect. The Martha/Squire subplot is particularly well handled. The suspense generated by Martha’s approach to the house is stressed through the triple shots of her movement toward the camera on the road. Although smoothed over slightly through the interpolation of one title after the first shot, this is nonetheless a violation of the thirty-degree rule which makes her movement more emphatic, more ominous. In addition, her absurd walk, waddling from side to side, allows her character to retain a comic touch (I suspect this section may well have been undercranked in projection in the 1920s). The repetition of her musical flourish emerges 92

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frequently from the motivic construction of the score, its rhythm echoing the rhythm of Martha’s steps when she walks and the rocking movement she makes whenever she sits down – mickey mousing before Mickey Mouse. Unlike Martha, the Squire tends to make slow deliberate gestures which become threatening after Martha’s revelation. The first theme associated with the Squire is also slow, while the second, which will eventually accompany his trip to Belden, is only slightly faster. Both are in a minor key and seem to carry the idea of a “fateful” turn of events. In contrast to Martha’s emphatic movements, Anna is usually still. She is shown sewing or quietly serving drinks while the revelers dance. As is true in the film as a whole, Gish is frequently shown in close-ups which are abstracted from the background and she is lit as no other actor. The characteristic lighting set up for her is one or two backlights so intense that all detail of her hair is lost, with a frontal key light, positioned low and slightly to her left or right, often apparently not as intense as the backlight. There is fill light, but often not enough to eliminate all shadow. Male characters are usually shot with a single, frontal key or, in the case of David, with a high frontal key light and some backlight. Sometimes the light on Gish is diffused (again, unlike any other character) and in both the interview with the Squire and her confrontation with Sanderson there is true soft focus. In the scene with the Squire, Burr McIntosh is shown in sharp focus in the close-up, the background behind him almost black, while the close-ups of Gish are especially soft around the face, and her background is fully illuminated (the longer shot of the two together does show the light falling off on the wall behind the Squire, but does not completely match the lighting of the close-ups). Similarly, in the confrontation with Sanderson, Bitzer and Sartov shoot Gish’s close-up with the edges of the frame, up to and including the antimacassar behind her on the chair, out of focus (in the DVD everything in the shot looks soft, but in the print, the soft focus seems to be stronger around the edges of the frame). The shot in no way matches the medium long shot of the two actors, nor the close-ups of Lowell Sherman, all of which are sharp. The unabashed discontinuity in lighting, backgrounds and focus between close-ups and master shots – a degree of discontinuity that would not be tolerated in later, classical cinema – gives Gish a unique background and scale for her performance. Many of her most important moments in these scenes consist of small, delicate gestures rendered in close-up – turning her head to look at David, only to find him gone; lifting her hand to her face in despair; turning her head away from Martha’s stare; struggling to steady her hand to thread a needle as David sits and talks beside her. It is almost as if Anna inhabits a different space than the other characters, more confined but softly luminous, one appropriate to her quiet endurance of a secret love and secret shame. The music associated with the Anna/David subplot in this section of the film, Cadman’s lyrical “I love you”, is markedly different from all of the other music in the sequence. The legato melody, carried predominantly by the strings, is often set against the highly accented flourish for Martha, carried predominantly by the woodwinds. There is also a decided contrast within the scene between Anna and the Squire. David’s theme, scored only for harp and violin, gives way to the Squire’s theme, which registers much lower with its cellos and basses. In addition, in two most effective transitions, both the Squire’s theme and, later, Martha’s flourish are interrupted by “Jingle Bells”. The revelers are the “kicker” in the complex tonal variations which make up this sequence. The first cut to the revelers on their sleigh occurs just after Anna’s conversation with the Squire, with his line quite similar to the play: “WHEN THE LAW’S BROKE, IT’S BROKE, AIN’T IT? A WRONG’S A WRONG AND NOTHIN’ CAN MAKE IT RIGHT”. The dismal prospect this philosophy offers Anna, mirrored in the music associated with the Squire’s condemnation, is broken by a tracking shot of the moving sleigh accompanied by “Jingle Bells”. Not only does this shot 93

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provide a drastic change from the Squire’s pronouncement, but also, the sleigh’s movement – echoed by the camera – and the gaiety of the music with which it is associated, differs significantly from the stillness and poignant tone of the prior scenes between Anna and David. In the second transition, the revelers and their music do not simply interrupt the conversation between Martha and the Squire but transform the space of the parlor with their entrance. As they proceed to set up the dance, the camera, directly facing the rear wall, is placed high and farther back from the action than in any previous shot of the room, so that it looks much bigger and less intimate. We see the rafters on the ceiling and the revelers who line all three walls. The fiddler stands on a chair or riser so that he stands out in the extreme long shot. As dancers move into the center of this space, there is a strong sense of the lively, animated crowd and the previously tense atmosphere in the room gives way to a whole new aspect. The professor attempts to dance the Virginia Reel with Kate, to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel”. Not knowing the steps, he jumps repeatedly in place, while Kate and the others push him around the dance floor in the proper sequence of steps. Then the comedy and commotion abruptly cease, and the film switches emotional registers yet again, as the dance floor clears so that David and his mother can dance a polka to “Little Brown Jug”. This appeal was not lost even on the resisting Ludwig Lewisohn: “A son dances a simple old country dance with his mother… an old-fashioned ditty that brings back to every American those scenes of his earlier years from which no man can withhold a faint tenderness. Our youth does tug at our hearts” (“Drama: An Evening at the Movies”, cit., p. 332). The dancers clear out as abruptly as they have come with a brief shot of Martha staring at Anna and a repetition of the flourish, returning us to the ominous aspect of the impending disclosure. But this quickly gives way to more folk tunes, with Rube’s dance and the revelers’ mounting the sleigh and heading for the barn. A last bit of comedy at the barn, when the professor hangs his hat on the horn of a cow, sets up a contrast with the next scene, the confrontation between Anna and Sanderson. There are indications that at least some spectators objected to the inconsistency of tone in Griffith’s montage. This is most apparent in the comments about the music, for it was standard practice to use music to unify crosscut sequences (as is the case in the scene of the rescue over the ice). Gillian Anderson cites a negative British reaction in 1923: In addition to the music being of a low standard, the score is “peppered” with leit-motifs for each of the six main characters. The airs of “I love you” and “Believe me” are scored each time the heroine appears. There is a further theme announcing the arrival of the chatterbox neighbour, and this theme alone appears forty times in the original score…. I am glad Mr. Marchbank refused to perform this rubbish and made a clean sweep of both the music supplied with the film and the innumerable cues which appeared about every ten bars or so. (Anderson, ed., Music for Silent Films, 1894–1929: A Guide, p. xxxvii; the original citation is from M.M. Hansford, “Picturegraphs”, The American Organist, 1923, p. 234)

In his review in The New York Times, Woollcott more briefly refers to “an orchestral accompaniment that includes every old tune from ‘Little Brown Jug’ to ‘Jingle Bells’”. There were also many complaints about the comedy. While Wid’s Daily (September 12, 1920, cit.) praised the comedy in the “good old barn dance scenes”, the more highbrow Exceptional Photoplays (December 1920, p. 3) opined: “Some of his comedy scenes, the country dances and the village store episodes, are carelessly done, as if taken in haste, and are not properly joined to the rest of the story.” What is at issue here, in addition to the quality of the music and of the comedy, is the lack of unity – the music changes every ten bars, the spirit of the lively folk dances is at odds with the proximate scenes. But the abrupt shifts are precisely what make Act 2 of Way Down East so distinctive. 94

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Given the framework of a single building arc of suspense, Griffith clearly seems to have aimed for tonal contrast rather than increasing tempo as a way of augmenting the effect of that suspense. Each repetition of “Jingle Bells” or David’s theme serves to refresh the impact of Martha’s flourish. In addition, this is one of the few instances I know in which Griffith’s interest in editing for contrast does not exist primarily at a moral level – rich versus poor, city versus country, lust versus love – but rather at the formal level of lighting, framing, the extent and rhythm of movement, sonic rhythm and melody. I don’t think he questioned the moral assumptions of Lottie Blair Parker’s Way Down East, but he took them as givens enough so that he could play more freely with other filmic parameters and experiment with giving his montage a different sort of emotional charge. In this sense, the film is both like the streaky bacon typical of “good murderous melodrama”, and more modern than Griffith’s detractors in the 1920s gave him credit for. Way Down East can be taken as exemplary of melodrama in as many ways as there are definitions of melodrama itself: it is a sentimental story of a virtuous, beset heroine (James Smith, Melodrama, 1973; Martha Vincinus, “Helpless and Unfriended: Nineteenth Century Domestic Melodrama”, 1981); it provides “thrills” and sensation scenes (Michael Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910, 1981; Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 2001); it relies upon deeply felt moral categories and turns crucially upon the denunciation of vice and recognition of virtue (Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 1976, cit.); it intertwines story and score in a manner which recalls the earliest definition of the form as melos and drama. Nonetheless, in my view, this example most usefully reminds us of the stylistic diversity of melodrama. In his essay in this volume, David Mayer informs us that the play was an instance of “combination melodrama”, a drama incorporating extended comic turns by well known comedic actors (such as Harry [Charles] Seamon playing Rube Whipple), songs, the presence of live animals on stage, and a climactic fist fight between the hero and his rival (the producer, William Brady, got his start in show business organizing and promoting fist fights). While Griffith’s version is more unified in the structuring of suspense, and in this sense could be called more “classical”, it retains melodrama’s penchant for lightning-quick shifts in tone, accompanied by sharp contrasts of pictorial and musical elements. That such shifts remained a constant of melodrama, even at the height of the classical Hollywood system, will be evident to anyone who has ever delighted in the sequence in Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1957) in which Jasper’s death is put in alternation with Mary Lee’s wild dance. Lea Jacobs

THEATRICAL SOURCES Recalling her creative association with D.W. Griffith, Lillian Gish describes her initial disbelief when, in 1919, Griffith announced his intent to make a film of Lottie Blair Parker’s play Way Down East. Gish refers disparagingly to this drama and Griffith’s judgement: “We all thought privately that Mr. Griffith had lost his mind. ‘Way Down East’ was a horse-and-buggy melodrama, familiar on the rural circuit for more than twenty years. We didn’t believe it would ever succeed.” She then adds, “As I read the play I could hardly keep from laughing” (Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, pp. 229–30). Gish’s dismayed astonishment, carrying with it the assumption that Griffith was to adapt his film from a single antiquated and unfashionable source, has misled scholars who, often without noting its significant place in the American theatrical repertoire, have been similarly dismissive of the drama. Many of these interpreters of Griffith’s work have likewise assumed that he worked directly from a single playscript, achieving a modern filmic masterpiece, against all odds, from outdated dross. There are, in point of fact, four discrete versions and various intermediate drafts of Way 95

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Down East written and performed between 1896 and 1898. Retracing the play’s development on its long try-out circuit of American cities and hamlets, Griffith draws extensively on two of these: the very earliest, performed on rural try-outs as Annie Laurie, and the final printednot-published version (the text cited by Lea Jacobs cited in her essay above) of Way Down East which reached Midwestern and East Coast audiences late in 1898 and which remained in the popular repertoire through the 1920s, well after Griffith’s film was recognised for its excellence. Moreover, Griffith relied on sources beyond Parker’s stage drama. There are parody versions which further underlined the theatrical characteristics of the play and illuminate audience expectations which were generated and memorialised in this rural drama. More significantly, there is a novelised version, published in 1900 and in-print until 1938, which provided the overall structure for Griffith’s film and which further suggested some of the film’s episodes, notably those which occur before Anna Moore, exhausted and demoralised, reaches the Bartlett farm. My intent is to describe the evolution and surviving permutations of Way Down East to the extent that these variants furnished Griffith with raw and finished material and, further, to indicate how Griffith has inflected his sources to achieve his own distinct drama. Although the original play is chiefly credited to Lottie Blair Parker (1859–1937), it is essential, in the light of the subsequent film, to underline the role of two theatrical collaborators – William A. Brady (1863–1950) and Joseph R.[hode] Grismer (1849–1922). Their work was essential to the success of the play, and the impact of the changes they wrought as the play moved to its final version carries into Griffith’s motion picture. Brady, already known to film historians for his role in promoting major boxing matches and for filming both the live fight and reconstructed facsimile matches, was – first and foremost – a theatrical impresario active from the 1880s through the 1920s. It was to Brady that Lottie Parker’s husband, Harry Doel Parker, brought the script of Annie Laurie in 1896. Although Brady subsequently characterised Parker as a novice dramatist, her talent chiefly recognised by her husband, Lottie Blair Parker had already enjoyed recognition as an actress and a modest success with curtain-raiser comedies. Aware of current American theatrical praxis, Parker had the acumen and stage knowledge to prepare this manuscript for production as a “combination” melodrama, (i.e., a melodrama devised for touring on the nation’s numerous theatrical circuits where the serious episodes were interspersed with musical and variety turns). Brady, although later implying that the play was clunky and amateurish, immediately recognised the commercial potential of Annie Laurie and thereupon purchased performing rights and the American copyright to this drama for $10,000. He also purchased rights to a second melodrama on the subject of the recent SpanishAmerican War which, in the event, was never developed. As Brady neglected to purchase international copyright, Lottie Parker arranged for Annie Laurie to receive a copyright performance at Great Yarmouth, England, in January 1897, thereby confirming her authorship of this drama and her acknowledgement in subsequent versions of the play. Although Annie Laurie was superseded – and consequently forgotten – following successive revisions, it is from this earliest drama that Griffith found a scene – excised in later versions of Parker’s play – which became the model for the harrowing and highly regarded episode in which Anna Moore desperately and futilely struggles to keep her newborn baby warm and alive. This moment is found in Annie Laurie’s third act when Annie, accused by the Squire (then called Amasa Wiggins), has run from home-farm Christmas celebrations into a blizzard, pursued by David. David tracks her to the edge of a lake and there watches as Annie, struggling in the deep drifts, finds a bird, trapped frozen and dying, in the snow. Annie’s grief as she cradles the bird resonates both into her recent past to recall and mourn her dead baby and into the immediate present with her expulsion into the blizzard, the bird serving as a moving double metaphor for her baby and herself: 96

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Annie (Enters, coming slowly down the run, as she gets about half way down the stage, which should be made to grow gradually lighter during the act, is made very light, and a sunlight effect is thrown upon the backing) The sun is up! I had not thought I should live to see it rise again! (Comes slowly down the run: her hair is loosened and falling about her, her face pale, her eyes wild and staring as if blind with grief. She has neither hood nor wrap, and her dress is torn and soiled; she does not see David. He has retreated as if awed by her look of stony grief, and stands back of … tree L.U.E watching her and listening.) This is the way to the lake – (looking off R 2 E) I couldn’t find it last night – in the dark and in the storm. . . . Oh! I’m tired – (Sinks down on the ground resting her arm and head on tree down R. After an instant her eyes fall upon something on the ground near the tree.) What is that? (picking up object) Poor little bird – poor little snow bird, so cold, so cold. – (Caresses it, seems to be trying to warm it in her hands and against her cheek.) You’ve come to me for some company – we’ll go to the lake together – the water will be dark and cold – but not so cold or dark as this world when all we love is lost – lost – (Her manner and tone have become wild and incoherent – she laughs) What was that you said? (Talking to the bird) You’re cold? Then I’ll build a fire to warm you – lie there now – you’ll see! (Puts the bird down and goes about humming. She breaks off a few twigs from the fallen tree and piles them in a little heap in the centre of the stage; she smiling and singing; picks up the bird tenderly, sits down on the stage near [the imagined] fire and holds the bird toward the little bunch of twigs, rubs it and rubs her own hands as if it were alight and they both enjoyed the warmth) Isn’t that nice? Isn’t that warm? (Sits smiling and crooning to the dead bird, rubbing it and rocking back and forth) Not warm yet? And the fire out – Oh, I don’t know – I don’t know what to do! (Falls moaning and crying pitifully) I don’t know where to go. Where was I going? (Struggles to her feet) Where was it? (Rubs her hand across her brows as if perplexed) Oh, yes, I remember now! (Laughs) We were going to the lake – there’s no one there to drive us away – (starts in a feeble staggering toward R 2 E) We can stay there forever – and ever …

Twenty years later, D.W. Griffith was to return to this scene and transmute it into the episode which Gish’s extraordinary playing makes so emotionally scarifying and poignant. With the American rights to Annie Laurie secured, Brady brought in a long-time associate, Joseph Grismer, a key figure in the development of the play and Griffith’s film. As an apprentice actor on the California theatre circuit, Brady had worked for Grismer. Their fortunes currently reversed and Brady now setting the parameters, Grismer was engaged, in the parlance of the day, as a “play-doctor” to prepare this new drama for metropolitan audiences and for touring on America’s rural circuits. It was presumably their intent to develop Annie Laurie as a rival to the “plays of locality” developed and popularised in the mid-1890s by Augustus Thomas (1857–1934), because Parker’s play, set in rural New England, and which had been briefly tried-out before audiences in Newport, Rhode Island, reappeared in Chicago in 1897 under various provisional titles with its locale transformed to the prairie of Nebraska and its characters’ names now shorn of New England associations. 97

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The plot and basic character relationships of all versions of Way Down East remain Parker’s. However, Brady’s previous experience as a fight promoter is made evident in the intensified rivalry between the hero, David, and the villain, Lennox Sanderson. Whereas Parker calls for a brief scuffle between the two antagonists in the sugar-shed, where the rescued Anna will be carried and revived, intermediate versions of Way Down East reveal Brady’s attempt to turn the scuffle into a fight in which Sanderson is successively disarmed of a horsewhip, riding crop, and pistol. This fight, rather than the rescue of Anna from the lake – and in Griffith’s film the swiftly moving ice floes of the Connecticut River – become a chief action of the final act. Griffith will ignore these elaborations and will offer a furious-but-brief fistfight which is intentionally subordinated to the need to continue the search for, and eventual sensational rescue of, Anna from the Nor’ East blizzard and drowning in icy water. Both Parker and her collaborators and Griffith knew how best to serve their own art forms. The stage-play’s frozen lake to which Anna stumbles and from which she is subsequently rescued is never seen and is merely described. It lies somewhere beyond the trees, and Anna’s rescue is signalled by her being carried in David’s arms across the wooded stage into the sugar-shed. Griffith, by contrast, turns Anna’s headlong rush onto the ice and subsequent rescue into a specifically filmic episode where the very mise-en-scène – the cracking, juddering ice and grey-black river – are visibly in dangerous motion whilst Lillian Gish, as Anna, lies immobile and helpless on a floe, swept toward her death. Richard Barthelmess, burdened by a weighty bearskin coat, must move faster than the current to the very brink of the plummeting falls and snatch Gish from the ice, then rush, carrying the unconscious heroine Anna, at an oblique to current and away from the crashing falls. Moving ice effects are possible and not infrequent on the Victorian and Edwardian stage, but, however sophisticated and intricate, none had the capacity to equal Griffith’s astounding achievement. As attempts to turn Parker’s play into a frontier drama in the Augustus Thomas mode failed, Grismer reverted to Lottie Blair Parker’s New England setting and chose the theatrical model of another successful American actor-dramatist to emulate. Re-christening the drama Way Down East, Grismer looked to the “b’gosh” drama chiefly developed by Denman Thompson (1833–1910). B’gosh drama took its name from the expression “by gosh” supposedly used by rural New Englanders dwelling “down East”, i.e., North and East of the U.S.–Canada border, but taking in all of New England, and featured the lives of village and country folk linked to farmland and/or seacoast and far removed from the sophistications and perceived moral evasions and relativisms of city life. Thompson’s personal vehicle and model for the numerous subsequent b’gosh plays was The Old Homestead (1886), a comedytemperance melodrama, originally a vaudeville sketch, in which “Uncle Josh” Whitcomb searches for his long-absent son in perilous New York and, finding him, restores the youth to sobriety, happiness, and the assurance of marriage to a good local girl on his down East farm. The Old Homestead in its later forms was also structured as a combination melodrama and successfully incorporated a vocal sextet which offered a repertoire of popular and traditional songs, a rural band mixing, but not blending, fiddles and brass instruments, and various comic turns by characters who had functional roles within the drama. Grismer elaborates on Thompson’s archetype, in particular expanding the role of Hi Holler, originally the “Toby” or rural clown of American comedy, into a perceptive observer of, and commentator on, the mores and manners of the leading characters, even as he is addicted to corny jokes from Pickin’s from Puck. Further evidence of Grismer’s sound judgement, and in keeping with Lottie Blair Parker’s recognition of the importance of the combination company approach, was his engagement of the performer Charles Seamon. Seamon toured the American variety circuits as a slow98

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witted rural constable who reported and attempted to solve the theft of a few stamps and postcards from a village post office. Seamon finished his turn with a song, “All bound ’round with a woollen string”, a ludicrous tale of courtship and blighted marriage which Americans still sing as “The purtiest gal I ever saw” (“was sippin’ cider through a straw”). Grismer divided Seamon’s sketch into segments and padded it out with additional dialogue which Parker, now working with Brady and Grismer on further drafts, obligingly furnished to create the character of Rube Whipple, the village constable. The music for Seamon’s comic song was incorporated into Louis Silvers’ score for Griffith’s film and accompanies the constable’s eccentric shuffling dance in the Bartlett parlour. Several bars of music and “All bound round…” lyrics are further visible on a Griffith intertitle within this sequence. Grismer continually strengthened the play’s musical elements, adding the dancing of reels and squares in the Bartlett parlour and introducing an entr’acte sleigh ride in which merrymakers – the “Village Choir” octet, en route to a barn-dance – sing a medley of airs before a wintry backcloth of snowdrifts and bare maples. Griffith, fully aware of the expectations of American audiences whose theatrical tastes were strongly influenced by combination touring companies of the late 1870s–90s, honours and preserves these musical elements. It is notable that his film ends, not with the Parker-Grismer procession of happy couples returning across the snowy fields to the Bartlett farm for a hearty breakfast of doughnuts and mince pies, but with a further dance which underlines the new harmonies amid the several newly-wed couples and Anna’s confirmed place as the beloved daughter of the house. Grismer’s final significant contribution to Way Down East is the snowstorm itself. Grismer invented – and immediately patented – a machine which replaced the old theatrical “snow cradle”, a trough filled with paper scraps (“snowflakes”) suspended above the stage and rocked to produce somewhat erratic and token snowstorms. Grismer’s device, utilising two or more large electric fans and blowing a mixture of soap, paper, and “granular substances” created a more realistic build-up of drifts against windows and door-frames and, in outdoor settings, the illusion of a wind-driven blizzard. The Brady-Grismer emphasis upon snow and audience expectation of blizzard effects were confirmed when, within six months of its opening at the Manhattan Theatre in November 1898, roles, dialogue and Grismer’s patented snowstorm were parodied in Charles Carton’s Way Up East by the vaudeville team Joseph Weber and Lew Fields. Not only were the characters burlesqued, but large handfuls of paper snow, thrown through open windows and doors, pelted the actors. Eleven years later, variants of Grismer’s snow machine were subsequently used by Griffith’s production team – in “exterior” shots within the Mamaroneck studio and out of doors – to make Gish’s passage through the Nor’easter appear even more perilous. Grismer’s changes to Way Down East were of such a magnitude that he earned a 33 1/3% share of royalties and authorial credits. The play’s full title now reads, “Way Down East, A Pastoral Drama in Four Acts by Lottie Blair Parker, Elaborated by Joseph R. Grismer”. The farmyard stage and film setting for Annie Laurie/Way Down East is integral to the action. Griffith was later to insist that the farm setting for his film version was derived from the appearance and layout of his family’s former home in Oldham County, Kentucky, but this is unlikely to be so. Whilst Griffith doubtless sought an image of rural serenity which inspired nostalgic longing in his audience and which also stirred his own memories of a boyhood home, his claim is implausible, partly because Charles Seesel’s and Clifford Pember’s film sets closely mimic the 1897–99 stage settings, but more so because the design for the Parker-Grismer-Brady Way Down East is itself derived from a ubiquitous popular image of American rural life. The common source for both play and film – and for numerous other nineteenth- and twentieth-century American b’gosh dramas – is a popular lithograph which had enjoyed a long life as an image of American domestic serenity and stability. This print, 99

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taking its imagery and title The Old Oaken Bucket from Samuel Woodworth’s 1818 poem of the same name, was created by the artist Francis Flora Bond Palmer for the American lithographic firm Currier & Ives, and first appeared in 1864. In 1872 key elements of Palmer’s print – the house, well, bucket, and tree – were quoted on sheet music covers sold by the music-publishing firm Oliver Ditson & Co. to market Edward Kiallmark’s musical setting of Samuel Woodworth’s 1818 poem. With literally hundreds of thousands of prints and derivative images of Palmer’s lithograph in circulation, this iconic vision of American rural life imprinted itself on the national unconscious as the quintessential rendering of an unpretentious country dwelling. Grismer and Brady, as well as other contemporary theatrical producers, were able to exploit this expectation, and Griffith and his designers, consciously or unconsciously, followed in their wake. The first film view of Bartlett Farm, seen from a distance, “realises” Palmer’s print. Successive views of the farm reprise details from that print and repeat the design of the generic farm of earlier stage productions. Annie Laurie is, of course, a melodrama, and, indeed, all subsequent theatrical revisions and filmic permutations of Way Down East are melodramas, and the characteristics of melodrama are in play throughout each version. Nevertheless, Lottie Blair Parker’s Annie Laurie and subsequent drafts of Way Down East offer innovations within the conventions of this genre which partly account for its value in challenging American mores and which speak to the duration of its appeal to American audiences. The most effective study of Griffith’s Way Down East as melodrama is Linda Williams’ incisive and eloquent Playing the Race Card (2001), in which she acknowledges the power of melodrama and itemises some of the larger characteristics of melodrama which this film shares with other dramas. Williams cites, in particular, the Bartlett farm as a “space of innocence” which, once enjoyed by Anna, must be reclaimed after her ordeal which is both arduously physical – undergoing trials by childbirth, poverty and exhaustion, snowstorm and freezing cold – and devastatingly emotional – deceived, seduced and abandoned by her bogus husband, experiencing the death of her baby, rejected by would-be parents and lover. It involves a process – painful, humiliating, and deeply unjust – of exposure and expulsion, which Williams calls a “dialectic of pathos and action”, which Anna must endure and for which her detractors and persecutors must also suffer and repent. To this extent Way Down East shares common ground with The Old Homestead. The Old Homestead concerns an errant “prodigal” boy sought and reclaimed into the family and again embraced by his parents; Way Down East is the betrayal, tenuous reinstatement, rejection, expulsion, cleansing, and eventual reclamation of Anna, and she, too, is embraced by parents and accepted as a “daughter” at the fourth-act curtain. But here similarities end. We know that Josiah Whitcomb’s son is merely young and weak and that his vice, alcohol, although deeply troubling and injurious to his health, can be overcome. We know that, weak or not, Whitcomb’s son will be reincorporated into his fractured family. The moral climate into which Lottie Blair Parker ventures is not so forgiving. The chasm between inebriation and sexual transgression, especially if the transgressor is an unmarried female, is vast. The woman who had borne a child out of wedlock was a source of disturbance and deep moral ambiguity frequently played out upon the nineteenth-century stage. By 1898, American melodrama, as much as the drama of Europe, had long traded in the errant and reclaimed female, both as heroine and as the “adventuress” or “woman with a past”, and, as well, with her heartless or merely opportunistic seducer. As an actress, Lottie Blair Parker had toured in Steel MacKaye’s Hazel Kirke (1880) which enacts the crisis of a heroine tricked into a “mock-marriage”, and she may have been acquainted with James A. Herne’s Drifting Apart (1888) in which – in a dream sequence – a child dies on its mother’s lap. Such plays, probable sources for Way Down East, are indirect precursors for Griffith’s film. At first glance there is little to distinguish Way Down East from these other earlier and 100

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contemporary dramas where sexual transgression and an offended society are opposed and, eventually, reconciled. Nevertheless, all variants of Way Down East represent an important step in exploring and dramatising this role. Moreover, each variant cannot be divorced from the ongoing issue of American female suffrage. In 1896, when Lottie Blair Parker wrote Annie Laurie, females were permitted to vote in local and state elections in some – but only a few – American states, but were not legally permitted to vote in Congressional or Presidential elections. In 1919, just as Griffith’s film version was being prepared, American females were accorded full suffrage rights. The effects of these gradual changes on the developing versions of Way Down East, their various authors and interpreters and, equally, on the play’s and film’s many audiences were matters which coloured each draft and every performance of this melodrama well into the twentieth century. Annie Laurie and Way Down East differ in a crucial particular from generic melodrama. Melodrama is invariably villain-driven. Hero and heroine are destabilised and driven from their space of innocence by the behaviour of a character, usually male, who is malign and wholly self-interested. Sanderson, lecherous and unscrupulous in using his unearned wealth to buy the good opinions of the Bartletts and access to their niece Kate, partly answers this description, but his villainy is revealed only in response to Anna’s coincidental presence at the Bartlett farm. His main acts of villainy lie in the past; within the play he is only reactive, threatening and blackmailing Anna into silence. In the final act he fights with David. That Sanderson is a villain is not in dispute, but he is not the only destabilising character nor the only character who behaves badly. The other character who claims our attention because she resents Anna’s acceptance in the Bartlett household and connives and exults in her expulsion, is Martha Perkins. Martha Perkins, who is described in successive variants of the play as “Of the Village Sewing Society” and “Comedy Spinster”, has two altogether discrete functions which Parker blends, not only with skill, but in such a way as to re-energise the conventions of melodrama and invite us to consider how to view the entire group of female characters. At first appearance, Martha is no different from other stock Victorian theatrical spinsters. Flirtatious, prudish, awkward, excessively curious and censorious, the theatrical spinster is a recurrent figure of derision and meant to be laughed at. Indeed, in the final versions of Way Down East, Martha does function as a comic counterpoint to Hi, Rube, and the Professor and is eventually paired with Seth Holcombe. On further examination of this play, we note that to this ludicrous figure Parker has affixed a second melodramatic role, the under-villain. Lesser villains – henchmen and “adventuresses” – are common melodramatic troublemakers and are eventually disposed of or driven off in the final act. Here Martha is the vindictive spreader of destructive gossip who rejoices at her capacity to sew discord and to cause Anna’s expulsion without exposure or censure to herself. If Sanderson’s villainy is physical and threatening, Martha is malicious and hypocritical. She has little motive for her cruel exposure of Anna, and Parker suggests that, although sexually inactive, she is salacious and frustrated. She is, moreover, anxious to insinuate herself into the Bartlett household. The stage direction which accompanies her revelation to Amasa and Louisa states that she “sits in rocking chair … bus[iness] of hitching chair down between Squire and Mrs B[artlett]”, thus physically intruding between this long-married couple who are about to disagree about Anna’s rightful place in their home. Afraid of strangers who taint and corrupt, the righteous Amasa has uncritically welcomed the newcomer Lennox Sanderson into his home – the hothouse flowers which he brings into the farmhouse in the dead of winter are emblematic of the poison this villain carries – and now stands ready to condemn and eject the good Anna. Griffith improves on this action, depicting Vivia Ogden as Martha joyfully hugging herself and rocking orgasmically in her chair whilst pleasurably exclaiming, “OH, IT’S AWFUL!”. One of the ways to grasp the power of this role is to note how individual actors were 101

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perceived by the national press. As might be expected, most column-inches are accorded to Phoebe Davis and to the other touring-company players of Anna Moore. After Anna, and co-equal in press attention, are the various Rube Whipples, commended for their singing, dancing, and rube-comedy, and Marthas, recognised and criticised for their intrusive meddling. Corroborating these views is an article detailing how the actress Ella Hugh Wood, who played Martha in the original company until 1901 and who is described as “a pretty girl of quiet and sympathetic manner”, transforms herself with make-up and wig from “a histrionic Jekyll” into an aged, wrinkled, stern-faced “Hyde … who resemble[s] the woman who comes to mind at the mention of New England spinsterhood”. Martha, pure on the outside, a sanctimonious hypocrite within, obliges us to consider how Parker – and perhaps Grismer and Brady – reshaped melodrama. Anna, impure to outsiders, pure within, is clearly in the protagonist’s – the hero’s – role, and David, although manfully dashing into the forest to rescue Anna, fulfils the heroine’s usual secondary function. Yet Anna is not presented to the audience as an audacious woman. That audacity is reserved for Kate Brewster, whom we recognise as the “New Woman”. Independent in spirit and material means, able to conduct her courtships, to come and go as she chooses, Kate masks the remarkable uniqueness of Anna. Lottie Blair Parker introduces a notable modernity with Anna’s role. Parker’s obituaries reiterate that she was the first dramatist to use the word baby, not infant or child, on the American stage. The latter two words distance the sexual act from its consequence. Baby, introduced in the second act and cast as an accusation of sin and contamination by Martha Perkins, foregrounds sex. Unmarried in the eyes of church and state, Anna has had and – because she admits to loving Sanderson until, abandoned, she understood his deceit and treachery – presumably enjoyed sex with her seducer. Thus she appears as the traditional “girl who lost her character” and, normally hopeless for a female in her circumstances, someone who has to cleanse her reputation and her status. Anna’s audacity – her place as the melodrama’s “hero” – is not to be the independent sceptical-of-marriage New Woman but is to fight to be a respectable, traditional woman, to be able to take her place in a family, to have the respect and love of a mother, and, eventually, to be a wife and mother herself. Moreover, because Anna arrives already suffering, the spectator’s attention is focused on her. The greater and lesser villains threaten, but their behaviour to her is reactive rather than – more normal for villains – instigative. Standing between the play and film is a further narrative: the full-length novel also titled Way Down East. The significance of this rip-off Way Down East lies in the fact that the novel and its author, Joseph Grismer, play significant roles in Way Down East’s progression from the stage to film. Grismer has extended the action of the Parker-Grismer-Brady stage-play to create a new narrative structure and to add embellishing details which directly foreshadow Griffith’s subsequent film adaptation. Whereas the play begins midway through the entire narrative, with Anna’s arrival at the Bartlett farm, her baby dead, her life in ruins, her unhappy past revealed only through the villain’s threatening innuendo and local gossips’ salacious tales, Grismer’s novel begins with a still-innocent Anna’s departure from her mother’s home and continues with her arrival at the socialite Tremont home in Boston where her presence, as she watches Sanderson play football for Harvard, excites jealousy amongst her cousins. The novel thereafter narrates Anna’s mock-marriage, pregnancy, abandonment by the unctuous and predatory Lennox Sanderson, birth and death of her baby, and illness before bringing her to the point at which the play begins. Grismer is anything but a major prose stylist. There is no poetic or metaphorical imagery to stimulate Griffith’s or the reader’s imagination. His writing is by turns effusive, lurid, and plain. Not surprisingly for someone who has worked for decades in the theatre, Grismer thinks visually, describing, in what may be his supplementary stage directions to Parker’s script and memories of performance, what occurs and 102

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how the characters move and gesture. Where possible, he uses dialogue from the play. Sensitive to the actor’s need to find motivations for their behaviour, he attempts to explain his characters’ psychologies and to account for motives behind actions. Crucially, for this novel and for Griffith’s eventual approach to the character, Grismer had played the role of Sanderson as the play continued its East Coast try-out tour. Thus Sanderson, in particular, is explained as overindulged, morally unaware, irresponsible. His villainy arises more from youthful selfregard than the cruelty which the same role reveals in the stage version. Griffith will use these newer traits, but in casting Lowell Sherman, already in his thirties and not the callow spoilt undergraduate of Grismer’s novel, Griffith imbues his reworked knowing villain with a pathological subtext. Grismer’s novel also shows Brady’s influence as he elaborates the fight in blood-curdling detail. He emphasizes the combatants’ aggression and violence. The fight, clearly the novel’s climax, accords four pages of description to the fight’s savagery and changes of fortune. Only after Grismer’s lengthy description of the fight, does he – in something of an anti-climax – resume David’s search to find Anna. Anna’s rescue serves only as a scene of resolution, not as a sensational climax, for that was clearly the fight’s function. Now that the men’s work is done, Anna may re-enter the narrative. These links in the chain – play and novel – were in place by 1900, and both remained before the public beyond the period when Griffith began preparations for his film. Brady’s management company, gradually merging with the major theatrical entrepreneurs, the Shuberts, continued to tour and to lease the rights to Way Down East. Indeed, such was the continuing appeal of the play that in 1920 Griffith signed agreements with the J.J. Shubert organisation promising to premiere his film in Shubert first-class theatres but also insisting upon his right to exhibit the film in theatres which were not owned by the Shubert family. In turn, Griffith agreed that the Shubert organisation might stage productions of Way Down East in any Shubert theatre not playing Griffith’s film. In 1912 Brady licensed Alice Guy Blaché, America’s first female motion-picture director, to make the first film version of Way Down East for the Solax Company. Unfortunately, not a trace of this film remains. Grismer’s novel, meanwhile, remained in print and, originally published with eight of Joseph Byron’s superb theatrical photographs of the play, was eventually illustrated with stills from Griffith’s film. These late editions of the novel remind us of the lengthy, intricate, and sometimes tangled path between Lottie Blair Parker’s earliest drafts and Griffith’s completed motion picture. Stage-play, novel, and film overlap and intersect, the earlier two informing and shaping, but never wholly overshadowing nor compromising the brilliance and originality of Griffith’s astonishing film. Lottie Blair Parker’s Way Down East is a major, if now neglected, American play and deserves recognition for its place in the national repertoire, and whilst Joseph Grismer’s spin-off novel is mediocre, it is nonetheless an influential, interesting and important link between stage and film narratives. Building on these sources, but moving beyond them, Griffith’s Way Down East is a masterpiece by international standards, undeniably a world treasure. David Mayer

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599 THE NEW ART FILM COMPANY

FLYING PAT Filming date: Summer–Fall 1920 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Presented by: The New Art Film Company Distribution: Famous Players-Lasky Corp.; Paramount Pictures Release date: 5 December 1920 Release length: five reels, 4,867 feet (“running time, fifty-five minutes”, according to Exhibitor’s Trade Review, December 25, 1920) Copyright date: 11 November 1920 (LP15798); “Photoplay by Fred Chaston” (penciled on copyright record) Director: F. Richard Jones Scenario: Harry Carr, F. Richard Jones Story: Virginia Philley Withey Camera: Fred Chaston Cast: James Rennie (Robert Van Nuys, a flying ace of distinction); Dorothy Gish (Patricia “Pat” [Mathews] Van Nuys, his wife); Morgan Wallace (Captain William Endicott, factory superintendent); Harold Vizard (Van Nuys’ butler); William Black (Detective); Porter Strong (Reporter); Tom Blake (Policeman); Kate Bruce (Old lady on the train); Mrs. Waters (Van Nuys’ cook); Miss Waters (Housemaid) Archival sources: none known Robert Van Nuys, the young aviator, met Patricia Mathews while she was doing war work “over there” and before they came back to the good old U.S.A, she was Mrs. Robert. They settled all their life plans coming home on the boat. Bob wasn’t one of those who believed that women’s place is in the home, playing a sort of upper servant to her husband. He told Patricia that she must have her own career in the world and they would go on together, but each living his highest and best. Pat was a little dubious and she didn’t know what kind of a career to have anyhow. Then one day she visited the big factory where her husband was manufacturing aeroplanes and the inspiration suddenly came to her. She would be a flying lady and the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Hubby was too busy to teach her to fly, but there was a Captain Endicott – There always seems to be a Captain Somebody or other to make trouble. So Patricia learned to fly. At least she got to the point where she went up with a dual control machine with Capt. Endicott. Up in the air, Pat made a mistake and yanked on the thing and the airship went crashing to the ground burying Pat and Endicott in a pile of wreckage. Luckily they were unhurt. When Bob received a telephone message stating that his wife and Captain Endicott were together at a road house of somewhat lurid reputation he naturally could not be expected to know that they had been in a wreck and had taken refuge in the inn. Filled with rage Robert went out in his car and brought Pat home. A grand family row occurred. The upshot of it was that Pat made up her mind to leave the brute and go out into the world and really have a career. So she packed up her bag and started. But she found that the world wasn’t such a nice place after all. Somebody tried to flirt with her on the train and the nice old lady who rescued her from the masher got her into a poker game and took away all her money.

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Finally Pat didn’t know where else to go so she turned around and went home. It so happened that the cook was leaving that day. So Pat, with the connivance of the butler, took the job herself. Bob had the usual emotions when, as a result of his coldness, his bride left home. He rushed frantically around trying to find her. Not being able to to find [her], he hired detectives to try to find her. As usual, they couldn’t find her either. All the time, Pat was in the kitchen listening. She was, however, having a few troubles of her own. Heaven never had destined Patricia for a cook. Once when the dinners became too unbearably awful, Robert went out to the kitchen to investigate and Pat had a hard time passing herself off as a Swede who didn’t speak English. Also there was a flirtatious policeman on the beat who caused severe complications for Pat. Finally her troubles culminated in a grand smash-up. The amorous Captain Endicott insisted on coming to call at the same time as the policeman. Friend Husband also chose this time for an unexpected visit to the family kitchen whence issued the terrible concoctions that terrorized his stomach. Out of this mix-up Pat emerged with triumph – a very laughable emergence and all ended happily. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, November 11, 1920, LP15798 [stamped with date November 15, 1920] At this time one of the requisites of pilot training was to be strapped into a chair that rotated, turning the occupant upside down, revolving all the time. This sequence was used in the film with many hilarious close-ups of Dorothy upside down staring into the camera in utter confusion. The only problem with shooting this portion of “Flying Pat” was that Dorothy promptly became air sick. She was a Pisces and always preferred the sea to the sky. Lillian Gish in Dorothy and Lillian Gish, p. 106

No copy of this film is known to survive at the time of this writing. Flying Pat was Dorothy Gish’s aviation film. In her comedies made by New Art she battled German spies, Bolsheviks, criminals and an assortment of greedy, bad people. Now she had a chance to soar through the air – wearing a very fetching outfit consisting of boots, jodhpurs, leather jacket and flying cap with goggles. It was a lightweight, improbable story, but one that made the most of her comedic skills. This was fast-paced farce, enriched by shots of aerobatic stunts. During her flying lessons, Dorothy’s reactions were filmed while she was strapped to a chair that was revolved about and turned upside down to emulate a plane’s movement. A former Sennett director, F. Richard Jones was brought in to direct Flying Pat. Jones had worked on Mickey (co-directed with James Young, 1918) and directed Yankee Doodle in Berlin (1919). He co-wrote the scenario for Flying Pat with Harry Carr, author of several previous Dorothy Gish films. It was adapted from a story by Virginia Philley Withey, the wife of former Griffith director Chet Withey. Jones was brought in because Elmer Clifton, who directed most of Dorothy’s previous New Art comedies, was now working with Griffith, and Dorothy’s two post-Clifton releases had not been well received by the critics. This one pleased Variety’s unidentified reviewer, who called it “delicious nonsense” (December 17, 1920). By the time Flying Pat was made, Dorothy Gish had married her leading man, James Rennie. Paul Spehr

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600 THE NEW ART FILM COMPANY

THE GHOST IN THE GARRET Filming date: Fall 1920 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Presented by: The New Art Film Company Distribution: Famous Players-Lasky; Paramount Pictures Release date: February 1921 Release length: five reels, 5,037 ft. (“running time, sixty minutes”, according to Exhibitor’s Trade Review, April 23, 1921) Copyright date: 31 December 1920 (LP15987) Supervision: D.W. Griffith Director: F. Richard Jones Scenario: Fred Chaston? (according to copyright reccords, probably spurious attribution) Story: Wells Hastings Camera: Fred Chaston Cast: Dorothy Gish (Delsie O’Dell [Lucy, a poor relation]); Downing Clark (Gilbert Dennison, her rich uncle); Mrs. David Landau (Dennison’s wife); William E. Park (Bill Clark, the uncle’s secretary); Ray Gray (Oscar White [Percy White, the aunt’s secretary]); Walter T. Lewis (Dennison’s butler); Mrs. [Mary] Foy (Dennison’s cook); Frank Badgley (Detective O’Connor); Frank Hagney, Tom Blake, William Nally, Porter Strong (Crooks); Mike, the bulldog Archival sources: none known Lucy goes from a poverty stricken home to visit her aunt and uncle and takes along her bull dog and her parrot. The aunt receives her with misgivings and her cordiality does not increase when Lucy’s bull dog breaks up a fashionable tea party and sends all the guests wildly climbing the furniture. Billie, the uncle’s secretary, is attracted to the little girl and takes her to a dancing party, lending her a string of imitation pearls which are an exact paste counterpart of a $75,000 string belonging to the aunt. Percy, the aunt’s secretary who is in reality a crook[,] steals the real pearls and in trying to hide them gets them mixed up with the imitation pearls that Lucy has hidden. Lucy is accused of the theft of the real ones which are found in her pocket through a trick of Percy’s and is about to be arrested. Seeing his sweetheart in danger, Billie takes the blame upon himself and goes to jail. The aunt discovers her own mistake and Bill and the girl are freed from blame. Lucy then traces the wicked Percy to a haunted house which is being used as a hang out and rendezvous for a gang of crooks. The unexpected return of the crooks while she is investigating the houses places Lucy in terrible peril. She saves herself by scaring the crooks into blue fits by pretending she is a ghost. She then lowers her faithful bull dog out of the window on a rope made of torn up sheets and he brings her help – Billie and the police. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, December 31, 1920, LP15987 [stamped with date January 6, 1921]

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No print of this film is known to survive at the time of this writing. The Ghost in the Garret was the thirteenth and final production made by Dorothy Gish’s comedy company, New Art Film. It was not really a ghost story, but a farce fabricated out of mistakes and misunderstandings. The comedy was augmented by Delsie’s two pets, a parrot and a bulldog. New Art touted Mike, the bulldog, as the funniest animal seen on the screen. While Wells Hastings’ story was not very original, Variety’s reviewer, “Bell.”, thought it was handled well and paced for laughs. He called it “[a] good old hoke classic standby of burlesque and vaudeville” (April 1, 1921). The film was directed by former Sennett director F. Richard Jones, who apparently kept the action moving, particularly during the last half. The copyright registration credits the scenario to Fred Chaston, who was cameraman on several of Dorothy Gish’s earlier films, and it seems likely that this was a typo because Exhibitor’s Trade Review credited Chaston as the cameraman (April 23,1921). The Variety review calls the heroine “Delsie O’Dell”, but the description filed for copyright calls her “Lucy, a poor relation”. The villain, played by Ray Gray, is called “Oscar White” in Variety and “Percy White” in the copyright description. There is no indication that Griffith had any connection with the production other than general supervision. Paul Spehr

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601 D.W. GRIFFITH, INC.

DREAM STREET Filming date: 13 November 1920–late February 1921 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Presented by: D.W. Griffith Producer: D.W. Griffith Distribution: United Artists Preview: 16 March 1921 New York premiere: 12 April 1921, Central Theatre Release date: 25 April 1921 New York premiere of the revised version with sound: 1 May 1921, Town Hall Length: 11,000 ft.; premiere screening: ten reels; release and copyright length: nine reels Copyright date: 14 June 1921 (LP16672) Director: D.W. Griffith Production manager: Albert L. Grey Scenario: Roy Sinclair (D.W. Griffith) Source: based on characters of “Gina of Chinatown” and “The Lamp in the Window”, the short stories in Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights (1917) Camera: Hendrik Sartov Set designer: Charles M. Kirk Film continuity: James Smith, Rose Smith Music arrangements: Louis Silvers Technical supervisor: Frank Wortman Cast: Carol Dempster (Gypsy Fair); Ralph Graves (James “Spike” McFadden); Charles Emmett Mack (Billy [Billie] McFadden); Edward Peil (Sway Wan); W.J. Ferguson (Gypsy’s father); Porter Strong (Samuel Jones); George Neville (Tom Chudder); Charles Slattery (Police Inspector); [Frederick] Tyrone Power (A Preacher of the Streets); Morgan Wallace (The Masked Violinist) Note: A special screening of the film with an experimental sound-on-disc process developed by Orlando Kellum was held at Town Hall, New York City, shortly after the premiere (see entry #602 in this volume). Archival sources: Cineteca del Friuli, 16mm acetate positive (Golden Era Films/Charles Vesce Collection); George Eastman House, 35mm acetate fine grain master; The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm acetate fine grain master (from 35mm nitrate negative received from D.W. Griffith in 1938, no longer extant); Gosfilmofond of Russia, 35mm acetate negative. MUSIC – University of Minnesota (Arthur Kleiner Collection, Austrian Institute), original score (unspecified parts); Library of Congress, a) piano conductor, 1st and 2nd editions (1,1,2,1; 2,2,1,0; drums; harp; strings), 156 pages. Note: all parts except oboe, horns and trumpets are stamped “2nd Edition”; microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Item 20; b) piano conductor, 130 pages (incomplete); microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Item 21 Some may say “Limehouse, Poplar or High Streets” but none of these are claimed further than that the characters look from wistful windows and walk with visions along a street of dreams.

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Gypsy Fair is the pride and pupil of her old father, a former dancing master, now member of a minor dancing team in a music hall, and supporting the household with her earnings. She is gentle, brave and gay, swift and restless as a bird, with a splash of Southern blood in her. Poverty has placed the father under the thumb of an inspector of police, as a paid informer, a “stool pigeon”. During a street fair, so gay that it almost seemed that dreams came true, she meets James “Spike” McFadden and his brother, Billie. Spike is young, brawny and swaggering, conquering the males with his fists and the girls with his splendid looks, physique and baritone voice. Billie is weaker, but aflame with melodies which he tries to express. The sudden stopping of a stubborn mule throws Gypsy at Spike’s feet during the fair, and the next time he sees her he considers himself an old acquaintance. An impression Gypsy promptly changes. But Gypsy’s heroism during a fire at the music hall makes her all the more desirable. During a panic, she quieted the crowds by her bravery, beauty and talent in dancing, when all the other players refuse. For this valor, she is given an advance in salary and opportunity. In the audience that night are Spike and Billie, also Sway Wan, renegade wanderer from a noble family in China, present keeper of a secret gambling den for which the police are searching. During the abandon of the dance, Gypsy throws her garter into the air, and Sway Wan catches it. Though she was unknowing, Sway Wan occupied a room just across a narrow court from her, so he could often see her through the window, and almost touch her. He comes to admire her greatly. That night he meets her outside the stage door, and presents her with a lily and blandishments. Resenting his familiarity, it chances she meets the Police Inspector, and with a great idea for the release of her father from his unpleasant obligations, agrees to trade a tip on the whereabouts of the gambling place, to which Sway Wan had invited her, in return for her father’s exemption. The bargain is made, the raid occurs – shortly after Spike had left – and Sway Wan becomes a vengeful enemy to Gypsy. Another friend of Gypsy is Tom Chudder, the pawnbroker, with a mysterious underground passage into his store from the distant wharfs. All these live under the influence of two contending forces, a street preacher who is a power for good in the little street; and the strange violinist with the weird, beautiful face. When he plays, he incites all the evil. Sway Wan enlists the aid of an old enemy of the [M]cFadden boys into his services, a common thief. This thief sees Billie putting away the money he gets for his songs, into a secret safe for a great purpose of which Gypsy is the principal. For Billie so loved Gypsy that he took work as an usher in the theatre to be near her. At first repulsed, Spike becomes more enamored with Gypsy, meeting her one night after the show. She was the first girl not to fall a willing admirer to his strutting. Gypsy is living alone, her father having died one night while asking her to dance her new dance for him. When she was finished she found him dead. Knowing that Gypsy too admired him, the impetuous Spike walked boldly into her room. Billie, who had become very jealous of the many admirers of Gypsy, had given Gypsy his oath that he would kill any person that troubled her. Billie is temperamental and headstrong in his passions. Billie decides to give Gypsy some flowers, but is too timid to knock on the door, leaving them for her. Spike, piqued by her indifference and jibes, declares he will kiss her. A struggle begins – Billie hears her calls and protests, enters the room, and sees Gypsy in Spike’s unwelcome embrace. Billie draws his revolver and declares he will kill Spike. The devotion between the brothers, continuing from an orphaned infancy, has been staunch and remarkable. This is the first break.

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With the gun at his brother’s heart, Billie hears the voice of Good. He weakens and repents. And when Spike meets him later in their rooms, he is ready to crush him with a blow, but instead the great love they bear each other results in a dramatic conciliation. A few nights later, Spike and Gypsy find their love supreme. On this night the jealous Billie returns moodily to his room to find the thief stealing his savings. In a struggle, the thief is killed. Spike returns to find Billie hysterical beside the cold body. He realizes he must protect Billie, sends him from the room, and when the neighbors come, called by the shooting, says he alone was in the room. He makes his escape to Sway Wan’s room, and sends Sway Wan with a message to Gypsy. She comes to him, and agrees to get his pay so he can escape. As she leaves the room, Sway Wan seizes her, drags her into his silken-curtained chamber, and proposes marriage, threatening to inform the police, on watch in the street outside, if she protests. But Spike escapes, and seeing him leave, with a dagger, makes her escape. Gypsy finds the office where she goes for Spike’s pay, closed. The police inspector sees her and follows her to her room. There he demands that she warn the police if Spike arrives, by a lifting of the lamp shade in signal. She agrees, in order to get him from the room, should Spike come. Across the narrow court, Sway Wan has heard the instructions. Spike comes for the money. Gypsy gives him her warning instead. Then Spike asks her if she can get Tom Chudder to let him use the secret passage for escape. She goes on the errand, leaving Spike alone. Sway Wan, with the aid of a wire, lifts the lamp-shade [sic], the police enter and arrest Spike. When Gypsy returns, the inspector thanks her for the signal and hands her a five[-]pound note as reward. Spike believes he has been betrayed. Billie hears of the arrest, but is under the influence of evil cowardice, and refuses to take his blame. At the inquest, Spike is charged with slaying. The Coroner demands that his brother be brought. Spike declares his brother’s name shall be kept out of the hearing, and says he alone was in the room when the killing occurred. Then Billie arrives, accepting all the responsibility, and informing the jury how the thief had knocked him down, struck at him with a chair, and he had shot in self-defense. Later Spike and Gypsy are married. They sign a splendid contract, she to dance and he to sing. Billie has received a King’s pardon and is now a rising young composer. And then in the close, they appear in their home, searching for something. [S]uddenly a rustling of a drapery over a chair, and a touselled [sic] hair baby lifts the curtain to play peek-aboo. A very happy family. Press book synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, June 14, 1921, LP16672

In an unnamed city, Spike is a dock-worker, and his shy brother Billie is an aspiring songwriter. The heroine, Gypsy Fair, supports her aged father, a police informant, by dancing in a theatre near the harbor. One evening a fire breaks out during a performance, and Gypsy calms the panicky crowd. Both Spike and Billie witness this and fall in love with her, as does Sway Wan, the villainous owner of an illegal gambling den. Upset at the latter’s advances, Gypsy reveals the whereabouts of the den to the police on the condition that they stop using her father as an informant. The police raid the den, and Gypsy taunts Sway Wan. Spike tries to attract Gypsy by singing. A theatrical producer hears this from a distance but is unable to find Spike. Billie tells Gypsy that he wrote the song Spike had sung. Billie saves his money, hoping to marry her, but Spike scoffs at the idea of marrying a police informant’s daughter. Gypsy’s father dies. 110

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Months pass, during which Billie becomes an usher in the theatre to be near Gypsy. He tells her that he will kill any man that bothers her. Returning home, Gypsy encounters Spike in the hallway, and he forces his way into her apartment, refusing to leave. As he is about to rape her, Billie burst in and threatens Spike with a gun but cannot bring himself to shoot his brother. Spike regrets his actions and returns to declare his love to Gypsy and while with her, experiences a religious conversion. Billie hears them declare their love and rushes home, upset. There he finds one of Sway Wan’s henchmen searching the place and shoots him dead. Spike returns and makes Billie hide, standing over the body with the gun as the neighbors come to investigate. Spike flees into the fog, taking refuge in Sway Wan’s home. Sway Wan brings Gypsy there to see Spike, but then tries to convince him to marry her. She manages to escape, going home to get her savings to help Spike. Billie learns that Spike has been accused of the murder, but he cannot get up the courage to turn himself in. The police arrange for Gypsy to signal with a lamp when Spike comes to her apartment, and she pretends to agree. She goes to arrange with a smuggler for Spike’s escape, but Sway Wan signals with the lamp to betray Spike to the police. Gypsy returns as the police arrest Spike, and he assumes that she has sold him out. In court, Spike overhears Sway Wan tell an inspector that he signaled with the lamp and realizes that Gypsy did not betray him. As Spike testifies that he killed the intruder in his apartment, Billie enters and confesses. Later the theatrical producer offers a contract to Gypsy and Spike. Billie, who has been pardoned, enters with a roll of songs for the producer. At home, Billie sings his latest song while Gypsy and Spike play with their baby.

Dream Street, released between two of Griffith’s last great films, Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1922), suffers distinctly by comparison. Time and again we have seen with the Biographs how Griffith’s crowded production schedule led to masterful one-reelers being released alongside quite pedestrian work. Here the same holds true. It would be pleasant to uncover hitherto unnoticed stylistic or narrative patterns that reveal Dream Street as an unappreciated masterpiece – or at least a good film. The most interesting aspects of it are, however, its strange contradictions and its repetitions of Griffith’s earlier work, from the Biographs to the recent features. Dream Street was apparently filmed during the late autumn of 1920 and into the early months of 1921. It was far enough along in the editing phase to be previewed on 16 March 1921 (Henderson, D.W. Griffith: His Life and Work, p. 225). Dream Street was the first film Griffith made after the formation of his own production company, D.W. Griffith, Inc., on 30 June 1920. At that point, Griffith was in severe financial straits, but the huge success of Way Down East (released in September of 1920) gradually put him back on a firmer footing. The initial intent, however, was clearly to produce a film along the lines of Broken Blossoms (1919) by returning to the stories of Thomas Burke, author of that film’s source, “The Chink and the Child”. Using the pseudonym Roy Sinclair, Griffith took two other short stories by Burke from the same collection, Limehouse Nights, and worked them together into a script. Although an early title in Dream Street declares that the setting represents no specific slums, the details suggest the same Limehouse setting as in Broken Blossoms. In fundamental ways, the story of Dream Street simply reverses that of Broken Blossoms. Where the earlier heroine played by Lillian Gish had been naïve and helpless, Gypsy is streetwise, feisty, and self-reliant. Far from being a brute of the Battling Burrows sort, her father is an ineffectual invalid whom she loves and supports. In place of the almost saintly Chinese character played by Richard Barthelmess, there is the sinister criminal Sway Wan. The situation is more complicated, however, with the addition of the two contrasting brothers, the 111

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aggressive “Spike” McFadden and his adoring and repressed little brother, Billie, both of whom fall in love with Gypsy. Interestingly, Spike walks in a way that recalls Burrows’ toughguy swagger, stiffly, with chest thrust forward and hips back. Where in Broken Blossoms the delicate heroine and Chinese hero were highly sympathetic characters, Dream Street suffers from the fact that, as Richard Schickel has put it, “none of its principal characters is very appealing in deed or manner” (Schickel, D.W. Griffith: An American Life, p. 450). Spike, who ultimately emerges as the romantic lead, spends much of the early part of the film trying to seduce or rape the heroine, being redeemed only by a sudden and implausible religious conversion that turns him into an impossibly romantic wimp. Before that point, he certainly conveys no sense of the innate gentleness that distinguishes the Yellow Man in Broken Blossoms, who resists his sexual attraction to the heroine (an attraction which surfaces primarily in one scene). Gypsy is portrayed by Carol Dempster in what one contemporary critic called her “hippity-skippity” manner (quoted by Schickel, ibid.) – a vivid phrase which could be used to characterize many moments of feminine acting in Griffith’s films through much of the silent period. The opening of Dream Street encapsulates particularly well the opposing attractions of realism and symbolism in Griffith’s work. A note declares that “THANKS ARE DUE TO OFFICIALS OF SCOTLAND YARD AND THE LONDON POLICE FOR DETAILS OF ENGLISH POLICE AND INQUEST PROCEDURE”. Here we seem to be in the familiar territory of the nearly documentary-style realism of the street scenes in The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and the historical footnotes in the intertitles of The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Yet immediately Griffith denies this specificity: “DREAM STREET – SOME MAY SAY LONDON – LIMEHOUSE, POPLAR OR HIGH STREET – BUT WE DO NOT CLAIM ANY OF THESE. OUR PEOPLE ARE DREAM PEOPLE WHO LOOK FROM WISTFUL WINDOWS OR WALK WITH VISIONS OF THE STREET OF DREAMS”.

The symbolism that returns at intervals throughout the film is established in a remarkably explicit fashion with two expository titles: “THERE ARE TWO INFLUENCES IN THE PLAY, THE FORCE OF GOOD, REPRESENTED BY A PREACHER OF THE STREETS. THE OPPOSING FORCE – TEMPTATION TO EVIL – WHICH IS REPRESENTED BY A VIOLIN PLAYER – A TRICKSTER OF THE STREETS”. “BETWEEN THESE TWO STRUGGLE OUR LITTLE CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY – ABOVE THEM THE EVENING STAR – SYMBOL OF ETERNAL LOVE”.

Such overt imagery recalls some of the allegory in the Biograph shorts, such as The Two Paths (1911; see DWG Project, #312), which is subtitled “A Symbolism”. There the villain clearly resembles a satanic figure. Dream Street verges on being “a symbolism”, though its good-versus-evil plot is portrayed at much greater length. Griffith had played many times with allegorical scenes, as in the endings of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Here the uneasy mixture of allegory and realism emerges partly from the fact that the preacher and violinist exist within the action, and they occasionally influence the main characters. There can be few films in the history of Hollywood whose narratives depend so much upon coincidence as Dream Street. Although coincidence is not absolutely proscribed in classical narrative, its preferred use is supposed to be limited and to come well before the climax portion of the action. Griffith’s film is flagrant in its use of happy or unhappy chance events. In one scene, Gypsy and a friend spend a Sunday evening strolling along the riverside. There they encounter Spike, Gypsy repels his crude advances, and the two women turn to leave. He starts to sing, knowing that his voice captivates women. Sure enough, the pair pause to listen, and an expository title reveals: IT CHANCES THAT A GREAT THEATRICAL PRODUCER, SEARCHING FOR LOCAL COLOR –. The eventual happy ending comes about when that producer discovers Spike’s singing talent, Gypsy’s marvelous dancing, and Billie’s brilliant songwriting ability and catapults them all to fame and fortune. Other coincidences occur when the violently jealous Billie happens to arrive in the alley across from the entrance to the apartment building 112

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where Gypsy lives just in time to see Spike declaring his love to Gypsy. Later, after committing a murder for which Spike takes the blame, Billie flees and takes refuge in the apartment of a friend – who happens to live in the same building where Gypsy does. Apart from the flagrant coincidences, there are many peculiar touches in the film that suggest hasty writing. Early on, when Spike and Billie are introduced, a title declares: ALTHOUGH SPIKE WORKS AT THE DOCKS, A SUSPICION OF UNLAWFUL DEEDS HAS FALLEN UPON THE BROTHERS – WHETHER JUST OR UNJUST WE ARE UNABLE TO SAY. This intriguing suggestion of a narrator presenting restricted knowledge does not return. Similarly, when Gypsy first appears, a title characterizes her: IT IS SAID GYPSY WAS GENTLE, BRAVE AND GAY, SWIFT AND RESTLESS AS A BIRD, VIVID WITH AN HERITAGE OF SOUTHERN BLOOD. The effect of this intertitle is quite odd, since the character herself is before us on the screen, and just who would be saying such things about her is unclear. In another odd touch, Gypsy has a vision – consisting of only two shots – of herself as an Egyptian princess. Shortly thereafter a shot of the street preacher fades to a shot of Jesus speaking to a rapt crowd. Seemingly a parallel is set up, yet the preacher does not envision himself as Jesus, and nothing comes of either comparison or the parallel between them. Near the end, when the Police Inspector wants to capture Spike for the murder that he has supposedly committed, he visits Gypsy and tells her, “HE’LL COME TO YOU – WHEN HE DOES YOU’RE GOING TO TIP ME OFF”. Why the Inspector would expect Gypsy to betray the man she loves is unclear, and it would be simpler for him to place a watch on her apartment. He instructs Gypsy to signal Spike’s arrival by tilting a lamp at a window. Sway Wan tilts the lamp, but Spike assumes that Gypsy has betrayed him and given the signal. Later, Sway Wan boasts to the Inspector that he had tilted the lamp – but he does this in front of Spike, thus revealing to his embittered rival that Gypsy is innocent. Given that Sway Wan wants to break up the romance between Spike and Gypsy, his boasting makes no sense. Stylistically, Griffith also sought to repeat his success with Broken Blossoms. The pictorialist Hendrik Sartov, who in collaboration with Billy Bitzer had brought the fashionable soft style into Griffith’s work, now became the sole cinematographer. The photographic qualities of Dream Street exaggerate the dreamy, fuzzy look of the earlier film. Using the resources of his new studio facility in Mamaroneck, New York, and shooting during the winter, Griffith shot the film in studio settings. Numerous obvious paintings stood in for the skyline of London with the Evening Star and for other locales. The newly developed three-point lighting system that was becoming the standard for classical Hollywood filmmaking is quite apparent in Dream Street, countering the common argument that Griffith never adopted the new norms of commercial filmmaking. There are distinctly old-fashioned moments in the staging, however, as when Billie bursts into Gypsy’s apartment to interrupt Spike’s attempt to rape her: all three freeze into a surprisingly extended tableau image. Ultimately Dream Street did not fulfill Griffith’s goal of putting his new production company on a sound footing. It lost about $150,000, not an inconsiderable sum in those days. Even his more successful films, however, did not generate enough income to keep the director’s one-man production firm going, though he did recover from the artistic low point that Dream Street represented. Kristin Thompson

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602 –

[PROLOGUE TO DREAM STREET] Filming date: 27? April 1921 Location: Kellum studio, 203 West 40th Street, New York New York premiere: 1 May 1921?, Town Hall Director: not known Camera: not known Cast: D.W. Griffith Sound system: Orlando Kellum process Archival sources: UCLA Film and Television Archive, 35mm acetate negative. NOTE: “The Orlando Kellum material didn’t come to light until the late 1980s when someone called, told me it was all in a Hollywood garage, and offered to give it to me. I passed it all on sight unseen to the UCLA Film Archive” (David Shepard to the Editor, December 15, 2003). D.W. Griffith, always interested in the latest wrinkle, dabbled with sound in 1921, when he added some dialogue scenes to a picture called Dream Street. No fool, Griffith realized that Dream Street needed all the help it could get […]. On April 27, Ralph Graves went to the Kellum studios at 203 West Fortieth Street and recorded a love song that was dubbed into a scene already filmed silent by Griffith. […] The revised film premiered at Town Hall on May 1, and the response must have convinced Griffith that the film was salvageable, for on May 15, more sound was dubbed in. On Sunday, May 29, Dream Street and a program of Kellum shorts opened at the Shubert-Crescent Theater in Brooklyn. Scott Eyman, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930, p. 43

Regardless of whether this prologue had any effect on the commercial success of Dream Street, it is of immense historical value today, for it’s perhaps the closest thing we have to a soundfilm record of Griffith’s public performance style. Facing the camera, Griffith announces slowly but perfunctorily: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been asked to say a few words concerning the play of Dream Street, which you are about to see.” Then, preliminaries over, he launches into a more declamatory style, proclaiming in sonorous tones: “Dream Street! I wonder if there isn’t a Dream Street running through the heart and soul of every human being in the world.” And there, frustratingly, the fragment ends. Griffith had made his reputation partly by bringing an intimate, realistic acting style to his films, but his roots were in the theatre. In this brief clip we can gain some sense of the resonant delivery with which he reached the back-row spectators – and, later on, commanded the players in his classic films. J.B. Kaufman

The Kellum process was sound-on-disc, similar to Edison’s Kinetophone and – in its use of a single crankshaft that drove both record and projector in order to (hopefully) maintain synchronization – to the Vitaphone. The Griffith speech from Dream Street is adequately recorded, although not up to the standards of the Vitaphone, which benefited from five years 114

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more of research and the Bell Laboratories’ technological expertise. The single factor mitigating against wider adoption of the Kellum process was probably the fact that it could only attract marginal adherents – Sam Moore and his Singing Saw, not Al Jolson; Dream Street, not Broken Blossoms (1919). Of course, Broken Blossoms didn’t seem to need the extraneous bells and whistles that sound constituted in 1921. Scott Eyman

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603 D.W. GRIFFITH, INC.

ORPHANS OF THE STORM Working title: The Two Orphans Filming date: June–October 1921 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Presented by: D.W. Griffith Producer: D.W. Griffith Production manager: Albert L. Grey Distribution: United Artists Boston premiere: 28 December 1921, Tremont Theatre New York premiere: 2 or 3 January 1922, Apollo Theatre Release date: 30 April 1922 Release length: fourteen reels, 13,500 ft. (at Boston premiere); twelve reels, 12,000 ft. (release version) Copyright date: 12 December 1921 (LP18035) Director: D.W. Griffith Scenario: Marquis (Gaston) de Tolignac (title on print: “Through arrangement with Kate Claxton”) Source: “Les Deux orphelines”, the play (1874) by Adolphe Philippe d’Ennery and Eugène Cormon, adapted by N. Hart Jackson and Albert Marshman Palmer; A Tale of Two Cities, the novel (1859) by Charles Dickens; The French Revolution, the essay (1837) by Thomas Carlyle Photographers: Hendrik Sartov, Paul Allen, G.W. Bitzer Assistant photographer: Herbert Sutch Art director: Charles M. Kirk Set designer: Edward Scholl Editors: James Smith, Rose Smith Music arrangements: Louis F. Gottschalk, William Frederick Peters Technical director: Frank Wortman Cast: Lillian Gish (Henriette Girard); Dorothy Gish (Louise); Joseph Schildkraut (Chevalier de Vaudrey); Frank Losee (Count de Linières); Katherine Emmett (Countess de Linières); Morgan Wallace (Marquis de Praille); Lucille La Verne (Mother Frochard); Sheldon Lewis (Jacques Frochard); Frank Puglia (Pierre Frochard); Creighton Hale (Picard); Leslie King (Jacques Forget-Not); Monte Blue (Danton); Sidney Herbert (Robespierre); Lee Kohlmar (King Louis XVI); Rita Rogan (Henriette as a child); Adolphe Lestina (Doctor); Kate Bruce (Sister Geneviève); Flora Finch (Starving peasant); Louis Wolheim (Executioner); Kenny Delmar (The Chevalier, as a boy); Herbert Sutch (Meat-carver at fête); James Smith, Rose Smith (Dancers) Archival sources: FILM – Academy Film Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined); Arhiva Nationala de Filme (Bucuresti), 35mm acetate positive, Italian intertitles; Cinémathèque Québécoise, 16mm acetate positive, English intertitles, abridged version (generation undetermined); Cineteca Italiana (Milano), 35mm nitrate positive, tinted, Italian intertitles; Cineteca Nazionale (Roma), 35mm acetate negative, Italian intertitles (collated from two nitrate positives, destroyed in 1963 and 1969); 35mm nitrate positive (fragment: 197 ft. of last reel), Italian intertitles; Filmoteca Española, 35mm 116

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acetate negative (sonorized reissue with Spanish intertitles, abridged [1,476 m./4,852 ft.], from 35mm nitrate positive destroyed in 1963); Filmoteka Narodowa (Warszawa), 35mm acetate positive, Czech intertitles (generation undetermined); George Eastman House, 35mm nitrate positive (fragment); 35mm acetate positive (incomplete, U.K. release by Ideal Film Ltd.); Gosfilmofond of Russia, 35mm acetate negative; Library of Congress: 16mm acetate positive (Killiam reissue, tinted); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm nitrate positive (incomplete: reels 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 only, due to partial deterioration; received from Griffith in 1938); 35mm acetate fine grain master (11,208 ft., printed in 1957 from original nitrate negative); Národní Filmovy´ Archiv (Prague), 35mm acetate negative, Czech intertitles (title on print: Deti velke revoluce, 2,482.5 m.); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 35mm acetate positive; “several 16mm acetate positives” (Jennifer Teefy to the Editor, May 15, 2003). MUSIC – University of Minnesota (Arthur Kleiner Collection, Austrian Institute), original score (unspecified parts); Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF), Brussels, original score (unspecified parts), 136 pages; Library of Congress, a) dramatic numbers from the photoplay (by William Frederick Peters), piano conductor, 68 pages; copyright C1 E 695551, 7 July 1928, Julia Peters, Englewood, New Jersey; location: LC M1527.P550; microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3212, Item 164; b) piano conductor and orchestral parts by Louis F. Gottschalk and William Frederick Peters (1,1,2,1; 2,2,1,0; tympani and drums; harp; strings), 136 pages; microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Item 63

In the Normandy village, everyone knows the two orphans, Henriette and Louise Girard. One is blind and both are beautiful. Visitors from Paris have told Henriette that Louise might regain her eyesight through an operation by a famous oculist [sic] in Paris. So they take the coach for Paris, after Louise has made Henriette promise she will not marry and leave her. Henriette says: “Sweetness, I will never marry until you see the man I am to wed.” An accident interrupts the progress of the coach before a chateau of one of the nobility, blocking the equipage of the Marquis de Praille. After lashing the riders, the Marquis swaggers insolently around to view the passengers, and fascinated by Henriette’s fresh beauty, assumes liberties in his conduct. When Henriette reproaches him and repels him, he directs a servant to proceed in advance of the coach to Paris and abduct Henriette, taking her to his gardens where a great party of gorgeous and scandalous nature is to be given. The girls, laughing at Henriette’s account of the Marquis wearing a muff, resume the journey, speaking to all strangers as they pass. Arrived in Paris, they are alone, the elderly relative who comes to meet them having been decoyed away. With the shadows, the henchmen of the Marquis come, seize Henriette, and leave Louise alone, to be found later by Pierre Frochard. Madame Frochard and her boon companion and son, Jacques, despise Pierre as a cripple and weakling. Pierre, enraptured by the beauty of the blind girl, and with sympathy of one also afflicted, adores her and takes her to his mother. The Madame accepts her as one who will be useful in singing through the streets for charity. Henriette recovers from her swoon in the midst of the garden fete. Gorgeously dressed fashionables are all about. The Marquis demands a kiss. She flees from one ardent face to another, seeking a friend. With passionate mischief, the merry-makers pursue her, when the Chevalier de Vaudrey, guest at the party, approaches. “Is there no gentleman here to protect me?” cries Henriette. “We are gentlemen,” they laugh. “Then is there no man of honor?” she implores.

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“May I offer you the services of my honor and my sword?” the Chevalier answers, won by the pity of her distraction. The Marquis forbids anyone leaving the garden. The Chevalier insists. A duel follows. The Marquis is injured. The Chevalier with Henriette flees to safety. But Henriette cannot find Louise. After establishing her in a room, the Chevalier goes to the home of his relatives[,] the Count and Countess de Linieres. The Count has news from the King that the Chevalier is to wed a girl whom the King has selected. The Chevalier refuses and tells of his love for Henriette. The Count insists to the development of a quarrel. A few days later, the Chevalier asks the Countess to visit Henriette. Then Henriette tells her that Louise is not a real sister, but an orphan found in front of Notre Dame as an infant abandoned and brought to the Girard home. The Countess recognizes the circumstances as identifying her lost daughter, born from an early marriage with a commoner. Her father had killed the husband and sent the baby away to free his daughter from such an alliance, shameful because the husband was not a nobleman. As they talk, singing from the street below reminds Henriette of Louise’s voice. Then she rushes to the balcony, sees the dirty beggar girl, fails to recognize Louise, hears the voice again, then calls, “Louise!” Louise answers, “Henriette, come, come, Henriette!” As Henriette dashes to the stairway to go to her sister, the door to her room opens to admit a squad of soldiers under the command of the Count [d]e Linier[e]s. He orders Henriette’s arrest. Being Prefect of Police of Paris, he has such authority. The Countess cannot intercede, for she refuses to reveal the early secret to her great husband. Henriette goes to prison. She is ordered deported to America. Louise returns to the cellar with the debauched Frochards. The contempt of the noble for the commoner has created a tyranny that is beyond tolerance. Rebellion occurs in Paris. The prison is stormed and Henriette is freed with others. The Chevalier remains devoted in his love. Two men, Danton and Robespierre, control Paris. Henriette knows Danton, but not by name. He has sympathized with her in the loss of her sister when he hears it from others on the street. One night, when assassins pursue him, he flees for protection to the nearest house, which is the one in which Henriette lives. She takes him to her room, and nurses him through the night. When Danton leaves the following morning, Robespierre sees him. Robespierre has often told Danton, “Women will be your downfall.” The Chevalier, banished from Paris by the radicals, returns in disguise and visits Henriette to see that she is safe. He is recognized, followed, and captured in Henriette’s room. With Robespierre’s assent he is sentenced to the guillotine. And with him is sentenced Henriette as being his intimate friend. Danton, entering the room where stand the doomed, sees Henriette. She points out the Chevalier to him, and Danton recognizes him as one who had fed the poor months before. He remembers Henriette and how she had saved him. Danton’s desperate efforts to spare them, the recovery of Louise’s eyesight, the reconciliation of the Count and Countess with their nephew, the Chevalier, the restoration to the Countess of her daughter, Louise, and the acceptance by Louise of the Chevalier as Henriette’s betrothed, is the finale of the last act. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, December 12, 1921, LP18035 [stamped with date July 6, 1922]

Relatives of a high-born French woman slay her low-born husband and take her baby away. The baby and the handsome sum of money that comes with it is found by a poor man just at the moment when he is about to abandon his own daughter to save her from starvation. As result 118

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of the plague the two girls – Louise, the foundling and Henriette, the daughter – lose their parents, and Louise loses her sight, thus becoming dependent on Henriette. One day, they learn that a doctor in Paris is known to cure cases like Louise’s and the two orphaned sisters go to Paris. There Henriette is abducted by an aristocrat and helpless Louise enslaved by a family of beggars. Meanwhile the foundling’s mother has married an aristocrat highly regarded at the Court of France. It so happens that their much-loved nephew saves Henriette from the abductor, and falls in love with the girl. Likewise, blind Louise wins a heart that helps her to escape from her captors. While the sisters keep looking for each other the French Revolution breaks out, causing further complications. The noble nephew and his beloved Henriette are sentenced to death. It takes Danton’s last-minute interference to keep the blade of the guillotine from cutting Henriette’s head. At the end, all comes together: the sisters reunite, Louise regains her sight and her mother, and Henriette will marry Louise’s mother’s handsome nephew.

PREPARATORY NOTE The way this essay is structured is a little unusual. It was written in partnership, but not jointly, with David Mayer: since David and I were asked to address two different facets of Orphans of the Storm he and I felt we could write our parts separately, and then exchange notes. The result of the process is a sort of antiphony. I begin with the story of Orphans of the Storm and the story of its making; then, the floor goes to David Mayer who speaks about its theatrical sources; then I take over again to look at what Griffith has changed in these sources, and why. The reason why I decided to insert Mayer’s part in the middle of mine is practical, not eccentric: an establishing view on Griffith’s picture will help to understand Mayer’s points about its sources; by the same token, a large part of what I have to say about Orphans of the Storm as a film relates to Mayer’s analysis of The Two Orphans as a play. This is exactly the case why back and forth is the straightest way to the heart of the matter. The Story In the Normandy village, everyone knows the two orphans, Henriette and Louise Girard. One is blind and both are beautiful. Visitors from Paris have told Henriette that Louise might regain her eyesight through an operation, by a famous oculist in Paris. So they take the coach to Paris, after Louise has made Henriette promise she will not marry and leave her. Henriette says: “Sweetness, I will never marry until you see the man I am to wed.”

Such is the story exposition as phrased in the contemporary synopsis, reproduced above in full. An accident that will soon result in the reversal of fortunes happens already on the road: our coach blocks the equipage of Marquis de Praille. Griffith needs this unpleasant character to achieve two things: to give us an idea why the simple people of France eventually rose against their nobility, and to give us a cause for the forthcoming separation of the sisters. Savaged by the obstacle, the Marquis lashes the lowly coachmen; then, swaggers around to view the passengers and is fascinated by Henriette’s fresh beauty. Gallantly but insolently he assumes liberties in his conduct. The girl is too naïve to sense the danger and mistakes de Praille for a funny kind of character, which is the third thing Griffith wants the Marquis to be: the Rococo man whose manner and fashion look bizarre – both to a young lady from the French province and to the modern American filmgoer. Using her voice (which we cannot hear) and gestures (which her sister cannot see) Henrietta parodies the Marquis mannerisms for Louise who giggles along. As Lillian Gish’s hand language makes us understand she is greatly amused by the muff de Praille is shown wearing – an odd thing to wear in the middle 119

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of the summer. Odd, but historically true – or this is what the souvenir program handed out before Orphans of the Storm shows claims: Great pains have been taken to make the costumes, settings, incidents and characters from history absolutely correct. While many of the costumes, particularly those of the women, may seem strange to our eye, they are proper duplications of costumes of the period. Thanks are due Louis Allard, Ill. Ph.D., professor of French Literature at Harvard University. (Excerpt from a souvenir program archived at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

On his way to Paris, another road accident happens with de Praille’s carriage, a minor annoyance for him, and of no consequence to the fate of the two sisters, but worth mentioning all the same since Griffith wants the viewer to read it as a symptom of the upcoming Revolution. As one of them, author Henry MacMahon describes what happened in his book Orphans of the Storm: A Complete Novel from D.W. Griffith’s Motion Picture Epic (published in New York by Grosset & Dunlap in 1922): Driving recklessly to make up time lost in the blockade, the nobleman’s equipage knocked down and ran over a luckless denizen of the faubourgs. Carelessly flinging out gold to the relatives of the dead woman who were sobbing or cursing him, he leaned forward and inquired most solicitously of the driver: “But – are the horses hurt?” Indeed the nobles of that time regarded the masses as little if any superior to cattle or any other of their possessions. (pp. 9–10)

The nobles’ attitude to commoners also explains the ease with which the Marquis’ admiration for Henriette’s beauty led to a plan to abduct her, which he and his servant do the moment she and her blind sister alight in a little square beyond the Pont Neuf. From this point on the story of two sisters forks into two – each with its own peripeteia which their yearnings for each other render particularly poignant. Helpless blind Louise will see the lower depth of Paris. She will fall into the hands of a family of beggars. The mother, Madame Frochard, forces Louise to sing through the streets for charity, and beats her when drunk. Her boon companion and son Jacques is even worse: to the silent delight of his mother, he tries to bully the innocent creature into sharing his bed. Only the other son, Pierre, a cripple and weakling, has a noble soul – having saved Louise from falling into the Seine when she found out her sister is nowhere near, Pierre continues to protect Louise in the Frochard family ratty den. In contrast to Louise, Henriette’s abduction takes her to the top of the Paris society, but up there she does not fare better than her sister below. The synopsis: Henriette recovers from her swoon in the midst of the garden fete. Gorgeously dressed fashionables are all about. The Marquis demands a kiss. She flees from one ardent face to another, seeking a friend. With passionate mischief, the merrymakers pursue her, when the Chevalier de Vaudrey, guest of the party, approaches. “Is there no gentleman here to protect me?” cries Henriette. “We are all gentlemen,” they laugh. “Then is there no man of honor?” she implores. “May I offer you the services of my honor and my sword?” the Chevalier answers, won by the pity of her distraction. The Marquis forbids anyone leaving the garden. The Chevalier insists. A duel follows. The Marquis is injured. The Chevalier with Henriette flees to safety.

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So, like Louise at her end, Henriette now has an ardent admirer and a self-denying protector, but the Chevalier’s function in the story is more complex and convoluted than Pierre’s. What makes the Chevalier’s situation complicated (and Griffith’s film complicated to follow) is the family he comes from. His uncle, Count de Linieres, the minister of police, the man known for his loyalty to the King, stern mores and daunting willpower, inherited two dark family secrets. One is the fact that long ago someone from de Linieres’ family (his father-in-law, to be exact) had ordered to punish a man by pouring boiling lead in his veins. Later in the film, this secret will serve to motivate the Chevalier’s condemnation to the guillotine by a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal (known by the telling nickname Jacques Forget-Not), the martyr’s revengeful son. The other secret (unknown to the Count) is that the Countess, the Chevalier’s aunt, is Louise’s real mother. Before de Linieres, she had been married to a commoner from whom she had a daughter. To save the child from the wrath of her aristocratic relatives, she had Louise put on the steps of the Notre Dame Cathedral (with a note and some money) where Henriette’s father found her. To complicate matters, there is a tangle of love interests. The Chevalier is in love with Henriette, but she does not want to hear about love before they find Louise. Meanwhile his uncle, the minister, has found him a high-born fiancée, and already arranged an approval from the King. The Chevalier refuses, and tells of his love for Henriette. The Count insists to the point of a quarrel. The Chevalier turns to the more sympathetic countess for support, imploring her to meet with Henriette and see with her own eyes what a girl he is in love with. The moment of fateful recognition is thus set up, but the dénouement will be delayed through the ruthless intervention on the part of the Count and of History itself. It so happened that the room which the Chevalier has secured for Henriette is in the house where Robespierre lives, and which his friend Danton often visits. The time is still before the Revolution. The royalists are after Danton. They attack him in a lonely street. Wounded, Danton flees to the house where Henriette and also Robespierre lodge. She shelters him while the assassins search. Robespierre observes, suspecting an affair. The main emotional scene of the film – and, for many, one of the best in Griffith – is structured around the moment of recognition – a double recognition, in effect: the Countess understands from what Henriette tells her that Henriette’s sister is actually her daughter, and the next moment Henriette recognizes her sister’s voice in a song coming from the street. This is how this scene looks in Griffith’s rough draft continuity of 11 June 1921 (his first known attempt to put the film on paper, as found in The D.W. Griffith Papers): Countess comes to Henriette [and] tells her marriage with Chevalier is impossible because of difference in their rank. Henriette tells Countess [to] restore her sister to her arms and she will do anything she says. “I SOMETIMES THINK I AM MAD – I HEAR HER CALLING EVEN IN MY SLEEP.” Outside Louise on street singing. Scenes back and forward – listening and singing. Henriette rushes to window – calls to Louise – they recognize each other. Henriette starts to exit and is stopped by Count appearing with soldiers. (pp. 7–8)

Yes, in order to prevent his nephew’s misalliance the powerful minister of police arrests Henriette on bogus charges. Vainly the Countess de Linieres entreats for mercy. The recognition has taken place, but the resolution is suspended. Griffith is only halfway through the film. This is how Henry MacMahon’s novelization describes the state of affairs at the end of Part One of the two-part Orphans of the Storm: 121

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Deaf to her entreaties, they took her to La Salpetriere, this loveliest of virgins, to be immured among the foul characters there! (p. 83)

Part Two brings the Revolution into the mix. Tables and fortunes will turn, Danton and Robespierre rule, the Chevalier will live in exile, and Jacques Forget-Not administers his idea of justice. MacMahon again: Beautiful, pitiful Henriette! The horrors of the madwoman thou facest in Salpetriere; the obscene shouts and curses of the fallen; the fury of the female criminal; the misery of the poor distracted half-wits, where mad and sane are given the same cell: – these shall be but confused phantasmagoria projected on thy sick brain during this prison time before the awful Storm breaks – the lightning strikes – the thunder crashes, and the sharp female called La Guillotine holds thee in its embrace. (p. 89)

Having recovered from a temporary mental illness, Henriette, now free, encounters La Frochard and, having recognized in the shawl that the old hag wears her sister’s shawl, identifies her as the captor of Louise. But this new recognition only leads to more misery when the old woman tells her Louise has died. Henriette does not know this is a lie, but the viewer does. Louise is alive and looking for her, helped by hunchback Pierre. One day when his brother, inflamed with liquor and lust, was slowly dragging the screaming blind creature to the stairs, the huddled figure leaped like a puma – and his brother was dead. Taking Louise by the hand, he ran with her up the steps out of the cellar…. Tramps of the boiling, tempestuous Paris, spectators but not participants of the great events, they looked ceaselessly for Henriette. It was not only them who were looking for her, but also our young hero Chevalier Maurice de Vaudrey. Disguised as a pilgrim he managed to bribe his way into Paris, but no sooner did he appear at Henriette’s place than a guard captain dressed in the parti-colored Revolutionary garb arrested him. “YOU ARE ALSO UNDER ARREST, CITIZENESS,” he turned to Henriette, “FOR THE CRIME OF SHELTERING A RETURNED ARISTOCRAT.” Immediately, the two are brought before the dread Tribunal over which Jacques Forget-Not presides, and – again, a coincidence – they notice Louise (accompanied by Pierre) among the crowd at the trial. “LOUISE, LOUISE!” Louise and Pierre struggle their way toward the bench, but, again, a fence of locked bayonets stops each advancing sister. The end spiel is Griffith’s patent rescue made big-time through the participation of figures like Robespierre and Danton, former insurgents, now rulers; former friends, now rivals. A document survives [in The D.W. Griffith Papers] called “Rehearsal August 18th, 1921”, with Griffith’s detailed layout of the ending. It may not correspond to the final film in every detail, but the suspense structure underlying the sequence comes across with more clarity than any other rendering of events could possibly provide: Robespierre in gallery recognizes Henriette – gives sign that she is guillotined. As Henriette is being led to tumbrel cart Danton enters and meets her – realizes what has happened to her and swears to save her – he goes before the Tribunal and asks this favor in the name of all he has done for France. The Judge refuses the plea – he pleads with the jury – they hesitate – he implores them – the Judge refuses – Robespierre gives sign that they should grant his wish – they will let these people go but get Danton himself – Jacques leaves his post as judge and new judge writes acquittal of the prisoners – Danton suspicious watches Jacques – they start to send messenger with reprieve but Danton stops him and takes it himself. The Chevalier in death cart – mob howling.

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Henriette in the death cart – cart stops and as crowd cheers[,] sisters embrace for last time. Jacque [sic] Forget-Not goes into ante-room and directs his men to stop the reprieve. Jacque [sic] running to Guillotine. Danton on way to guillotine – mob following – attempt to stop him – he throws them off and dashes on. About three runs of Danton to the rescue. Room between the Guillotine and the room where the prisoners wait. Chavalier led up the steps – people watch – Henriette led up. They turn and see each other – Henriette sees man beheaded. Chevalier and Henriette wait together – farewell of lovers – Henriette led up first. Pierre and Louise in the mob. Danton coming – running. Louise cries out in mob – “TODAY I AM GLAD TO BE BLIND!” Henriette’s head on scaffold – Pierre sudden insane rushes up and slays executioner – is dragged off by spectators – they prepare to go on with execution when Danton rushes on with reprieve – saves Henriette – takes her in his arms – starts to kiss her and looks over and sees Chevalier – he hands her over to Chevalier – shakes his hand. Chevalier and Henriette down the steps to Louise – embrace. Pierre being dragged off – Danton sets him free. Pierre joins the others at foot of the guillotine. (the document is unpaginated)

One thing that is missing from this 18 August rehearsal and looms large in the final film is the circumstance that the agent of the above rescue is not Danton alone, but the cavalry posse that he leads – modeled to match the splendid rescue sequence in The Birth of a Nation (1915). Again, I do not find a better way of conveying the sense of frenzy that its gallop generates in the viewer than resorting for help to Henry MacMahon, the man of letters with the pen quick enough to conjure up mythological associations that, who knows, may have flashed across his mind as he was watching Griffith’s film, not concocted at the desk while revamping the film into a book. Danton and his Northern riders are straining every nerve, galloping their steeds furiously – eyes fixed on the seeming impossible goal. Rather are they modern centaurs, each rider and steed a unit of undivisible will and energy: Danton a furious resistless hyppogriff, fire-striking, fire-exhaling, in unity with his white charger; the lean-jawed, sternly set Captain on his lean galloping Arabian, cyclonic, onrushing like some Spectral Horseman; the rest riding like the Valkyries – as it were, twixt Heaven and earth – their galloping beats scorning the ground as they rush by to the hissing of the cleaved and angry wings. (p. 176)

Such, more or less, is the story. Let me now turn to the components of which it is made. How The Two Orphans Became the Orphans of the Storm The story of Orphans of the Storm consists of two stories packed into one. One comes out of The Two Orphans, a French nineteenth-century stage play, more on which we will hear from David Mayer. There is one thing, however, that we need to know before then: although its action takes place in Paris in 1785 – only four years before the fall of the Bastille – no historical characters appear in this play, and whatever happens to our two sisters has nothing to do with the French Revolution. The Two Orphans was a period piece, not the historical play as 123

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it became after Griffith populated it with historical figures like Danton and Robespierre, and historical props like the Guillotine. I do not think Griffith ever considered producing an “honest” – modest, source-faithful – screen version of The Two Orphans as he did in the case of Way Down East. The first rough continuity drafted on 11 June 1921 (only eleven days away from the date of the rights contract for the play) already has a “communist uprising”, “the brave Danton”, and even a Marie Antoinette squeezed between the lines. It was Griffith’s standing belief that touches of history were good for family dramas, that history helped to scale things up, as it did in Intolerance (1916) and The Birth of a Nation. There were also additional reasons to let in more history in this film. Everyone knew there had just been a violent revolution in Russia, a perfect opportunity for Griffith to frame his new film as a cautionary tale. Reviewers present at the opening night report Griffith drawing the parallel in curtain speeches “while he was here whipping the orchestra into shape” (Variety, January 6, 1922). Russia is also hinted at in the film’s introductory title, a philosophical treatise-in-little that makes one immediately think of Intolerance: Time: before and after the French Revolution. Our story is of two little orphans who suffer first through the tyranny – selfishness – of Kingly bosses, nobles and aristocrats. After the King’s Government falls they suffer with the rest of the people as much through the new Government, established by the pussy-footing Robespierre through Anarchy and Bolshevism. Strange that both these evil rulers were otherwise highly moral men except that they saw evil in all WHO DID NOT THINK AS THEY DID. The lesson – the French Revolution RIGHTLY overthrew a BAD government. But we in America should be careful lest we with a GOOD government mistake fanatics for leaders and exchange our decent law and order for Anarchy and Bolshevism.

Another reason for Griffith’s interest in the French Revolution may have been his usual urge to engage European quality films on their own territory, as it were. Given the effect produced on him earlier on by Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) or, still earlier, by La Mort du Duc de Guise (André Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy, 1908), it is plausible that this time his competitive temperament was spurred by the success of German epics featuring this or that historical figure against this or that kind of historical turmoil: Ernst Lubitsch’s Passion (or Madam DuBarry, 1919) and Deception (or Anna Boleyn, 1920), and maybe also by Dimitri Buchowetzki’s Danton (known in the United States as All for a Woman) if this 1921 German portrayal of 1794 France by a Russian émigré director of Polish extraction was available to Griffith at the time he made this decision. And if it was not available to him, then it was to his reviewers, four of whom drew a comparison between the two Dantons, Emil Jannings’ and Monte Blue’s, with the score 3 to 4 in favor of the latter. On a more general level, Variety’s critic “Libbey” concluded that Griffith paints the French Revolution “with lavish hand but with a historical fidelity that really constitutes a challenge to the foreign films which until now have been supposed to be the last word in historical re-visualizations” (Variety, January 6, 1922). Now, why Orphans of the Storm, not The Two Orphans? It may at first appear that Griffith modified the play’s title to reflect the changes he made in the plot. This it definitely does, but the main impetus behind the change was commercial, not conceptual. Given the success of the source play, The Two Orphans was clearly the best title, but the problem was, this was clear to too many people. According to veteran film historian Edward Wagenknecht, Griffith had to buy an obscure German version to prevent an appearance of two pairs of orphans at the same time (Wagenknecht and Slide, The Films of D.W.Griffith, p. 182). Worse, there was also an Italian version: “The Edison-Film Torino Attraction. Frank Valle presents the premier screen production of that great stage classic The Two Orphans”, says a poster that 124

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survives among Griffith’s papers [Editor’s note: the film in question is Le due orfanelle di Torino, directed by Giovanni Casaleggio in 1917 for the Turin-based company Edison Film. At least two other versions were directed in Italy during the silent period: Le due orfanelle by Eduardo Bencivenga, produced in 1918 by Caesar Film in Rome, and Povere bimbe!, the last film directed by Giovanni Pastrone in 1923 for Itala Film in Turin]. An essay, “Parasites of the Movies”, published in The New York Times (December 21, 1921) gives this explanation of the title change: Mr. D.W.Griffith has a grievance against a certain type of competitors – he calls the “leeches upon the industry” and “feeders on the mother film.” The epithets are suggestive. When an ambitious manager takes up a popular success of the past, lavishing his resources upon creating and advertising your production, these parasites rush in with mediocre productions and reap a harvest not of their own sowing. Thus Mr. Griffith in order to protect himself and his public has been obliged to rename his version of The Two Orphans calling it Orphans of the Storm.

A rather silly title, remarks Wagenknecht (who otherwise considers Orphans of the Storm to be a practically perfect film), “later borrowed by Irene Castle for the name of an animal refuge in Chicago” (op. cit., p. 182). Yuri Tsivian

THEATRICAL SOURCES It all appears so straightforward and uncomplicated. The title credits for Orphans of the Storm acknowledge that Griffith’s film is based upon Eugene Cormon’s and Adolphe d’Ennery’s The Two Orphans. Acknowledgement extends to include Kate Claxton, who created the role of the blind Louise and whose name was closely associated with the American adaptation of the play until her death in 1924. But these acknowledgements are misleading, and Griffith is disingenuous in citing The Two Orphans as his only theatrical source. The Two Orphans is unambiguously the principal source for Orphans of the Storm and provides the backbone of the narrative. However, Griffith’s screenplay is further indebted to at least four other dramas known to American audiences, and his handling of the basic The Two Orphans script makes substantial alterations – chiefly inflecting dramatic characterisation and changing the overall balance between his characters – to the original drama. These changes, as well as the sources themselves, deserve to be recognised. Indeed this film drama draws extensively on Griffith’s theatrical past, both as a spectator and actor, and, as much as it confirms Griffith’s control over the vocabulary of filmmaking and his artistic vision, Orphans of the Storm also illuminates the degree to which his vision is shaped by his early participation in the late-Victorian theatre and his awareness, not only of the popular American repertoire, but, equally, of significant theatrical imports from abroad. Thus, what at first seems linear and free from complications is, instead, gnarled, intricate, and complex. Film historians may find this account tedious, but the tangled pedigree of Orphans of the Storm may be worth the unravelling for the light it throws on Griffith’s working processes. The Two Orphans’ trajectory – rival translations, competing actresses, an enduring place in the popular repertoire – is in some respects typical of favoured stage pieces. The drama first appeared as Les Deux Orphelines at Paris’ Théâtre Porte St. Martin in January 1874 and, receiving favourable notices and drawing large audiences, was soon pirated by anonymous translators who hawked their English-language versions to foreign managers who then rushed these illicit translations into production before injunctions halted their transgressions. Simultaneously, but slower in achieving playable scripts, more circumspect London and New York 125

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managers negotiated agreed adaptations by John Oxenford (London) and N. Hart Jackson (New York), the latter for A.M. (Harry) Palmer, manager of Manhattan’s Union Square Theatre. Unauthorised versions, in some respects more faithful to the original French text than adaptations reshaped to meet London and New York tastes, had been suppressed by prosecutions but never wholly eradicated from the repertoire. These rogue translations periodically surfaced on American rural circuits and were later to compromise Griffith’s rights to the Jackson-Claxton American version of the play. Unlicensed texts were also to encourage Griffith to alter elements of the drama’s plot to answer his need for a suspenseful filmic climax. N. Hart Jackson’s licensed version, premiered in December 1874, cast the 26-year-old Kate Claxton as Louise. Kitty Blanchard, another popular young actress of the day, took the role of Henriette. Blanchard moved on to other parts, but Claxton became so identified with the role of the abused and exploited blind heroine that, soon after 1874, she purchased the U.S. copyright from Palmer and Jackson and, forming her own combination company (the term combination indicating that she had supplemented Jackson’s melodrama script with variety turns and additional musical numbers), toured the play though the American hinterlands for over thirty years, eventually staging a major New York revival in 1904. In 1921 Griffith leased from Claxton what he assumed were exclusive performance rights to this play, only to discover that Claxton’s copyright had lapsed. He further found that, by virtue of William Fox’s 1915 film version (directed by Herbert Brenon) of the play, starring Theda Bara as Henriette and Jean Sothern as Louise – which apparently drew on several versions, authorised and pirated, of the script – Fox now held U.S. copyright. Griffith was obliged to settle with Fox. Therefore, the phrase “through arrangement with Kate Claxton” on the main title to Orphans of the Storm conveniently obscures vexed issues of ownership which Griffith prefers to elide. The Palmer-Jackson-Claxton version of the play was set forth in seven scenes, initially arranged as a four-act drama but, by the 1890s, as a three-acter. Anxious to emulate as much as possible of the Paris production, Palmer dispatched his stage manager to the Théâtre Porte St. Martin to obtain the designers’ costume sketches and renderings and maquettes of stage settings viewed by Paris spectators. Four of these settings are again closely reproduced in Griffith’s film: the Paris street where the two orphans arrive and are separated; the Frochards’ underground lair; the west front of St. Sulpice, complete with the addition of Richard Marston’s stage snowstorm effect; and in the opening shot of La Salpétrière women’s prison from where Henriette, betrayed by Robespierre and arrested and imprisoned by the Count de Linieres, is about to be dispatched to the penal colony of Cayenne, far from the attentions of her aristocratic suitor, the Chevalier de Vaudrey. Images of these stage-sets, obviously popular and known to theatre audiences, were also reproduced on sheet-music covers when songs and incidental music by Henry Tissington, the play’s musical director and conductor of the orchestra at the Union Square Theatre, were published in simplified “reductions” for domestic pianos. Both in the Paris and American versions of The Two Orphans, the action is set entirely in the year 1784. Nothing of the Revolution, neither the initial uprisings of 1789 nor the Terror of 1794 intrudes. There is no Bastille to storm, no tribunal, no guillotine, no Committee of Public Safety, no Danton, no Robespierre, no orgiastic carmagnole dance. These elements will come – almost unaltered – from other Victorian plays by other dramatists. The only note of social unrest and political protest in The Two Orphans is a reference to the long-delayed performance, to be attended by de Vaudrey, of Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro. Neither is there a prologue in The Two Orphans which enacts the assassination of the Countess de Linieres’ first husband, the abduction of her infant daughter Louise, Louise’s rescue from 126

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the cold church steps and her arrival in the poor family where the infant Henriette also lives. Griffith will find and take his models for a prologue from other dramas. Instead, the stageplay begins with the “sisters’” arrival in Paris, Henriette’s kidnapping, and Louise’s forced co-option into the Frochard family. Subsequently, Henriette meets de Vaudrey, an appalled and unwelcome spectator at the Marquis de Presles’ orgy, and is rescued by him. The developing romantic relationship between Henriette and de Vaudrey is realised more slowly in The Two Orphans than in Griffith’s film, and much of the suspense and spectators’ anxieties are focused, not on this love affair, but upon the plight of Louise. Pity for Louise is intensified by her plaintive begging song, the lyrics unrecovered at the time of this writing, but Henry Tissington’s melody is remembered and recycled in the andante passages of Louis Gottschalk’s and William Peters’ 1921 film score. Jackson’s stage adaptation calls for a number of agonising near-misses, the sisters just failing to meet, until the relieved audience is prepared to ascribe total plausibility to their eventual reunion. One of Griffith’s more conspicuous and astute alterations to The Two Orphans is to accord more weight to Lillian Gish’s Henriette. This re-balancing of roles, resulting in a more passive and helpless Louise – imprisoned and sexually intimidated by Jacques Frochard – when seen against Henriette’s desperation and almost futile search to recover her sister, visibly enlarges Lillian Gish’s role. Henriette’s character is further enlarged by her unpremeditated sheltering of Danton, her consequent alienation from Robespierre, and her sacrifice of love and marriage until Louise can be found. Enacting such confused emotions – love, fear, bewilderment, denial – are known and exploited Lillian Gish strengths. Both French and English-language scripts call for the Countess’ guilty secrets – her former marriage, her stolen child, her unhappy second marriage – which she confides to de Vaudrey, to cause a breach of trust between Count de Linieres and his nephew which widens when the Count, judging another by his own standards, mistakenly assumes that Henriette is de Vaudrey’s mistress. Griffith’s other significant alteration to character balance is in his rendering of the relationship between the Frochard brothers. In the original Cormon-d’Ennery drama and in both British and American sanctioned adaptations, the Frochard bothers are almost as important to the plot as Louise and Henriette. The blood brothers’ contrasting moral characters, their jealousy, rivalry, loathing, and propensities to sudden violence contrast starkly with the two girls whose sisterly concern and affection for each other is so continually evident. This inverse mirroring of pseudo-sisters with real brothers assured that Victorian productions of The Two Orphans be cast with the chief female roles falling to the theatre company’s leading actresses, whilst the company’s two most able and better-known actors assumed the roles of the Frochard brothers. Of the two Frochards, Pierre’s was the favoured male role as it called, first, for whimpering and cringing before Jacques’ bluster, casting covert glances of adoration and sympathy toward the helpless Louise, then finding a sudden reversal in courage and agility when required to challenge his brother and abet Louise’s escape. Diminishing the brothers’ roles in the interest of an altogether different ending, Griffith has gone against this practice, casting his stronger male actors in the roles of de Vaudrey, Robespierre, Danton, and Jacques Forget-Not. It is highly likely that Griffith’s interest in The Two Orphans was stimulated by his association with the original performer of Jacques Frochard, the actor and stage director McKee Rankin, under whose direction Griffith had acted in Nance O’Neil’s California company, understudying Rankin’s roles. In 1910 Rankin had brought his son-in-law, Lionel Barrymore, to Biograph, had introduced him to Griffith, and had persuaded Griffith to cast the young actor in his first films. Rankin, on the West Coast in 1904, had no part in Kate Claxton’s revival of The Two Orphans, but, at that point, he was about to meet Griffith (see my essay on theatrical sources for Judith of Bethulia in The Griffith Project’s volume 7, #492). Stage 127

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versions of The Two Orphans stress the degree to which the stronger Jacques dominates and bullies Pierre. Indeed, Pierre’s deformities are attributed to cruel beatings from his elder sibling. In the American stage version Pierre, overcome with despair at the treatment Louise receives from his mother and by his awareness that Jacques intends to rape the blind girl, finally helps Louise to escape, to find Henriette, and, moments later, to guide de Vaudrey into the Frochards’ lair where the Chevalier captures the thief at the point of his sword. However, in the original Paris version and in the unauthorised English-language versions to which Griffith reverts, Pierre, tormented by Jacques and aware of his brother’s intentions toward Louise, turns on Jacques and in a brutal knife fight kills him. Thus, in Orphans of the Storm, Griffith has intentionally departed from the Jackson-Claxton text to remove Jacques from the final race-against-the-Terror’s-guillotine episode and to focus instead on the villainies of Jacques Forget-Not and Robespierre. Griffith has also effectively excised minor or lesser characters from his text, most notably Jacques Frochard’s unhappy and penitent mistress, whose hardened heart is softened, first by Louise, then by Henriette, and who in turn assists Henriette’s escape from La Force prison. The above are substantial changes from the stage version, but even these seem modest when measured against borrowings from four other Victorian and Edwardian stage-plays. The four plays, so influential and listed here in chronological order – Charles Reade’s The Courier of Lyons (1854), later revised and re-titled The Lyons Mail (1878), Watts Phillips’ The Dead Heart (1859), Freeman Wills’ and Frederick Langbridge’s The Only Way (1898–99), and Victorien Sardou’s Robespierre (1899) – share a common response to the French Revolution, a response worth noting here. This response is expressed as denial of a nation liberated from arbitrary royal tyranny and, in its place, emphasis on the excesses of the Terror, in particular the indiscriminate vengeance of mob rule – a mob easily swayed by demagogic oratory to condemn – and the unstoppable procession of virtuous – guiltless – people to the scaffold. These dramas share Thomas Carlyle’s horrified appraisal of the Paris mob and the self-serving ambitions of some of the Revolution’s leaders, most notably Robespierre, but they fail to accept Carlyle’s point that the success of the Revolution depended upon a complete transformation of public institutions. Such consistent disparagement of the French Revolution renders the events of 1789–96 a pliable metaphor which accords with Griffith’s views of “Bolshevism” and the political turmoil, moral laxity, and social disruption it was alleged to promulgate. All four plays deal directly with the limitations of French justice; all stress the cruelty of public executions and the grim relentlessness of the guillotine. Two of the dramas are adaptations of French plays by established Parisian dramatists and later enter the American stage as plays re-worked by British dramatists and commissioned for the British stage. Two are by British dramatists. Repeated performances of all four plays in the period between 1889–1910 sharply reflect British scepticism toward French celebrations of the Revolution’s centenary and international dismay at French hypocrisy on public view in the courts-martial, imprisonment, repatriation, and re-trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a miscarriage of justice and display of deceit and hypocrisy on which Western attention was fixed between 1894 and 1906. Significant to the later fashioning of Orphans of the Storm, all four plays separately found their way into the American theatrical repertoire and were individually well-known to American audiences who saw the plays performed and toured by American actors and visiting British stars. Because three of these plays are directly associated with the great English actor-manager Sir Henry Irving, the leading actor of the final three decades of the nineteenth century, and because the fourth play was the theatrical property of another English actor-manager, Sir John Martin Harvey, Griffith would have known these plays by reputation, if not – although it seems unlikely that he wouldn’t have seen all or most of them – as a spectator. These pieces, filling the stage with numerous minor characters and many dozens of supernumeraries, would have 128

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stimulated Griffith’s interest in crowd and battle scenes with representations, more theatrically vivid than the actual event, of the Revolution’s fêtes and large-scale civil skirmishes, including the taking of the Bastille and liberating its prisoners, show trials, public orgies, and public beheadings. The published souvenir programme to Orphans of the Storm informs that the production was “supported by a cast of twelve thousand”. The deft handling of smaller stage crowds, but crowds nonetheless, was apparent as these four dramas toured the American continent. Griffith’s borrowings from these plays show awareness of their strategies, their structures, and the effectiveness of their coups de théâtre. The Courier of Lyons was introduced to American spectators in 1878 upon word that Henry Irving had successfully revised Charles Reade’s drama as The Lyons Mail for London’s Lyceum Theatre. Irving was to bring the Lyceum company to America and to tour The Lyons Mail from New York along the Eastern Seaboard, the South, and Midwest in 1883, ’84, ’88, ’93. ’95, and 1901. Both plays, under these titles and thinly disguised variants, were to be performed along provincial circuits well into the twentieth century. In 1906, Irving’s son, H.B. “Harry” Irving, brought a “replica” production of his father’s property on a North American tour, and in 1916, at the instigation of Charles Samuelson of Samuelson’s Films, the younger Irving made a full-length version (directed by Fred Paul) of The Lyons Mail, mixing indoor settings and outdoor locations. H.B. Irving’s film was exhibited in the United States, but it is unknown whether Griffith saw it (although it is my guess that he did). Unfortunately, only the first quarter of this film survives, held at the Library of Congress. It is from The Lyons Mail that Griffith takes an essential plot element: the unjust conviction of an innocent person and that person’s last-minute rescue from the guillotine despite opposition and interference so nearly fatal to the innocent party. The Courier of Lyons/The Lyons Mail is based upon an actual criminal case which occurred in 1795. A mail coach, travelling between Paris and Lyons, was held up and robbed, and the coach’s driver, resisting, was fatally shot. Before the crime, the murderer and thief had noted his physical resemblance to a respectable citizen and had contrived to have this innocent man, a Joseph Lesurques, observed by persons who would later associate him with the crime-scene. Searching for the culprit, the police arrested Lesurques, who understandably protested his complete innocence. Witnesses, however, confirmed police suspicions, and Lesurques was tried, found guilty, guillotined, and his property, assumed to be profit from his crimes, confiscated. It was not until he was arrested for another crime that the true murderer, Dubosc, was identified as the actual criminal. Dubosc was subsequently guillotined and Lesurques posthumously pardoned and his property restored to his heirs. Nearly fifty years later, these events were dramatised by Emil Moreau, Paul Siraudin, and A.C. Delacour as Le Courier de Lyon and was performed at the Théâtre de la Gâité with Lacressionière in the double role of Lesurques and Dubosc. Soon thereafter, The Courier of Lyons, adapted for London audiences by Charles Reade, was offered by Charles Kean at the Princess’s Theatre. As with the original Paris version, Reade’s text specifies the roles of both Dubosc and Lesurques to be performed by the same actor, double-roles especially relished by Irving who specialised in enacting characters with split or multiple identities. The French version offered variant endings: on alternate nights Lesurques, true to historical sources, was condemned and guillotined, but on the following night, surrendering to melodramatic convention, Dubosc’s criminality was discovered just in time for him to be seized and carried to the scaffold in Lesurques’ place. English audiences, in the main, preferred only the melodramatic ending in which Lesurques is rescued, and that dramatic rescue was carried in both Englishlanguage versions to America. Given Griffith’s marked predilection for final-curtain rescues, it is not difficult to imagine which ending appealed to him. The Dead Heart, one of the two melodramas authored by British dramatists, also offers a rescue from the guillotine, but that rescue is effected in an altogether different way, and the 129

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play arguably offered Griffith further theatrical devices recognisable in Orphans of the Storm. The Dead Heart employs the most elaborate time scheme of two melodramas – the other is The Only Way – to enact lives altered, first, by aristocratic fiat some eighteen years before the Revolution and, subsequently, by the ideology and hard realities of the First Republic and, still later, by the Terror. In the dramatic prologue, set in 1771, the leading character in this drama is seized upon his wedding day, arrested through the machinations of a nobleman who has designs upon the hero’s fiancée, and, on the pretext of treason, imprisoned in the Bastille. When in 1789 the Bastille is besieged and falls in an elaborate stage spectacle, the once-young man is released, bewhiskered and bewildered, to become an instrument of the Revolution’s judiciary, cold-heartedly trying and sentencing aristocrats to death. He finds that his despairing fiancée had married his oppressor and is, consequently, the mother of a sixteen-year-old son whom he has routinely judged and condemned to execution for his aristocratic lineage. Learning the adolescent’s blood relationship to his former fiancée, he recalls his cherished love and, pretending to be the youth, takes his place on the scaffold. Thus The Dead Heart provides one of Griffith’s inspirations for a dramatic prologue, for a Bastillestorming scene, and for a last-minute device to cheat the executioner of his victim. The Dead Heart was first performed in London by Ben Webster in 1859 and entered the American repertoire in 1871. It was seen in further Manhattan productions in 1879 and again in 1884. Later, chosen by Henry Irving as a vehicle to note – not celebrate – the Revolution’s centenary and revised by Walter Pollock, The Dead Heart reached America in 1889 and was included on several of Irving’s North American tours. Griffith’s biographer Richard Schickel cites the influence of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859) on Orphans of the Storm, but this influence is only indirect. Griffith is, of course, aware of Dickens’ novel, but his immediate source is the Wills and Langbridge dramatisation of this novel, The Only Way, commissioned in 1898 by John Martin Harvey and for a year prior to its London opening toured in the provinces as The Jackal. Once reworked, retitled, and performed for audiences in the capital city, The Only Way was a sensational success, and Harvey was recognised as a claimant to Irving’s pre-eminence. Success brought immediate demands from Harvey’s backers and creditors to re-stage The Only Way in New York, but commitments to British tour dates kept Harvey in the United Kingdom. Unable to secure John Martin Harvey’s presence in the leading role, Daniel Frohman, one of the principal founders of the Theatrical Syndicate – later allied with the Motion Pictures Patents Company – forced Harvey to lease the American rights to his play and to permit Frohman to cast Henry Miller in the part of Sidney Carton. Harvey was obliged to wait until 1902 to bring his own production on an American tour, and this venture proved so successful that The Only Way was frequently toured through the United States and Canada, remaining in Harvey’s repertoire until his death in 1943. In 1926 Harvey appeared in a film version of The Only Way directed by Herbert Wilcox for London Films. Variant prints of this film are held by the National Film and Television Archive in London. What particularly links The Only Way to Orphans of the Storm are the dramatic prologue, the menacing character of Jacques Forget-Not, the lengthy tribunal episode in the Conciergerie, and the play’s final moments as Carton and Mimi, “the little seamstress”, together step from a tumbrel and mount the steps of the guillotine. Griffith’s prologue to Orphans of the Storm probably owes more to this drama than to The Dead Heart, as The Only Way enacts an aristocratic crime and its long chain of consequences: the summoning of Dr. Manette to treat Defarge’s sister, raped and fatally injured by a Darnay relative, Manette’s lengthy imprisonment to assure his silence, and Defarge’s commitment of the event to memory. Jacques Forget-Not is recognisably an unsubtle reprise of Defarge with his long memory of aristocratic crime and his personal vendetta against one family which links de Vaudrey and Henriette 130

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in one confused recollection. The tribunal scene is the play’s most elaborate, an opportunity for Harvey to shed the illusion of a drunken Englishman and to reach heights of persuasive oratory, rhetoric so powerful and so logically and emotively structured as to realign a hostile Paris mob against a court determined on a guilty verdict and almost immediate execution. On film, where Harvey displays the brilliance of this transformation, we may still witness what Griffith has in mind as he brings Georges Danton to speak in defence of Henriette and de Vaudrey. As in Orphans of the Storm, where an ancient wrong recollected by Jacques ForgetNot forestalls freedom for Henriette and de Vaudrey, a technicality found by Defarge prevents this freedom, and Carton must use the ruse of substituting himself for Darnay to save his client, husband of the woman he secretly adores, from the guillotine. Finally, there is the legacy of Victorien Sardou’s Robespierre, commissioned in 1898 by Sir Henry Irving for performance in Britain and America in 1899–1900. In Irving’s most lengthy and elaborate tour, organised by the Theatrical Syndicate and reaching cities and even tank-towns on the East Coast, South, Midwest, North Mid-West, and Canada, Robespierre was performed to sold-out houses. Given Griffith’s developing interest in theatre at this date, it is plausible to suppose that he saw Robespierre performed when, on 2 February 1900, it was given at Macauley’s Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky. Borrowings from this drama are on a lesser scale, but make a significant addition to Orphans of the Storm. Typical of Irving’s repertoire, Robespierre is both a villain and a hero, calculatingly manipulative and bloody to his adversaries, but, because Robespierre is more fiction than fact, he is written with a tender, paternal, sexually vulnerable side. What Griffith has extracted from this character, however, is Robespierre’s narcissistic dandyism which is emphasised with preening, lace-collar twitching, and approving glances into the mirror. Until Sardou’s play appeared, Robespierre had been characterised as cold, invulnerable to charm and flattery, driven alone by ideology and his perception of the nation’s interest. From Robespierre Griffith also takes Robespierre’s tampering with justice to satisfy his personal whims. The main antagonist to Henriette’s freedom is Robespierre, and his covert court-room signals, exchanged with Jacques Forget-Not, leave no doubt that he wants dead a woman who rejected him and appeared to favour his rival Danton. Political rivalry is transformed to sexual jealousy. Above all, Griffith has found in Robespierre a huge play: huge in scope, huge in the size of cast and scenic effects demanded. Photographs show 79 actors and supers on-stage in the final tribunal scene. Irving has alleged to have used 300 supernumeraries, choristers, and dancers, the latter for a revolutionary fête which degenerates into a rowdy procession and riotous, discordant carmagnole. Griffith’s sure-handedness with crowds, his ability to use large movements and visible counter-currents, to place subtlety and gross action in the same sweeping episode, may have derived from Robespierre and other stage dramas he knew as an actor, studied as a would-be dramatist, and admired as spectator. David Mayer

CINEMATIC ALTERATIONS No student of Orphans of the Storm could even think of a better partner than theater historian David Mayer to draw our attention to the layers of history prior to where the film historian normally begins. And I cannot agree with David when he says that film scholars may find his analysis tedious. Even if Griffith’s theatrical sources were less relevant to his work in film than David claims (and shows) they are, being guided by an expert hand through the complex world of theatrical melodrama – the world so kindred to and at the same time so interestingly different from ours – filled me with a sense of discovery similar to one experienced (I fancy) by the first readers of Darwin. One can hardly add anything to David Mayer’s exten131

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sive map of the sources that fed Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm – other than suggesting that perhaps we should leave the door a little more open for the possibility of Griffith having been familiar with Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities – familiar not only via its stage version, but also as a reader. For if we rule out Griffith’s first-hand familiarity with Dickens we will need to decide what to do with the time-honored historiographic theory that links Griffith’s crosscutting to Dickens’ novels. The best known text that put this theory forward was Sergei Eisenstein’s essay “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today”, which appears in Jay Leyda’s English translation in Eisenstein’s Film Form (1949, pp. 195–255), but the idea was born much earlier: to believe Linda Arvidson’s 1925 When the Movies Were Young (p. 66; Eisenstein’s essay quotes Arvidson’s book) the analogy between crosscutting and Dickens’ narrative technique had been mentioned to her by Griffith himself. Of course, there is always a difference between familiarity and usage: a possibility of Griffith having read A Tale of Two Cities does not necessarily mean that he used it as a source. But do we really need to pre-filter Griffith’s sources when we discuss works so sponging as his Intolerance or Orphans of the Storm? Let me quote a remarkable phrase from David Mayer’s email message to me explaining why he has opted to use the Claxton-Jackson stage script of The Two Orphans rather than the more “original” 1874 play by Kate Claxton: “I want to use a script which has the patina of multiple usage.” In other words, contrary to what the timehonored philological rule (and instinct) would seem to be telling, the historian prefers more polluted waters to cleaner ones, and of course, in his part of this note David Mayer adds other melodramas to the mix. The wisdom of this method I think is that it offers us a new look at what Griffith’s art (and, for that matter, art in general) is: it is a powerful refinery plant, a filtering machine that reworks muddled substance into pure and crystal clear works as Griffith’s masterpieces are. What I suggest is to leave all the taps open to make the solution of sources even more polluted: ideally, the future student of Orphans of the Storm will need to inspect not only its theatrical sources, but also the films based on The Two Orphans as well (say, all the three German period dramas with Emil Jannings I mentioned earlier on); and also all possible traces of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. This latter task is usefully and interestingly complicated by the impossibility of telling apart a direct borrowing from this enormously popular novel from a mediated one; the question is further obscured by the fact that there was a common historical source that both Dickens and Griffith admit they have been drawing from, Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 voluminous The French Revolution, A History. There is a page-long essay, “Thomas Carlyle Transplanted to Motion Picture Screen”, in the publicity kit for Orphans of the Storm released by United Artists to help the exhibitor’s newspaper campaign, which goes as far as to assert that “Mr. Griffith’s revolution … follows Carlyle by chapter and verse in the thirty or forty big scenes that the movieman deemed essential to the history” (Cinema Pressbooks from the Original Studio Collections, microfilm reel 33, kit Orphans of the Storm, p. 35). There are several mysteries of origin this future student of Griffith’s film will need to resolve (or rather identify, for many of them may be irresolvable). The title of the film, for instance: was this title borrowed from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which refers to the French Revolution as “an awful sound, as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising” (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], p. 260), or perhaps inspired – as the press books claim – by “Carlylean romanticism”? Or maybe by 1922 the phrase “the storm of a revolution” had already become such a cliché that the question of origin is not worth asking? Another mystery, which can perhaps be solved if one goes though the entire Carlyle and other history books on the French Revolution: was the scene showing the Marquis’ equipage knocking down and running over a young girl in front of her parents eyes “AN HISTORICAL ACCIDENT” (as Griffith insists in the intertitle to this scene), or is it a masked borrowing from 132

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Dickens’ novel (the absence of Dickens’ name from all promotional material for Orphans of the Storm may have been caused by copyright fears), or maybe from the stage melodrama based on A Tale of Two Cities which David Mayer tell us Griffith might have seen (I confess I have not read the latter, so I cannot tell if the road accident is part of it). And so on. As David Mayer’s anatomy of the tangle of Griffith’s theatrical sources splendidly shows, no DNA test exists that would help us to establish beyond doubt which prior text is responsible for this or that trait of Orphans of the Storm – the film whose paternity can only be inferred on the basis of likelihood and communal guilt. The study of sources generates as many new questions as it gives answers to. One of such questions which the case of Orphans of the Storm gives us a perfect reason to ask is whether there is – whether there can be – historical continuity between theater and film. On one hand, David Mayer has shown us there is, which is exactly what the task of an essay entitled “[Griffith’s] theatrical sources” consists of. On the other, it is not hard to imagine a scholar or theorist (Eisenstein, once again, could serve as a well-known example) who would stand up and say that the only possible reason to evoke historical continuities is in order to set off what really matters – the historical change, or, as he would phrase it, the “qualitative leap” between theater and film. Not a friend of dialectics, I do not sympathize with Eisenstein’s radical position, but I do think it stands to reason to assume that things did change quite a bit on their way from Kate Claxton to Griffith, and that it is part of the film historian’s job to highlight some of those things. Cinema does appropriate (to put it mildly) stories and techniques from elder arts, but the nature of this appropriation is more like giveand-take than take-and-run. One thing that remains for me to do in the rest of this essay is to look at what Griffith has given to The Two Orphans – since what he has taken from it we already know. When a stage play is turned into a screenplay (or the kind of script Griffith used for his Orphans of the Storm) certain things must be altered. The reasons behind these alterations are sometimes so commonsense that we almost feel embarrassed to point to them. It will sound as a truism, for instance, to remind that silent cinema is a predominantly visual medium, as distinct from the stage play which is predominantly verbal (even granted the inherent visuality of the nineteenth-century melodrama rightly pointed out by Nicholas Vardac and John L. Fell). But it is this – very general – distinction that helps to account for a number of concrete, very palpable differences between the dramatic economy of a stage play and the narrative economy of films. Take the conventional devices the playwright resorts to in order to introduce the main characters and their back stories, and compare them to corresponding devices normally used in silent films (I will use the term “back story” accepted in film studies to refer to fictional events that ostensibly took place prior to the ones that constitute the dramatic focus of the plot – though the drama theory offers such good equivalents as Vorgeschichte, translated as the bulky “antecedent story”). The back story with which our sisters, Louise and Henriette, are provided is long and telescopic: we learn that they had been orphaned; we learn about Louise’s blindness; and we learn about their recent (to become fateful) encounter with the Marquis de Presles as the coach changed horses on their way to Paris. We learn about this both in the stage melodrama and in the film, but the way and the order in which we learn all this significantly differ. It is conventional (and convenient) in the theatre to make the back story known, piecemeal, through conversations conducted on the stage (if terms are needed, we may call this device “retrodiction”). Thus, in the play The Two Orphans (or, to be exact, in its English version kindly sent to me by David Mayer) we learn about his road encounter with the sisters from the excited Marquis who arrives in Paris (and enters stage) before the sisters do, and as he tells his friends about this encounter he does not fail to mention Henriette’s “sweetest, prettiest face – with such eyes – and such hair, and such a smile” (Act I), 133

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for, in compliance with another theatrical convention, it is customary for central characters to enter only after more peripheral ones have prepared the ground (we may call such strategy “centripetal”). Later in the act (when the sisters are already on) we learn that one of them is blind, and still later, through a touching dialogue, that the sisters had lost their parents, and that Louise never knew her real ones, since as a baby she had been found on the steps of Notre Dame. The more remote the event of the past, the later in the play we learn about it: it is not before Act III, for instance, that we learn why her mother abandoned Louise and who that mother is. Here, too, the playwright conveys this information to the viewer using the technique of retrodiction. The events that make up the sisters’ back story in Orphans of the Storm are exactly the same as they are in the play, but the way and the order in which Griffith feeds them to us is interestingly different. For obvious reasons, retrodiction is not well fit for films. Of course, there is always its visual equivalent, the flashback, but even though there are a few brief flashback scenes in Orphans of the Storm, this device does not appear to be Griffith’s favorite. Early on, Griffith had been sticking to his (and not only his) stock solution of the back story problem by introducing what can be termed a “proleptic prologue”: a brief (sometimes as brief as one shot) chronologically ordered sequence to explain how the hero or heroine came to be what they are at the outset of the main plot. (The mother who dies in the beginning of Musketeers of Pig Alley [1912], or the late father’s empty chair in The Unseen Enemy [1912], for instance, serve to explain away the fact that the respective good girls of these two films live alone.) Likewise, the playwright’s “centripetal” pattern of character introduction is of little use for silent films: we are more used to seeing the main players introduced early in the story (often with a proper expository title, the means that the theatre, in its turns, is devoid of), while the supporting characters are introduced as need for them arises (shall we say, “centrifugally”), often credited and characterized by a title as well. In other words, the material resources available (or not available) to silent films dictate and determine their narrative economy, to which the stage play is then refashioned. We are speaking, of course, of ill-defined rules and inherent norms, so counterexamples are possible and welcome, for as David Mayer has shown, there is no place for certainty in the chaotic, always-in-flux world of the nineteenth-century stage. It is not excluded (though it sounds unlikely to me) that stage variation of The Two Orphans with the back story shown first actually existed, and that Griffith used an existing stage pattern when he decided to begin the sisters’ life story from the beginning, as it were. In addition, I have not seen other film versions of this play, and cannot answer for them either. There exists, however, a Motography review by Ken Webster, called “A Splendid Three-Reel Drama”, of the 1911 Selig Polyscope screen version called Two Orphans (directed by Otis Turner and, as the review claims, “under Kate Claxton’s personal supervision”) in which, as it turns out, the whole back story, complete with Louise’s birth mystery (a profoundly incompetent narrative choice by the standards of the stage melodrama) is given away in the very first shots: In the first reel Diane Eleanor de Vaudrey secretly marries a man beneath her. A child is born, Louise, the blind girl. Diane’s father kills her husband and forces her to marry the Count de Linieres, who remains ignorant of Louise’s existence. Louise is placed in the keeping of a peasant woman who has a child of her own – Henriette. Eighteen years later the peasant woman dies and the two orphans start for Paris. The day they arrive in Paris the Marquis de Presles notices Henriette and decides to kidnap her. (Motography, September 1911, p. 131)

It is only here that the film story catches up with the actual action of play. It is curious (though, as I have argued, not surprising) that a film that compresses the whole story of the drama into less than an hour of screen time should be so epic. 134

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Griffith’s orphans begin more or less the same way: we follow the life of the girls (starting with the drama surrounding Louise’s birth) as they grow up (at a cursory pace), go to Paris, run into the Marquis, and the intrigue begins (the pace of the story slows down here). There are losses and gains this kind of alteration brings to the story. What we lose in terms of the gripping intrigue (the stage version of the play brings us right in medias res) we regain in terms of spectacle. The encounter with the Marquis, which is merely mentioned in the play, is actually shown in Griffith’s movie, and is one of the most charming acting routines in the whole film. Among other goodies promoted by the press kit there is also a promise of “Six Actors to Play Sisters in ‘Orphans’” (p. 24) – the pleasure of watching two baby actors grow into two children (one, Rita Rogan, playing little Henrietta, was a star in her age category) and then very quickly turn into Lillian and Dorothy Gish. Attractions like this were the prerogative of cinema, but they were seen as cinema’s strength, and were fairly usual for it. Another truism would be to say that the stage acting and acting for silent films were two very different skills, yet it is quite instructive to watch the Gish sisters play up Louise’s blindness, for instance, comparing their business with what we can glean from the text of Kate Claxton’s stage melodrama to get an idea of what dramatic advantages Claxton the actress could draw from the blindness of her Louise (Kate Claxton actually saw the film and, as the press kit informs, said she was “wonderfully pleased both with Lillian Gish as Henriette and Dorothy Gish as Louise”. At the same time, the press kit continues, “she refuses to draw comparisons, but says there were good actors forty-eight years ago – and there are good actors now” – press kit, p. 28). On the stage, as soon as we learn that one of the girls is blind, the other’s words become her sister’s eyes. Here is what the sisters say in the play – add the emotions expressed through gesture and voice and you will see why this dialogue could only work well on the theater stage: HEN: Oh, what a beautiful place Paris is! LOUISE: Indeed! HEN: Ah! my poor sister; what a pity you can’t see all these wonders! LOUISE: Tell me, where are we? HEN: We are at the foot of a noble bridge, with small houses on each side, and a statue in the

middle. LOUISE: That must be the Pont Neuf that papa used to talk about. He lived there with our mother

before he settled at Evreux. HEN: And yonder I see two large black towers. That must be Notre Dame! LOUISE: Notre Dame! That is where they left my cradle when I was found by one who adopted

me as his second daughter. Had it not been for him, I should have perished shortly after my birth of cold and hunger; and perhaps that would have been a good thing after all. HEN: Nay, why do you say that? LOUISE: Then I should not have been a poor blind creature, an object of pity to all who behold me.

I do not know much about the acting technique on late-nineteenth-century stage, but I can imagine how important a tool her speech skill and her voice must have been for someone like Kate Claxton to make the most of a touching scene like this. But silent cinema too has its own – visual – tools for dealing with blindness, and while theater actors of course were visible to their public as well, no one will dispute the fact that the resources of enhancing this visibility available to theater people were more limited than the ones available to Griffith. In the first reel of the film, Lillian Gish has just sewn a beautiful silk dress for her dear sister – but how does one remind a blind person of the beauty of silk? By the sound of it, 135

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is Griffith and Gish’s answer. Lillian takes a little fold of Dorothy’s dress between her fingers, brings the cloth closer to her sister’s ears, and gives the silk a quick rub (all this taking her less time than it takes me to describe it). No one is saying that a similar bit of business could not have occurred at one time or another to one of the stage performers in The Two Orphans, but I am pretty sure that it would look different on stage, less instant, less fluent, less Lillian Gish. There is a remarkable, profoundly professional, piece of evidence about the difference between theater and film that comes down to us from, of all people, Kate Claxton, the veteran stage impersonator of Louise. As it turns out, Claxton not only went to see Orphans of the Storm, but also visited the studio at the time of its making, and even discussed some technical matters with Griffith. One of the questions that interested the actress was costuming, for while in the theater the burden of finding (or sewing or buying) the right dress for one’s character lies on the actor, in the movies the decision is evidently made by the director and the cinematographer, saying nothing of the designer. This is what Claxton explained in her interview to The New York Herald (September 11, 1921): Speaking of dress. Mr. Griffith often shows me the compliment of inviting me to sit next to him during the filming of the scenes. The material of the gown worn by the Countess costs no less than $40 a yard. I expressed my horror at such extravagance. But I learned that Mr. Griffith had his reasons. He explained that there are no colors for him in the pictures but black and white. But the design of the silk is in such colors that there will be no less than twelve shades of gray ranging from the white to black of the film.

There is hardly a more telling example of how what may at first be perceived as a lack – the lack of words, or colors, or the third dimension – creates extra subtlety, not crudeness. Give-and-take is an accurate way of describing what happens when we turn something into something else. The publicity kit for Orphans of the Storm, as I mentioned earlier on, makes a great deal of Griffith using Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution. If this was the case, this is what we may call take. What Griffith gives to Carlyle’s history is perhaps a less tangible but not unreal thing: a new image. I am not speaking of screen images here, but of an image in a more abstract sense, of a changed mental image of Carlyle’s nineteenth-century vision of the eighteenth-century event. One surprising side-effect of watching Orphans of the Storm for people who knew and cared for Carlyle was not (only) a changed image of the French Revolution itself, but (also) the way the film changed their image of Carlyle’s history book. Suddenly, the book looked, how to say it, “cinematic”, as The New York Times correspondent Henry MacMahon (yes, the same man who wrote the novel after the film) discovered in 1922: There is little dialogue in [Carlyle’s] French Revolution. It is action, action, ACTION. And have you ever noticed the Carlyle technique of setting the immediate scene against a background of Time and Space and World’s Transcendental? The allegory behind the Picture, so to speak – the higher Vision over against the horrific Reality? That’s movie stuff! Foreshadowing and cut-back; wide perspective, minutest close-up; impressive fade-out, parallel action, accelerating climax, the return or obstruction, the tension snapped at breaking point, the idyllic aftermath: you shall find them all in the ‘fire-picture’ (as Carlyle himself calls it) of the eventful four years that destroyed the Bourbon scheme and introduced the still darker tyranny of the Terror. (“Recaptured Thrills of the French Revolution”, The Literary Digest, February 25, 1922, p. 29)

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One may disagree about the extent to which cinema altered the face of nineteenth-century theater and literature, but there is little doubt that it has given this face a lift. (I am thankful to David Mayer, Dan Morgan, Alan R. Goodrich and Joshua Yumibe for their help). Yuri Tsivian

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604 INTERNATIONAL NEWS SERVICE

[PERSONALITIES OF THE TWENTIES] Alternate title: [Hearst silent vault material, INT2669, INT2764] (title based on Hearst index card description) Filming date: 1921 (date based on edge code on film) or 1922 (see Kevin Brownlow, below) Location: Washington, D.C. Distribution: International News Service Release date: not known Release length: one reel (94 ft.) Copyright date: undetermined Director: Not known Photographer: (?) Wallin (according to Hearst index card) On camera: D.W. Griffith; [in other shots] Rex Beach, Charles P. Donahue, and Clayton R. Lusk Archival sources: UCLA Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate negative (unedited) NOTE: Archival title supplied by UCLA Film and Television Archive cataloguer, based on Hearst index card description. Footage from the print is included in D.W. Griffith, Father of Film (Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, 1993), where it is presented as showing D.W. Griffith shaking hands with U.S. President Warren G. Harding at the Washington, D.C. premiere of Orphans of the Storm. In a communication to the Editor (June 25, 2004) J.B. Kaufman writes: “the Hearst newsreels had quite a few different names, sometimes simultaneously. […] [However, an advertisement in The Moving Picture World] mentions the combination of the Selig company with Hearst’s newspaper organization, the ‘International News Service’. And it does appear that several of the Hearst newsreels included ‘International’ in their names”. Kevin Brownlow to J.B. Kaufman, January 26, 2004: “I think this came from a compilation film called Personalities of the Twenties, ex UCLA. Pres[ident] Harding is shown in close-up, but not in the same shot as DWG. DWG shakes hand[s] with a member of his cabinet, I believe. Date 1922”.

This is raw footage originally shot for a Hearst newsreel that included coverage of Rex Beach, Charles P. Donahue and Clayton R. Lusk, along with Griffith. The Griffith scenes were shot in Washington, D.C. They have sometimes been assumed to document Griffith’s visit to the White House in 1922, along with Lillian and Dorothy Gish, for a private showing of Orphans of the Storm at the invitation of President Warren G. Harding. In fact, however, some of the film’s details point to an earlier filming date. Griffith had made another, far less publicized trip to Washington in 1921 for a cause dear to his heart: helping to fight a proposed federal censorship bill (special thanks to Russell Merritt for pointing this out). Evidence on screen is inconclusive, but the print of this news footage preserved in the UCLA Film and Television Archive bears a 1921 edge code. That, and the total absence of Lillian and Dorothy Gish, suggests that these scenes were shot during the earlier visit. J.B. Kaufman

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605 D.W. GRIFFITH, INC.

ONE EXCITING NIGHT Working title: The Haunted Grange Filming date: June–August 1922 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Distribution: United Artists Derby, Connecticut preview: 12 September 1922 (in fourteen reels) New Jersey preview: late September/early October 1922 (in twelve reels) Newport, Rhode Island premiere: 2 October 1922 Boston premiere: 10 October 1922 New York premiere: 23 October 1922, Apollo Theatre Release date: 24 December 1922 Release length: eleven reels, 11,500 feet Copyright date: 14 December 1922 (LP18507) Director: D.W. Griffith Story: Irene Sinclair (pseudonym of D.W. Griffith) Photographer: Hendrik Sartov Additional photography: Irving B. Ruby Set designer: Charles M. Kirk Music score arranged and synchronized by: Albert Pesce, “General Music Director for D.W. Griffith” Special effects: Edward Scholl Cast: Carol Dempster (Agnes Harrington); Henry Hull (John Fairfax); Porter Strong (Romeo Washington); Morgan Wallace (J. Wilson Rockmaine); C.H. Cro[c]ker-King (The Neighbor); Margaret Dale (Mrs. Harrington); Frank Sheridan (The Detective); Frank Wunderlee (Samuel Jones); Grace Griswold (Auntie Fairfax); Irma Harrison (The colored maid); Herbert Sutch (Clary Johnson); Percy Carr (The Butler); Charles Emmett Mack (A guest) Archival sources: FILM – The Museum of Modern Art, 16mm diacetate positive (received from D.W. Griffith in 1938 and printed from one of the two 35mm nitrate negatives, both no longer extant); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate positive (excerpts). MUSIC – University of Minnesota (Arthur Kleiner Collection, Austrian Institute), original score (unspecified parts); Library of Congress, a) piano score (published by D.W. Griffith, Inc., Los Angeles, 1922), 164 pages; copyright C1 E 553396; location: LC M1527.P505; microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3212, Item 95; b) piano conductor and orchestral parts (1,1,2,1; 2,2,1,0; tympani and drums; harp; strings), 164 pages. Note: copyright on piano part only (The Museum of Modern Art Collection); microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Item 62 A man of wealth, past his youth, Rockmaine by name, has an obsession to win Agnes Harrington, a young girl. She feels only repugnance for him, but to save her mother from impending disgrace at the hands of Rockmaine, consents to marry him. Young John Fairfax, also wealthy, of splendid family, and a fine young chap in every way, returns home from Europe. He meets the girl and it is mutual love at first sight. Fairfax does not know she is being sacrificed on the twin altars of Greed and Passion. He opens the Fairfax country house and gives a party to which Agnes Harrington, her mother, and their crowd are all invited.

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In his absence the Fairfax home has been made the headquarters of a band of bootleggers. Johnson, the chief of the band, in attempting to escape with the immense spoils, amounting to about a half a million dollars, is pursued by revenue officers and shot and killed in the Fairfax house shortly before the party guests arrive. Suspicion is cast on young Fairfax and his troubles multiply rapidly. Here there comes into the picture Romeo Washington, a comical negro, whose fears when he learns of the murder form real comedy. Mysterious figures begin to appear. Eventually Agnes Harrington, Fairfax and Romeo and the maid, his sweetheart, are all locked in the house while detectives seek the slayer. Stark disaster stalks all about them. One of the mystery figures is a burly negro whose actions further complicate the mystery. Again things begin to happen with startling sudden[n]ess. At the height of a terrific storm the search for the slayer comes to a climax, and suspect and pursuers all dash out into the torrential storm. Then young Fairfax – But the rest must be seen. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, December 14, 1922, LP18507 [stamped with date December 15, 1922]

A rich young mother dies in Africa and, in an effort to steal her baby’s inheritance, the woman’s traveling companions conspire to adopt the child, hide her true identity from her, and split the money. Years later, the girl, now known as Agnes Harrington, is to be married off to J. Wilson Rockmaine, a fortune hunter and blackmailer. Rockmaine has caught her adoptive mother, Mrs. Harrington, in a compromising situation and is threatening the older woman with exposure unless Agnes agrees to the wedding. Agnes and her mother are the guests of John Fairfax, a rich young man who has recently returned home from Europe to take up residence in his old family estate. Unknown to Fairfax, the house has lately been used by bootleggers as a hideout. The head of the bootlegger gang, Clary Johnson, tries to escape with his loot before the guests arrive for the party, but is shot dead. Suspicion falls on Fairfax. All of the guests and servants, including the black maid and her sweetheart, Romeo Washington, are locked in the house overnight by a detective investigating the case. Mysterious comings and goings, along with creepy noises and a terrible storm, combine to keep everyone on edge until Rockmaine is revealed as the killer. Agnes is informed of her real parents’ identity, is told that she is the heir to a great fortune, and marries John Fairfax.

Without question, the financial success of Orphans of the Storm provided D.W. Griffith with badly needed revenue for the continued operation of his chronically underfunded studio at Mamaroneck, New York. Riding the crest of his critical and box-office triumph, Griffith traveled to London in the spring of 1922 to attend the opening there of Orphans of the Storm, but also to pursue the production of a film whose subject would be nothing less than the history of the world. This ambitious project, which was to have been scripted by H.G. Wells, never came to pass and Griffith found himself in need of a viable alternative that might turn a quick profit. While virtually all of his feature films up to that date had been profitable, it is also true that Griffith’s most successful projects had been based upon proven literary (Broken Blossoms) or theatrical (Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm) properties; those films based on original treatments by Griffith himself, although box-office successes, were notably less well received by both audiences and critics. It was only natural, then, that Griffith would seek out a theatrical hit. Having recently tackled melodrama, in both contemporary and historical settings, his instincts led him to find a subject much lighter in tone. 140

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In mid-1922, Griffith attempted to secure the rights to The Bat, an enormously popular play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood that had opened on Broadway in 1920, running for a phenomenal 878 performances. Considered the “granddaddy” of all haunted house mysteries, The Bat tells the story of a woman who rents the home of a banker who may or may not have died while on a trip to Colorado. During her first few days in the house, she becomes aware of strange happenings and someone’s insistent attempts to break in. She is warned to leave the estate but refuses to do so. A large sum of money is missing from the dead man’s bank and it is suspected that he stole the money himself and hid it in the house, waiting only for the chance to sneak back and retrieve it. However, there is a long list of others who also want the money: the bank cashier wrongly accused of the crime; a detective trying to clear up the mystery; a doctor who is a close friend of the family; a nephew who is penniless; the woman’s niece, who is romantically involved with the cashier; and “The Bat”, a murdering thief who has been eluding the local police. Because he did not have enough ready money to purchase this valuable property, the rights for which were reported by Variety to be $150,000, Griffith did the next best thing: he wrote his own haunted house story. Using the pseudonym Irene Sinclair – “a young Kentucky authoress” – Griffith constructed a continuity generic enough to circumvent any copyright problems, and then went so far as to copyright his own treatment in July of 1922 as “The Haunted Grange”, although the final film would differ significantly from this initial sketch. As his leading man, Griffith hired Henry Hull, fresh from his star turn on Broadway in another haunted house play, The Cat and the Canary; the character of Agnes Harrington was played by Carol Dempster, in her least convincing imitation to date of the Gishes and Mae Marsh. The photography and editing of One Exciting Night were completed without incident and the entire production was previewed and ready for release in short order. As originally planned, the film was a modest production, taking place primarily within the confines of the Fairfax mansion, a dark and claustrophobic environment perfectly in keeping with such a story. Griffith, however, felt that the production was too modest and lacked an appropriately dramatic climax, one worthy of his past successes. In this he was encouraged by Carol Dempster who, according to at least one eyewitness account, complained to her director that the film was not big enough. As a result, a storm sequence was filmed at huge expense and worked into the film’s finale. Griffith later claimed that an unusually severe mid-June storm had been the source of the sequence, but the evidence onscreen makes it clear that the entire storm was man-made. Wind machines, enormous banks of lights and numerous lightweight trees and tree limbs combined to create a near-hurricane that was all too obviously fake and without dramatic effect. The cost was considerable (nearly $250,000) and put the film significantly over its original budget, making it difficult, if not impossible for One Exciting Night to finally turn a profit. Of course, an ill-advised storm sequence was not the film’s primary problem. At its heart, One Exciting Night was a comic thriller and, as such, required a tightly knit story directed with a light touch – neither of which were among D.W. Griffith’s strengths. For comedy, Griffith fell back upon the broadest and most offensive kind of racial stereotyping, portraying the character of Romeo Washington as a lazy good-for-nothing whose quaking in terror at the slightest provocation was clearly meant to incite riotous laughter in the audience. The fact that the part of Romeo was acted by Porter Strong, a white man in blackface, makes the effect all the more painful for modern audiences. Moviegoers of the time, however, had little or no problem with the convention of white performers in blackface; in fact, if reviews of the time are any indication, audiences found Porter Strong and Irma Harrison, the maid, to be skilled burnt cork performers and highly entertaining. More than the use of offensive stereotypes, Griffith’s inability to grasp the essence of his own story – knowing what would make it work and why – is the reason for One Exciting Night’s 141

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ultimate failure. Rather than carefully unfold his plot and clearly introduce his characters, Griffith does both haphazardly, using an overabundance of explanatory intertitles in an effort to move his story forward and dropping characters into the film wherever convenient. All too often, motivations are spelled out with such obviousness that the audience is left to wonder what all the fuss is about on the screen. Clutching hands, characters in grotesque disguises, sliding panels and creaking doors, ominous shadows that contain unknown terrors – these are the essential elements of the mystery genre, but rather than weave them into the fabric of his story for maximum effect, Griffith drops them indiscriminately into the plot with little or no effect, failing to understand that they are not arbitrary devices with which to scare the audience, but are instead the very heart of the matter, the reason why the audience is paying attention to the story in the first place. Griffith’s legendary ability to manipulate an audience is nowhere to be found in One Exciting Night; even the final storm sequence, which he hoped would rival the triumphs of his previous film finales, falls oddly flat. Griffith’s usually unerring sense of cinematic rhythm fails him in this film, and one can only assume it is because he has so little affinity for the mystery genre. Long before the film is over, the audience knows who the killer is and no natural disaster created in the studio can help One Exciting Night recover from such a basic flaw. Most reviewers of the time were forgiving of the film’s failings, taking it for a light and unassuming diversion for both the audience and the filmmaker after the high seriousness of such previous releases as Orphans of the Storm and Way Down East. The New York Times called it “ a hilarious thriller”, while Variety declared that the “mystery element is admirably maintained”. Griffith himself attempted to deflect criticism by calling the film a simple “story of entertainment”, “a little romance – just a little mystery”. He hoped that it would “take people out of themselves during the few minutes they are seeing it”. Variety optimistically observed that, “while it will never achieve any fame for Griffith, it will probably bring him more real money in the next six months than some of the productions upon which he has spent young fortunes in producing. He is obviously cashing in on his prestige …”. It was true that Griffith hoped the strength of his name would carry his “little” film over its several rough spots, but he was not to see any money from One Exciting Night, real or otherwise. According to the same Variety columnist, One Exciting Night was initially previewed in Derby, Connecticut, at fourteen reels. When it was previewed a second time in New Jersey, it had been cut to twelve reels. The version Variety reviewed was eleven reels, and still they felt that it could have been trimmed substantially. Clearly, Griffith had trouble giving shape to One Exciting Night. This only exacerbated an already difficult situation. The final budget for the film was variously reported to be anywhere from $362,000 to $928,000 (the latter sum probably reflecting numerous overhead charges). Whichever was correct – and the true figure for the direct production cost was probably between $500,000 and $600,000 – One Exciting Night was a loss for the Griffith studio. Had he not added the storm sequence at the last minute, at an additional cost of nearly $250,000, Griffith might have managed to break even. However, add to that expenditure the heavy debt the studio was already carrying before production began, the substantial cost of extensive road show engagements (which were, as always, ineptly managed by Griffith’s brother), and the promotional and publicity expenses that Griffith, as an independent studio head, had to shoulder personally, and the film’s eventual estimated gross of $1,150,000 (as reported by the D.W. Griffith Corp. itself in 1928) would still result in a clear and decisive loss for the studio. Years later, Gerrit J. Lloyd, who worked for Griffith as a press agent during the Mamaroneck years, asserted that it was the losses incurred by this one film that put Griffith and his company permanently in the red. As he wrote in a letter to Barnet Braverman in 1949, “after that he was digging money on any terms wherever he could get it”. Steven Higgins 142

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606 GRAHAM-WILCOX PRODUCTIONS LTD.

PADDY – THE NEXT-BEST-THING Country of production: United Kingdom Alternate title: Paddy the Next Best Thing Filming date: late 1922? Location: Graham-Wilcox studio, Islington, London; exteriors: County O’Meath, Ireland; Devonshire, England? Producer: Herbert Wilcox Distribution in the U.S.: United Artists/Allied Producers and Distributors Corporation Release date in the U.K.: January 1923; reissued 1925 Release length: seven reels, ca. 7,200 feet Copyright date (U.S.): 26 or 28 July 1923 by D.W. Griffith, Inc. of U.S. (LP19239) Director: Graham Cutts Scenario: Eliot Stannard, Herbert Wilcox Author: Gertrude Page Story: Gertrude Page Source: “Paddy – The Next-Best-Thing”, the novel (1908 or 1916) by Gertrude Page; the play (1920) by W. Gayer Mackay and Robert Ord (pseudonym of Edith Gayer Mackay), based on the novel Photographer: Rene Guissart Cast: Mae Marsh (Paddy Adair); Darby Foster (Lawrence Blake); Lillian Douglas (Eileen Adair); George K. Arthur (Jack O’Hara); Nina Boucicault (Mrs. Blake); Haidée Wright (Jane O’Hara); Marie Wright (Mary O’Hara); Marie Ault (Mrs. Adair); Sir Simeon Stuart (Gen. Adair); Mildred Evelyn (Doreen Blake); Tom Coventry (Mickey Doolan); Bernard Vaughan (Dr. Adair) Archival sources: none known NOTE: An item in The D.W. Griffith Papers (May 6, 1927) refers to the storage of film elements on this film with the negatives of other Griffith films. The reference also appears in earlier laboratory reports for the Griffith studio. Paddy Adair plays the part of son to her father, doughty old General Adair, who would dearly have loved to have a son, but accepted Paddy as the next-best-thing. She is a typical tom-boy, and helps Jack O’Hara make love to her sister, who, however, is in love with Lawrence Blake. The latter tells Eileen Adair that he does not care for her in that way, and then Paddy takes the situation into her own hands and calls him a cad for having led her sister on. Lawrence then tells Paddy that she herself is the girl he loves, and Paddy drives him away in furious anger. Jack O’Hara goes abroad to make his fortune, and Paddy’s father dies suddenly. Nothing is left for Paddy to do but go to London to make her living, leaving sister Eileen with their two maiden aunts. Lawrence follows her. There are tempestuous meetings, and then, after a display of gallantry on his part in which he is severely injured, Paddy finds that she loves him. Jack O’Hara unexpectedly returns home, and Paddy goes back to the old home place to meet him. Leaving her sister and Jack together, Paddy wanders away to be alone with her memories and is lost in a dense fog.

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A search party is formed and Paddy is found near death in the viscuous [sic] mud of an Irish bog. Lawrence rescues her and they bare their hearts to each other. Press book/advertising sheet synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, July 26, 1923, LP19239

The only definite connection between D.W. Griffith and this film is that it was registered for copyright by D.W. Griffith, Inc., in July 1923 (by sending in a press book, prepared by the U.S. distributor Allied Producers and Distributors Corp.). There is no evidence that Griffith invested in the production, so why then would he acquire U.S. distribution rights? The only obvious factor that might have attracted Griffith’s interest is that his former star, Mae Marsh, had the featured role (the rest of the cast was British). This film was in fact a comeback for Marsh, as she had not appeared in a film for over two years. The British director, Graham Cutts, had first looked in the United Kingdom for an actress to play Paddy, before deciding on Mae Marsh, and he then sent a representative to Los Angeles to obtain her signature on a contract for the role. The studio filming was at the Graham-Wilcox studios in Islington, London, and the sets included a reproduction of an Irish castle, the biggest set yet built in a British studio. Location filming was in Ireland (and possibly scenes in Devonshire). Mae Marsh seems to have enjoyed the experience, impressing her British colleagues with her willingness to perform the more physical aspects of the part, including swimming, hunting and leaping through windows. The story – a romantic drama of a young Irish tomboy and her growing love for the rich young landowner nearby – was based on a very popular novel by Gertrude Page, which had been serialised in American newspapers and turned into a stage drama which ran for three years at the Savoy Theatre in London. It was quite a common practice at the time in Britain to make films from theatrical successes, and the star of the stage version was an American, Peggy O’Neill, which might have been what suggested to Cutts the casting of Mae Marsh, another American, in the film role. Thanks to its literary antecedents, the film would have had a receptive audience on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, with its Irish milieu and locations (County O’Meath, north of Dublin), the film was likely to appeal to America’s immigrant communities with roots in the emerald isle. This Irish element was stressed in the musical arrangements, as several of the melodies chosen to accompany scenes in the film were Irish, notably “When Irish Eyes are Smiling”, selected as Paddy’s love theme. After completion, in January 1923 Graham Cutts and producer Herbert Wilcox visited the United States to promote Paddy – The-Next-Best-Thing, and it seems possible that they met Griffith during this trip, or at any rate with his colleagues at D.W. Griffith, Inc., and made the deal for U.S. distribution. Later in the same month the film was trade shown in Britain at the Scala Theatre, and this also suggests some connections with Griffith or his interests, as the Scala was also where The Birth of a Nation and Orphans of the Storm had been screened for their London runs. The film garnered very good critical comment on both sides of the Atlantic. Variety praised Graham Cutts’ work, as well as the camerawork and the cast, and concluded: “in every way it is a fine feature.... This is one of the best British films yet made.” The British trade press was even more fulsome, The Kinematograph Weekly (February 1, 1923) writing of the “excellence of the production”, and in particular lauded Cutts’ “smooth” direction and his skill in the humorous sections. The journal enthused: “There is not a dull moment in the whole picture … This is another film which marks a milestone in the improvement of British screen art, and its success as a feature is assured.” The reviewer liked all the performances, and called Mae Marsh “a delight”, though suggested that she was “apt to be too much on the move”.

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The Bioscope of the same date was critical of two scenes – an Irish country dance and a mirror sequence – but praised another scene, which depicted a search on a torch-lit moor. The journal concluded that the film was “an outstanding piece of work”, and was also very approving of Marsh, calling this the best performance of her career, a carefully worked out characterisation of the part. It noted: “so infinitely varied are her methods that, although she is absent from the screen for hardly a moment throughout the picture, her work is never monotonous”. Sadly, as no print of this film is known to survive, we have no chance to see this performance for ourselves. Stephen Bottomore

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607 D.W. GRIFFITH, INC.

THE WHITE ROSE Filming date: February–April 1923 Location: (Louisiana shooting) New Orleans; Franklin; New Iberia; Bayou Teche; (Florida shooting) Hialeah; Miami; Ft. Lauderdale; shooting completed at the Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Presented by: D.W. Griffith Distribution: United Artists New York premiere: 22 or 21 May 1923, Lyric Theatre Release date: 19 August 1923 Release length: ten reels, 9,800 feet (twelve reels, 12,000 feet at New York premiere) Copyright date: 26 July 1923 (LP19240) Director: D.W. Griffith Scenario: Irene Sinclair (pseudonym of D.W. Griffith) Story: Irene Sinclair (pseudonym of D.W. Griffith) Photographers: G.W. Bitzer, Hendrik Sartov, Hal Sintzenich Assistant director: Herbert Sutch Set designer: Charles M. Kirk Film editors: James Smith, Rose Smith? Music composed and adapted by: Joseph Carl Breil, “as conducted by Albert Pesce” (according to piano conductor score at the Library of Congress) Special effects: Edward Scholl Cast: Mae Marsh (Bessie Williams, known as “Teazie”); Carol Dempster (Marie Carrington); Ivor Novello (Joseph Beaugardé); Neil Hamilton (John White); Lucille La Verne (“Auntie” Easter); Porter Strong (Apollo, a servant); Jane Thomas (A cigarstand girl); Kate Bruce (An aunt); Erville Alderson (A man of the world); Herbert Sutch (The Bishop); Joseph Burke (The landlord); Mary Foy (The landlady); Charles Emmett Mack (Guest at inn); Uncle Tom Jenkins (An old Negro) Archival sources: FILM – George Eastman House, 35mm nitrate negative; The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm acetate negative (from 35mm nitrate positive received from D.W. Griffith in 1938, no longer extant); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined). MUSIC – University of Minnesota (Arthur Kleiner Collection, Austrian Institute), original score (unspecified parts); Library of Congress, a) piano conductor and instrumental parts (1,1,2,1; 2,2,1,0; drums; harp; celeste; strings), 109 pages (published by D.W. Griffith, New York, 1923); microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Item 80 (The Museum of Modern Art Collection); b) piano conductor, 109 pages (published by D.W. Griffith, New York, 1923); microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3212, Item 148 Bessie Williams, reared in an orphan asylum, gets a job in a summer hotel. Another girl tells her she must be a regular flapper to attract the men, and she becomes one. Joseph Beaugarde [sic], out looking for experiences to give him a better view of life before becoming a minister, is fascinated with her and, believing she is bad, betrays her and returns home to wed another girl. A baby is born to Bessie, and, cast out she wanders around until she is finally given shelter by an old negro woman. In the meantime Beaugarde, who has entered the ministry, becomes conscience stricken

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and finds out he really loves Bessie but has lost track of her. Telling the other girl about his one false step, he is forgiven and they are about to wed when the old negro woman is instrumental in getting him to Bessie’s bedside when she is thought to be dying. The other woman, understanding the situation, releases him and he marries Bessie, who recovers, and they begin life anew. C.S. Sewell, The Moving Picture World, June 2, 1923, p. 398 From Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, July 26, 1923, LP19240

Bessie leaves an orphan asylum with a letter praising her behavior and deportment and gets a job as a cashier at a resort hotel in the bayou area of Louisiana. Anxious to be popular, she adopts the manners and dress of a flapper, and flirts openly with men. She is closely observed by Joseph Beaugardé, the scion of an old family who has studied to join the ministry, but is taking a trip to observe the ways of the world. Bessie (now known as “Teazie”) is immediately attracted to John, who is torn between his own attraction and repulsion at her reputation as a tramp. In fact, Bessie remains “a good girl”, but Joseph is unaware of this. One moonlit night the two make love and Teazie believes she has found the love of her life. Joseph, however, decides he cannot be engaged to a girl like her and leaves the next day. Teazie is devastated and soon learns she is pregnant. Joseph returns to his home and becomes a very successful minister noted for his eloquence. But he remains haunted by his affair with Teazie. Teazie in the meantime loses her job due to her illegitimate child and wanders off searching unsuccessfully for work, sometimes contemplating suicide. Her wandering brings her to the area of Louisiana where Joseph lives. Carrying her baby in a storm, she unknowingly asks for a job and shelter at Joseph’s house but is turned away by a servant. However, a black woman, Auntie Easter, takes her in and cares for her. Told by a doctor that Teazie is dying, Auntie Easter sends for Marie, a young white girl who is engaged to Joseph. She in turn calls for Joseph to comfort the dying girl. Joseph recognizes Teazie and realizes his sinful behavior toward her. He marries her on her deathbed. He resigns from the pulpit saying he is a great sinner. But in fact Teazie survives and the new family greets the spring with new hope and faith.

Perhaps the most pernicious – and difficult to dispel – myth about Griffith’s career (stronger even than the claim he “invented” the close-up) is the claim of his long and inevitable decline. Few seem to doubt it, yet the date for its beginning remains elusive. In my discussion of Intolerance (see DWG Project, #543, pp. 46–47), I quoted Cecil B. DeMille claiming that the decline begins with Intolerance – in other words in Griffith’s third year of making feature films! However, I believe few critics would deny Broken Blossoms, Way Down East or Orphans of the Storm the status of major Griffith films. I also feel that his two sound films, Abraham Lincoln and The Struggle, rank as important films in Griffith’s oeuvre, and I am not entirely alone. I would admit that most of the Paramount films do not display the control of editing, performance and composition that mark Griffith’s best work. But the myth of decline has unjustly obscured two films from the mid-1920s that I consider masterpieces: his extraordinary account of post-war inflation, shot in Germany, Isn’t Life Wonderful from 1924, and his last great portrait of a woman betrayed, The White Rose from 1923. The White Rose could be seen as Griffith’s reworking of Way Down East, but with a striking series of variations. The setting moves from the alternately bountiful and frigid rural landscape of New England Puritanism to the steamy Louisiana bayou country, with its decaying aristocratic mansions, torrential downpours and omnipresent Spanish moss draping the trees. This change in setting allows a change in tone as well, as the story of rural purity seduced by 147

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a city cad takes on complex shading and contradictions. The masculine figures of seducer and rescuer (represented by dandy Lennox Sanderson and farm boy David Bartlett in the earlier film) are here fused into the anguished and ambiguous figure of Joseph Beaugardé, both seducer and – ultimately – husband, and, to complicate things even more, Minister of God. Joseph’s tortured sense of both sexuality and guilt strongly engaged Griffith, and the performance as an updated Arthur Dimsdale by English actor Ivor Novello, while perhaps not totally successful, nonetheless provides Griffith’s most multi-layered investigation of male sexuality. The myth of Griffith’s decline is bound up with (and often explained by) a claim that Griffith as an old-fashioned Victorian moralist became increasingly out-of-step with the mores and styles of the 1920s “Jazz Age”. This reading overlooks not only subtleties, but ignores the major thrust of Griffith’s filmmaking, which, as Eisenstein pointed out, was never exclusively the celebration of old-fashioned rural values or the embracing of the fast-paced tempo of modern life, but – crucially – a complex staging of the encounter between these two opposed worlds. To dismiss Griffith as “old-fashioned” entails missing his often tortured attempt to reconcile the old and new, to bring old-fashioned values into the new world and vice versa. If nothing else, The White Rose must be read as a parable about the dangers of a woman maintaining the old-fashioned patriarchal values of the repression of sexual expressiveness and glamour in the modern world. Sexuality takes center stage in this encounter between the old and new – and I mean sexuality and desire as much as gender. The crucial role of sexual desire in Griffith’s plots (and indeed in his stylistics) has also been obscured by the view of him as a puritanical Victorian. Just as we can no longer maintain a notion of the Victorian age as one that simply ignored sexuality, we cannot overlook the sexual dimension of Griffith’s filmmaking. As a graduate student, I once brought up the sexual motivation of Griffith’s editing in a seminar and was summarily informed that the only remarkable thing about sexuality in Griffith was its repression. After Foucault (my seminar pre-dated The History of Sexuality), it seems obvious that repression signals the strong presence of sexuality, rather than accomplishing its erasure. But Griffith does not simply exemplify Victorian sexual mores and repression. Rather, he participates in the breakdown of the Victorian view of the role and representation of sexual behavior, as much akin to Thomas Hardy as to Charles Dickens. Griffith wrestles with a devotion to the Cult of Pure Womanhood, devoted to Motherhood and domesticity, and with the attraction of a modern sense of woman as sexual, but also playful. Both these views certainly remain trapped within patriarchal ambivalences toward the feminine, hardly offering progressive models of gender. But in his feature films Griffith stages the breakdown of the virginal “angel of the house” (Lillian Gish may seem born to play the role, but in Griffith’s films she most often enacts it as tragedy), and a growing fascination with an alternative female role (figured in many ways as a girl rather than a woman): the woman who approaches sexuality as a game, a play of surface glamour. Mae Marsh first incarnated this role in the Modern Story of Intolerance, which in some ways provides a sketch for her character of Bessie/Teazie in The White Rose. In contrast to the more one-dimensional portrayal of this proto-flapper type by Clarine Seymour in such films as True Heart Susie, Marsh in The White Rose carries this role through a prolonged transformation, a melodramatic odyssey, as the playful girlwoman, enduring undeserved suffering, becomes a mother and ultimately a wife. To any viewer willing to look beyond images whose unfamiliar dynamics might first appear as melodramatic clichés, it should be clear that in The White Rose Griffith tries to work out a new view of sexuality, not simply retelling Victorian morality tales. But, a bit like Thomas Hardy, Griffith finds that exploring a new interest in sexuality and sensuality does not release him from a strong indulgence in guilt. Hence the exploration in this film of the interiorly 148

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divided male character, in sharp contrast to the traditional melodramatic roles of heartless cad and earnest young man in Way Down East. The humid atmosphere of the Louisianan night seems to foster the expression of sexual passion in The White Rose, while having Mae Marsh, rather than Lillian Gish, take the main role of the woman seduced and abandoned also entails a greater degree of sexual expressiveness. One senses Griffith’s own erotic investment in this story, his identification with Teazie trying to discover a new mode of modern sexuality, while preserving the traditional sense of being a good girl, as well as his alignment with Joseph’s tortured pursuit of a new realm of sensual delight and emotional involvement while struggling with an overwhelming guilt. Thus the seduction of Teazie by Joseph does not rely on the deception of a false marriage used by the seducer in Way Down East, but rather occurs gradually and naturally through one of Griffith’s most lyrical sequences, as the young couple moves through a landscape of burgeoning Southern sensuality, blossoms and Spanish moss hanging about them, the moon reflected in the bayou waters, as each of them seems overwhelmed by desires that course through nature itself. This is not a tawdry one-night stand – although that is precisely what Joseph, in his limited guilt-ridden view of sexuality, tries to tell himself later. Griffith portrays it as (following the prose of the intertitle) “THAT MIRACLE WHICH DOES SOMETIMES OCCUR – THE MIRACLE OF REAL ENDURING LOVE”. Joseph’s blindness which causes the tragedy of the film does not lie entirely in his traditionally melodramatic mistake of misreading the signs of true virtue (assuming Teazie is a slut through her style of dress, make-up and flirtatious ways), but also because he cannot accept his own sexual responses. Novello is rather burdened with the necessity of enacting male repression in a legible manner, which leads to scenes that can only be described as bordering on male hysteria, as he attempts to shake off not only sexual attraction, but sexual fulfillment. (While Novello’s rather ambivalent sexuality works well within the new, more feminine, ideal that Griffith seems to set for male behavior, he does not quite achieve the rich ambiguity of sexuality that Hitchcock will draw from him a few years later in The Lodger [1927].) In denying his sexual nature, Joseph turns against a power that Griffith’s intertitle describes as “A VOICE AS STRONG AS LIFE ITSELF”. Is the overwhelming guilt he suffers after seducing Teazie due to his giving into sexual temptation, or – and I feel Griffith’s narrative logic endorses this latter view – because he runs away from her gift of sensuality and devotion? Around the time Griffith began planning The White Rose he sent a telegram to Mae Marsh telling her he had just seen again the greatest performance by an actress on film: her role as Little Sister in The Birth of a Nation (The D.W. Griffith Papers, D.W. Griffith to Mae Marsh, April 27, 1921). Marsh frequently gets overlooked in the pantheon of Griffith’s leading ladies, due partly to the indisputable power and range of Lillian Gish, but also, I feel, because this film showcasing her most complex performance has received so little attention. Marsh was not an actress trained on stage as Gish was, but a teen-ager Griffith noticed and decided to cast during one of her visits to a Biograph shooting location because of her resemblance to stage actress Billie Burke. Arguably she does not possess Gish’s uncanny control of facial expressions, but, on the other hand, she moves her whole body more gracefully than Gish (the dancing around the sets that often seems awkward when Gish attempts it seems natural with Marsh). But more than expressiveness, Marsh’s talent lies in a profound vulnerability and openness to the camera. As Bessie, the “first class orphan”, and Teazie, the would-be Jazz-baby, Marsh projects an eager desire to please, to be liked and a need to be loved. All of this reveals her poignant innocence, expecting so little from the world other than attention and affection – and receiving even less: harsh judgment, contempt, abandonment. Bessie’s entrance into the film, after Griffith has shown the lassitude of the Louisiana Teche country (its old families weighed down by the burden of unnamed past sins, and the 149

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pure laziness of the “white trash”), injects an unexpected freshness and energy into this sleepy world. Her introduction of herself as she asks for a job at the resort hotel exemplifies Griffith’s acute Dickensian sense of simplicity, as she presents her two treasured possessions to certify her good character: the letter of recommendation from the orphanage, and her family album. The letter, which she proudly and carefully takes from an envelope, reports: “Her deportment and conduct in the last year was ninety per cent.” Bessie supports her claim to be (as the intertitle puts it) A FIRST CLASS ORPHAN. YOU SEE – I – I – HAD A MAMA AND A PAPA BOTH, with the family photo album. Griffith not only frequently expresses aspects of characters through carefully chosen props, but here, as in a number of other films, he lingers over a young girl’s relation to absent or dead family members through mementos or photographs (the pathetic legacy of a bit of silk and ribbon left Lucy by her dead mother in Broken Blossoms; Susie’s relation to the photograph of her dead mother holding her as a baby in True Heart Susie; Nellie Jarvis’ improvised doll of Jimmy bearing his photo in The Greatest Question). Bessie’s photo album acts not only as a personal token of her dead parents, but also as a marker, she hopes, of social status. It indicates she is not simply the cast-off child of a prostitute, but the result of a legal couple, having both a mother and a father. The album marks not only her connection with her parents, but her knowledge of them; it distinguishes her as the victim of a tragedy, but not necessarily a shameful one. Having an image of her father particularly marks Bessie as first class. Michael Allen mistakenly states (although this may be due to viewing an aberrant print) that we only see the photograph of Bessie’s father, whereas both parents are visible on facing pages in an admittedly rather brief shot as Bessie displays it to the dubious manager of the hotel (Allen, Family Secrets, p. 114). But his claim that the additional feature of this symbolically loaded object (which an intertitle describes as HER INHERITANCE), an embedded music box, has a symbolic relation to Bessie’s mother carries a strong resonance. As Bessie winds it up for the grimacing manager, its simple melody becomes almost audible from the delight that spreads over Bessie’s face. The tinny music becomes contagious, as Griffith cuts successively to the old clerk and a black attendant, both of whom look up and express amusement. Griffith expresses Bessie’s poignancy and emotional simplicity partly through her enthusiastic embrace of inadequate symbols of great emotions. It is important to grasp the levels of Griffith’s play with character here. He recognizes that this silly musical photo album hardly merits being (as another intertitle describes it) Bessie’s “PROUD POSSESSION”, just as later the candy heart she hands to Joseph on their one night of love bearing the clichéd emblem “I love you” hardly displays originality or taste. But that is precisely the point. Bessie does not have taste, sophistication, or anything else – except desire and devotion. It is not Griffith’s simplicity on display here, but that of his character, and Griffith recognizes that the inadequacy of these signs only magnifies the enormity of the emotion they try to encompass, lacking any more adequate means of expression. Thus the amused reaction to the music box in the hotel lobby also carries a recognition of the purity of this young girl. And when Joseph, after abandoning Bessie/Teazie, finds the candy heart she placed in his pocket (saying to him, “THEN YOU CAN THINK OF ME EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE FAR-FAR AWAY”), he can only kiss it and weep. These moments of embarrassed revelation that bring compassionate recognition in their wake typify what is generally termed the “Intimate Griffith”, his attention to the tenderness of his characters, their private desires and intimate longings. In perhaps no other film was Griffith as self-conscious about this aspect of his filmmaking as in The White Rose. The film opens with a series of intertitles of the sort Griffith had used since Intolerance to instruct his audience about the nature of his film and how to view it. The first proclaims the film to be A STORY DIFFERENT IN THAT THE FALLEN MAN SUFFERS AS WELL AS THE WOMAN, – ALSO OF WOMAN’S ENDURING LOVE, THAT NO ERROR, SHAME, NOR SORROW CAN DESTROY. Griffith sacrificed some

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degree of narrative suspense in order to make sure his attitude toward gender responsibility was understood from the beginning, and to announce that he considers Teazie’s love more important than any social shame of her unwed motherhood. This title can be described more or less classically as the film’s “argument” and moral. The second title, following immediately, deals more with style and genre: IT CONCERNS A FEW HUMAN BEINGS – NO MOBS OR MELODRAMATIC ACTION – JUST PEOPLE, SWAYED BY CIRCUMSTANCE AND ENVIRONMENT.

Here Griffith quite self-consciously defines the nature of his intimate films and contrasts them with his previous epic films. As has often been pointed out, many of Griffith’s films include both modes, balancing intimate scenes with epic action, and Griffith here seems to contrast The White Rose specifically with his recent successes Orphans of the Storm and Way Down East. Orphans of the Storm alternated between the intimate stories of the Gish sisters and the “mobs” of the French Revolution, while Way Down East, whose story of seduction and unwed motherhood parallels The White Rose in many ways, not only left the “fallen man” untouched by serious suffering but provided a climax of sensational melodramatic action with Anna’s rescue from the ice floes. With The White Rose Griffith knew he was staging another encounter between the traditional and the new, extended to a new understanding of his own traditional way of telling stories and staging melodrama. It would be misleading to indicate that The White Rose eschews melodrama; the basic situation of the abandoned mother and her suffering constitutes the core of the domestic melodrama, and Griffith most certainly explores melodrama’s heightened degree of moral expressiveness in this film, as well as the expression and recognition of the true signs of virtue, which Peter Brooks in his classic account of melodrama calls “the moral occult” (Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination). But Griffith also labored to redefine melodrama. Throughout his career Griffith redefined the heritage of melodramatic theater through the new medium of cinema; but, to truly understand Griffith’s career, we need to recognize this transformation demanded a constant process of innovation. The excitement of Griffith’s mature films lies partly in the fact that he redefines even his own contribution to cinema, constantly searching for new ways to express human desire, fashioning scenarios of tragedy as well as redemption. What Griffith labors to avoid in The White Rose consists less of the expressive aspects of melodrama than its scenario of Manichean villainy portraying the guilty man as “fallen” and in need of redemption. Likewise, the film avoids the “melodramatic action” of its prototype Way Down East. This contrast can be made very directly, since I believe that Griffith conceived a key scene from The White Rose in explicit parallel and contrast to Way Down East: Teazie’s wandering with her baby in the midst of a tropical storm. The contrast between scenes operates on nearly every level: the drenching nighttime rain of the one contrasted with the winter cold of the other; Gish’s basic passivity on the ice floe (collapsed and nearly unconscious as the ice bears her toward the falls) compared to Teazie endlessly trudging through rain and mud, carrying her child; and, perhaps most importantly, the rescue of Anna by David which joins the romantic couple and resolves the film in Way Down East compared to the unwitting spatial proximity of Joseph and Teazie in The White Rose which effects no rescue and leaves her to contend with the elements alone. In Way Down East Griffith brilliantly followed traditional melodramatic scenography (indeed increased it: he added the ice floe rescue to the original melodrama source) resolving the emotions generated by the revelation of Anna Moore’s betrayal through the physical action of danger and rescue, purging not only Anna’s shame with suffering, but also re-establishing, through David’s action, a heroic image of masculinity to counter Sanderson’s mendacity. The sequence provides a climax that is as dramatically, emotionally and physically satisfying as it may be ideologically dubious. But just as the collapse of seducer and lover into one figure in The White Rose does not permit the simple purging of male guilt thorough 151

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heroic physical action, the rain storm sequence describes a trajectory of suffering and ignorance, refusing to sublimate spiritual redemption through physical heroism. Griffith’s signature device, parallel editing, which he uses to perform so many actions throughout his career, plays key roles in both the ice floe sequence and the tropical storm, but the contrast in the use of this technique reveals Griffith’s very different conception of each sequence. In Way Down East parallel editing works to create suspense, cutting on the knifepoint of the instant between the progress of the ice floe and David’s attempt to reach Anna and save her life. The editing articulates movement through space and the temporal necessity of getting there “in time”. Space and time must be mastered through physical action as a sign of devotion, a scenario of victory against fate that will be rewarded by erotic fulfillment and earthly happiness. The drama is based on an ability to see, often an agonizing one, as we see alternately Anna’s peril, David’s effort and the peril of the rushing river. Although difficult to navigate, the rescue deals with a single complex space, the river uniting victim and hero. The storm sequence in The White Rose, however, sets up a different contrast, and operates with a lack of vision and understanding, a fundamental division in space and the lack of contact between characters. The sequence is preceded by the poignant scene in which Teazie, now a homeless derelict, begs from some men at a train depot an old trunk that previously contained some puppies in order to carry her baby. As Teazie places her child in the trunk, closes it, then kisses and rocks it, Griffith cuts to Joseph in his study reading in his Bible the verse “What invention might carry us away from conscience?”. Joseph’s suffering, while undoubtedly sincere, remains the luxury of a man well fed and sheltered by his family home. Teazie’s “invention” remains simple and direct, and indeed inadequate, like most of her expressions of love, but succeeds nonetheless, in a world of severely limited options, in sheltering her baby. The storm sequence itself begins with Marie, Joseph’s fiancée, pacing about the interior of her family mansion. She crosses (as she did in the scene which introduced her) to the window, an image of a woman looking expectantly for something other than that which life has thus far offered her. Griffith then cuts outside to show the courtyard of her mansion swept by a torrential rain. The next shot shows an exterior view of Marie’s window, the rain pouring down, while light from within gleams through. The next shot, still from the exterior, shows the window straight on, Marie visible within, peering through the dripping windowpane. Griffith avoids giving us Marie’s direct point of view, stressing instead the rain outside and its contrast with the interior light and warmth that surrounds Marie, as she shakes her head and shivers at the storm. We next see Joseph entering the imposing gate to Marie’s estate, holding an umbrella and covered by a raincoat. After a cut back to Marie pacing again (apparently awaiting Joseph) we first see Teazie carrying both the old trunk sheltering her baby and her suitcase, her thin coat and hat soaked by rain as she approaches the same gate. A shot of the grounds within the gate shows Joseph passing in the background, but night, rain and distance prevent any possibility of recognition between the couple, separated since their one night of love. Nearly collapsing under rain, weariness and her burden, Teazie, her back to us (Griffith offers us no close-up view of her face throughout the sequence, maintaining this distant view from behind until the end), staggers in, “dreaming” as the intertitle tells us “THAT PERHAPS IN THIS GREAT HOUSE SHE MAY FIND WORK OR REFUGE”. Continuing the contrast between the warmth and security of the interior and the storm outside, Griffith cuts from Teazie to Marie’s parlor, where a fire now blazes in the hearth, as Marie and Joseph sit together and talk. A title (WHILE ADOWN THE STREET) introduces a third element to this crosscutting, the interior of an African-American church, and Griffith shows the line from the hymn they are singing (“PASS ME NOT, O GENTLE SAVIOR, HEAR MY HUMBLE CRY”). As Teazie enters the courtyard, Griffith intercuts Joseph and Marie as Joseph tells her of the 152

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sin of his past. Melodramatic coincidence operates heavily here, as the true victim of his sin passes so nearby at this very moment without Joseph’s (or Teazie’s) awareness of their nearness. At the very moment that Marie offers Joseph her forgiveness (as if she were the victim!), we see Teazie leaving the front door, having just been refused by a servant the refuge she dreamed of. She turns the corner of the house and is bathed momentarily by the beams of light streaming from the window, a lighting effect looking almost like a divine illumination. In place of rescue, the climax of this sequence comes with a tour de force shot, juxtaposing the opposed elements that the crosscutting has brought together and also kept apart. Staggering, Teazie nearly collapses against the railing beneath the window. Griffith cuts to the straight-on view into the window glimpsed in the opening of the sequence, with Teazie huddled against the railing at the bottom of the frame, a dark figure drenched with rain, silhouetted by the brightly lit window, as we see Joseph and Marie within. Griffith then intercuts the exterior and interior view as Joseph kisses Marie’s hand, presumably in gratitude for her forgiveness. As this kiss takes place, we cut back outside to the previous framing as the nearly unconscious Teazie seems to revive slightly, and for the first time in the sequence we get a good view of her illuminated face as she looks up. She gathers her remaining strength and walks off. In the two layers of composition – Teazie in the foreground, Marie and Joseph framed in the window in the background – no exchange of glances takes place, no awareness of the others’ presence is achieved. Suffering continues directly beneath the tableau of forgiveness. The effect is one of bitter irony and unredeemed suffering even as Joseph believes he has achieved absolution. Rather than a resolving melodramatic action, Griffith’s parallel editing poses contradictions and disparity, on both a gender and class level. Such deeply woven patterns of sin and injustice cannot be resolved through simple physical action. Teazie survives the storm, but barely. Instead of being rescued by her heroic lover, she is taken in by Marie’s black servant, Auntie Easter. That such a refuge was in store for Teazie has been predicted twice in the film, most obviously in the cut to the black church during the storm sequence, and more distantly when Teazie first meets Joseph and sees the crossed knives on the table as an omen (“I SEE A BLACK WOMAN COMING DOWN THE PATH AND DEATH RIGHT BEHIND HER”). But we need to linger over the significance of the African-American characters in this film, especially Auntie Easter as the true mediator and rescuer of this drama. Although Auntie Easter and her fellow churchwomen are clearly sympathetic characters and the cut to the choir in the storm sequence indicates that Griffith sees the black church as practicing the compassion of Jesus that Joseph’s large cathedral lacks, we would be remiss in citing them as exculpatory figures for Griffith’s virulent racism in The Birth of a Nation. The film’s main black characters, Auntie Easter and Joseph’s servant Apollo, are played by white actors in blackface and for the most part maintain the caricatures of blacks inherited from the minstrel show: Auntie the dominant black termagant, Apollo the bow-legged, crap-shooting and basically ineffectual black male. They are both racially grotesque caricatures, mainly played for laughs. All of this granted, nonetheless Griffith gives Auntie Easter and her black community a vital role to play that exceeds comic relief. Even the clichéd “feminism” of the traditional minstrel “wench” role (frequently played by men and asserting female dominance in the family) plays an unusual role in this film of renegotiated gender roles (see Eric Lott, Love and Theft, 1993). Auntie Easter and Apollo play a rather traditional minstrel routine at their “comic” marriage with Easter unwilling initially to repeat the part of her vows that indicate she must “obey” her husband. While derived from traditional (and hardly feminist) minstrel material, in the context of this film this inverted marriage takes on something of a feminist aspect. If the traditional joke blunts her objection to male dominance, Auntie Easter’s reac153

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tion to Teazie’s story seems to me to carry authentic rage against the male order of the world that has so abused the young girl. Recall that this scene, the closest thing to a rescue, comes immediately after Teazie’s pathetic wandering through the storm. Instead of merely expressing sympathy, Auntie Easter clenches her fist and grimaces in anger at what Teazie tells her. She turns and glares at Apollo (apparently as the only representative of masculinity nearby), who turns away under the fury of her gaze, as the black woman ushers Teazie into her home (the first act of kindness shown to Teazie since she was turned out of the hotel by the manager). While Griffith still operates within the clichés of both race and gender, we also see him hitting up against (and therefore marking) their limitations. The respectable white world has shown no compassion for this innocent victim, but outside respectable society, compassion rules people’s behavior. Excluded from rescue, Teazie finds refuge at last with this black woman, but death still seems to loom behind her. The black woman’s cabin provides the place where disparate characters are gathered, the couple reunited and the drama resolved. The final sequence enacts a death scene, dominated at first by the presence of women. Griffith’s editing first contrasts Teazie (as she lies in bed surrounded by black women singing hymns and weeping) with cuts to Marie and her well-dressed friends as she tries on her wedding dress. Through her suffering, Teazie has taken on a nearly religious significance, one clearly defined by the Bible verse Auntie Easter reads to her: “COME UNTO ME, ALL YE THAT LABOUR AND ARE HEAVY LADEN AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST”. Curiously, Auntie Easter claims that Teazie should not die alone (alone? She is surrounded by other women) and sends for Marie (because she is a white woman? Or perhaps, as later dialogue titles explain, because, as a wealthy society woman, she could take care of Teazie’s baby). Flanked by the black woman on the left and the young white woman on the right, Teazie now appears as part of a traditional tableau of womanhood (as Allen nicely puts it in his insightful reading of this scene, “the climactic scene therefore brings together all real, surrogate and potential mothers into the same place”: Family Secrets, p. 118). If here Griffith invokes the traditional patriarchal trinity of womanhood of mother, whore and virgin, his reworking of it is a striking one. The Mother is a black woman whose bulk, strength and maternal figure seems so powerful that masculinity seems almost irrelevant. Far from a figure of moral derision, Teazie embodies a vision of the betrayed woman as martyr rather than temptress and indeed as a young mother who balances Auntie Easter’s powerful maternity with a sense of vulnerability. Finally, if Marie appears as the most traditional feminine figure of virgin bride-to-be, she undergoes the greatest transformation in this scene, a process of revelation and education, a radical interruption of her trajectory toward a traditional marriage (she comes to Teazie directly from trying on her wedding dress). This ritualistic scene revolves first around the issue of motherhood, staging a sort of negative nativity (Teazie’s baby remains in her arms, shown in close-up within a circular iris). But Teazie’s request to Marie involves the erasure of her role as mother (“AUNTIE SAYS YOU’RE RICH – WON’T YOU HAVE MY BABY PUT AWAY WHERE HE’LL NEVER KNOW ABOUT – ABOUT HIS MOTHER”). Immediately after Marie gives this promise, Auntie Easter brings out Teazie’s photo album, but rather than displaying her family images, Teazie simply plays the music box tune. Whereas Teazie once used the album proudly to show off her knowledge of her parents, she now wants her very existence as her child’s mother (and that of his father’s as well – as she tells Joseph soon after this “I NEVER TOLD ANYBODY”) concealed from her son. Teazie represents the mother whose sublime act of sacrifice involves her own erasure. The scene resounds with the cheap mechanical tune that evokes Teazie’s own absent mother. If motherhood forms the center of the scene, that center remains disturbingly hollow. Michael Allen (whose recent book on Griffith’s feature films, Family Secrets, provides one

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of the few insightful analyses of The White Rose) describes the powerful, almost supernatural role the absent mother plays in this film, one aspect of the family drama that Allen traces throughout Griffith’s features. Allen’s thoughtful book traces the complex relation between family roles and the tensions they generate, and their expression through melodramatic scenography. He also emphasizes the role that absent parent members and therefore surrogate mothers (and sometimes fathers) play in these films. But beyond absent parents, I feel the surrogate family demands an even more intensive examination as one of the central themes in American cinema. Much more than a simple prosthesis replacing missing parents, the creation of a surrogate family provides one of American cinema’s strongest utopian images. The theme of the family cobbled together out of outcast individuals who lack (and therefore seek) the love, support and understanding traditionally associated with the family provides the essential model for a new community. This theme, which can be traced through directors such as Chaplin, Borzage, Capra, Vidor, Fuller, Sirk, Ray, and such contemporary directors as Wes Anderson (Rushmore, 1998) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, 1997), forms a cornerstone of American cinema and begins with Griffith. But the created family must grow out of the eradication of the traditional family, even if this is played as a tragedy. All the major characters in The White Rose lack parents, not only Teazie, the only announced orphan, but also Joseph, whose mansion parlor is dominated by the portrait of his dead mother, an image he is shown praying before as he wrestles with his love for Teazie. Although Marie has a father, he is dispensed with in a single shot, never shown with Marie and rendered ineffectual by an intertitle (“MARIE’S FATHER, OF WHOM AN EARLY MISADVENTURE HAS MADE A RECLUSE”). Even John, the deus ex machina suitor provided for Marie after Joseph marries Teazie, is an orphan. But Teazie enacts the theme of the erasure of the traditional family programmatically. Whereas she is introduced attempting to demonstrate her status through her knowledge of and significant ties to her parents (the musical picture album), as we have seen, she ends up hoping her baby will know nothing of her. Knowledge of her own father had been Bessie’s claim to status, but when she is asked about the baby’s father soon after its birth, she responds: “IT’S JUST – JUST MINE”. Thus the significance of Teazie’s being taken in by Auntie Easter and the black church lies not only in the sincere religious charity they practice in contrast to the prestigious, but formally cold, white cathedral, but also in their position on the fringes of society. The surrogate family (which is frequently figured as ethnically diverse) must be formed on society’s margins, where outcasts gather in a new sort of brotherhood, and traditional ties have been broken. Thus Auntie Easter, a marginal comic relief character, takes on the essential role as surrogate mother in this film, most obviously mothering the two forlorn white girls (she is, in fact, Marie’s “Mammy”). Her rather mysterious role in the resolution of the drama becomes visually expressed in an odd but clearly strongly intentional composition that marks the film’s transfer from simply mourning Teazie’s fate to redressing it. As I mentioned earlier, Auntie Easter’s cabin becomes a sort of catch basin into which all of the drama’s main characters drop after missing each other during the climactic storm: first Teazie, then Marie, then Joseph. Joseph’s entrance into this space that has been dominated by femininity and the invocation of motherhood initiates a drama of transformation triggered by his recognition of Teazie and his son, as he kneels before them. The pivoting focus of this drama of metamorphosis passes next to Marie and her transformation from sheltered, lonely rich-man’s daughter to the one who must (even more than Joseph) make a decision. After a close-up of Marie, an intertitle reads, “I UNDERSTAND JOSEPH. THERE IS ONLY ONE THING TO DO –”. But, in the two shots of Marie and Joseph facing each other in profile as Marie transfers his promise of marriage from herself to Teazie, Auntie Easter stands behind them, strongly 155

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lit, staring toward the camera. She seems to channel the transfer of energy from the woman to the man, but under the sign of her dark maternal power and her watchful eyes. She then goes out to get a minister to perform the wedding ceremony (a fascinating duplication which predicts Joseph’s resignation from the ministry in the following scene). Carrier of messages, go-between, Auntie Easter remains on the margin of this great drama, but her presence visually takes the connotation of a blessing and almost supernatural power, the ultimate surrogate mother, the powerful Black Woman who will redress the tragedy. Griffith stages this scene as the enacting of a mystery cult, dedicated to the Great Mother in all her forms. An intertitle precedes the entrance of the minister and the beginning of the marriage ceremony which joins Teazie and Joseph and makes this reading explicit: “A LITTLE, WORN, OUTCAST GIRL LIGHTS THE ROOM, LIKE AN ALTAR LAMP, WITH THE TERRIBLE MYSTERY OF WOMAN’S UNSELFISH LOVE”. This mystery explains the sequence’s (and the film’s) most daring

narrative and symbolic juxtaposition: first, the linking of rituals of marriage and death, then – withheld from this scene but implicit in it – Teazie’s mysterious resurrection. On the apparent threshold of both her death and her marriage, Teazie asks for make-up. Clearly no longer the accoutrement of a Jezebel, the make-up that Marie applies to her reaffirms Teazie’s understanding of the generous and erotic side of modern womanhood, so horribly misunderstood by Joseph. But it also announces the onset of death, since it is death’s pallor she wishes to enliven. It is after looking at herself in the mirror held by Marie that Teazie takes on the glassy far-away stare that causes the acceleration of the ritual, determined to get her married before she dies. The ritual marks Teazie hearing Joseph’s real name for the first time (Joseph Beaugardé) and passing it on to his son (Alexander Beaugardé), and apparently (although this is not explicitly marked) taking it herself. More importantly, she asks Joseph if he really loves her and really wants her to live. The kiss that seems to seal this pledge is followed by Teazie’s collapse and then by a marked tableau of the death scene in long shot: the newlywed couple in the foreground, flanked by two men on the right (the minister and the clerk) looking away from the camera, and on the left, in stark contrast – Marie in white, Auntie Easter in black – both stand staring toward the camera. Even more than the ambiguous collapse of Teazie, this tableau seems to underscore the presence of death. Griffith certainly plays here an overt narrative game of withholding information. We assume Teazie has died and he won’t contradict our assumption. We see scenes that seem to be the consequence of her death: Joseph’s public resignation from the cathedral; his speaking to and picking up of a drunk lying in the street (reversing his earlier scorn for such a figure). But then a series of images move toward rituals of rebirth: the hint that Marie will marry John; the “comic” wedding of Auntie Easter and Apollo; the archetypal Griffithian image of Spring with children cavorting around a blossoming tree, followed significantly by young couples (including John and Marie) with the theme of sexual attraction as part of nature reaffirmed. In the film’s final scene, Griffith stage-manages what can only be described as the resurrection of Teazie through a series of images that take on an allegorical and nearly magical power, uniting the identification of nature, life and sexuality with the more mysterious image of the absent mother. We are issued into the interior of Joseph’s study, a room that, as Allen cannily emphasizes, remains empty during this shot; no character, other than the camera itself, gazes upon it (Allen, op. cit.). We then cut to a mysterious shot of the portrait of Joseph’s dead mother whose strange, obscuring, oblique angle has been repeated throughout the film, original cued early in the film by Joseph’s point of view. As Allen notes (op. cit., p. 115), this “aberrant” presentation of the image endows it with a nearly religious aura, as if “the spectator is literally unable to gaze upon her presence” (although one might point it is not presence which is at issue here, but imagery and representation, an ambivalent attitude toward religious 156

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icons deeply woven into the biblical prohibition against graven images). The oblique angle also relates to Griffith’s staging of most of Joseph’s glances toward Teazie as oblique, particularly in their first encounters at the hotel, when he rarely was willing to look at her face- to-face. After its initial introduction, this oblique view of the portrait reappears after Joseph has returned from his affair with Teazie and entered the ministry. He has just discovered the candy heart Teazie placed in his pocket. Griffith cuts to Teazie leaving the hotel with her child. Cutting back, Joseph stands looking at his mother’s portrait and crosses over to it. We get the same strange oblique angle, its aura heightened by a beam of light that spotlights, yet obscures, the mother’s face. Joseph falls to his knees, then rises up and proclaims: “I LOVE YOU, TEAZIE. WHATEVER YOU WERE, WHATEVER YOU ARE, I LOVE ONLY YOU”. The role of the portrait is somewhat ambiguous here. Is the mother (whose influence, we were told, led Joseph to the ministry) opposed here to Teazie – does she represent the commitment against which his desire for Teazie struggles (“I love only you”)? Or does she, like Teazie, represent the lost object of love, the emblem of Joseph’s desire that his ministerial calling seems to block him from pursuing? Are Teazie and the mother’s portrait opponents in the struggle for Joseph’s soul, or complements, a sign that should lead him to true salvation? The beauty of this ambiguity of symbols lies in mirroring Joseph’s own spiritual conflict, and its meaning can only be resolved by the logic of images that come at the end of the film. Thus, as the introduction to the film’s conclusion, the oblique portrait remains an enigma in need of interpretation. Does its presence in the empty room mark Joseph’s failure, his renouncing the calling that his mother drew him toward? Griffith, embracing the overt allegorical mode, glosses the meaning at last with another emblem, bearing its own legend in an intertitle. We see a bush of white roses tended by two gardeners, reintroducing the theme of nature. It also recalls that Teazie is indeed the film’s eponymous “white rose” and that a white rose was the gift given by Joseph in exchange for Teazie’s candy heart – a gift that, while more culturally sanctioned, Griffith showed withering and fading. The explicit intertitle intertwines the cycle of nature with that of nurturing love and resurrection: “PLANTS, LIKE PEOPLE DIE UNLESS THEY HAVE ATTENTION. THE BOSS GAVE THIS ROSE A LOT OF CARE, NOW IT’S LIVING AGAIN”.

Returning to the gardeners, the shot fades. The next shot fades in on a courtyard with a baby perambulator in mid-ground and a wooden gate in the background. The gate slowly opens, drawing our attention (and recalling the gates that mark significant transitions throughout the film: the gate of the orphanage as we first see Teazie; the gate to Marie’s estate where Teazie enters in the rain; the gate at the resort hotel from which both Teazie and Joseph exit with a thoughtful pause; the gate to Auntie Easter’s cabin as she ushers in the sick girl). Griffith cuts in to a closer view as the gate opens, and we glimpse Joseph pushing it. He pauses slightly, then, a bit like a magician revealing his best trick, opens it wide and reveals Teazie dressed in white against a background of blossoms. They step forward into the courtyard and another allegorical title glosses this revelation: THEY HAVE RISEN – SORROW’S CROSS – THE STEPPING STONE. As they seat themselves on a bench next to the perambulator, Griffith cuts again to the oblique portrait of the mother, followed by the intertitle: OUR MOTHER – WE ARE JUST BEGINNING IN EARNEST. As the couple embrace next to the baby carriage, Griffith ends the film with another overt title: THE EARTHLY TRINITY NEAREST THE DIVINE – FATHER, SON AND THE ETERNAL MYSTERY. This is followed by an emblematic close-up of three white roses, as light streams behind them. This allegorical ending certainly works as a narrative resolution, revealing the withheld information that Teazie did not die after the marriage ceremony and that what seemed to be a tragic ending has been, in fact, revealed to be a happy one. But, rather than narrative suspense or surprise, Griffith pitches the work of resolution onto the allegorical level of symbolic but also enigmatic imagery. The dominant of the scene is precisely the “eternal 157

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Mystery”, which can only be read as the power of femininity, embodied in the enigmatic image of the mother, the force of nature and the literal embodiment of these energies in Teazie and the family formed around her: the earthy trinity of father, son and mother. There is no question now that the image of Joseph’s mother has been fused with Teazie, that the regime of patriarchal harsh judgment has been overcome through the tenderness of the mother. I agree with Allen that the repeated images of the portrait of the dead mother “have textual work to perform” (op cit., p. 120). Although it may not be, as Allen claims, “the only satisfactory explanation”, his reading of the film’s finale as “a demonstration of the power of the Great Mother to rescue Her ‘daughter’ from death” seems to me a strong reading of the succession of allegorical images and titles. A strong religious strand runs through The White Rose, from the clerk’s gift of a crucifix to Teazie as she leaves to the hotel with her child, through the religious imagery associated with the black church, to these final images, mostly in contrast to the official religion of Joseph and his ministry. While bits of religious advice given about God the Father and his son seem earnest, they also seem oddly passive (as with Auntie Easter’s claim that the Good Lord “NEVER TALKS ABOUT NOBODY”). But I think Allen overstates the case in claiming that in Griffith’s work “religion is portrayed as ineffectual, hypocritical and superficial” without following up his own insight about the substitution in one of these final heavily significant intertitles of “Our Mother” for the traditional “Our Father”. Just as Griffith wished to re-conceive the structure of the family and the relations between genders in a utopian configuration, a reconception of Christianity would play a central role in this new visionary and modern world. The finale of The White Rose argues for the feminization of Christianity in which the “eternal mystery” of motherhood explicitly takes on a central role in the Trinity, literally binding father and son through the mystery of sexuality and birth. (Recall that in Griffith’s utopian conception of Babylon in Intolerance, the introduction of the new Mother Goddess Ishtar as supreme deity sparked the betrayal of Belshazzar by the High Priest of the masculine warrior god Bel.) Griffith maintained in the early 1920s a vision of the utopian possibilities of society, religion and the cinema, all of which he saw as capable of immense, even millennial, transformations. In this, he voices the progressive and even radical ideals of the first generation to shape the twentieth century – ideals that in many ways were shattered by the technological carnage of World War I on the one hand, and by the post-war growth of a consumer culture on the other. Griffith continued to believe in his ideals that are less those of a Victorian sensibility than of a utopian and millennial modernism, proclaiming new roles for sexuality and new freedom for women, but very much under the sign of a new spirituality. In many ways, especially politically and socially, the 1920s can be seen as a period or reaction and polarization as the political activism and idealism of such figures as Vachel Lindsay or Lewis Hines fell out of favor with established institutions and appeared increasingly irrelevant to progressive forces after the Russian Revolution. The White Rose should not be seen as the old-fashioned Victorian melodrama of an increasingly out-of-step director about to surrender his independence as a filmmaker, but as a glimpse of a forgotten future, a utopian vision that few could sustain. Wonderful conversations with Ismail Xavier years ago about the role of allegory in this film, as well as most recent discussions with Chris Simmons about American silent cinema, progressivism and religion helped spark some ideas included here, although neither Chris nor Xavier are to be blamed for their development. Tom Gunning

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608 G & H PICTURES CORP.

HIS DARKER SELF Working titles: Be Yourself; Black and White Filming date: August–September 1923 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York; Los Angeles (one shot) Presented by: Albert L. Grey Producer: Albert L. Grey Distribution: W.W. Hodkinson Corp. Release date: 16 March 1924 Release length: five reels; two reels (1925 reissue) Copyright date: 16 March 1924; reissue: 13 December 1924 (LP20906) Director: John W. [Jack] Noble Story: Arthur Caesar Adaptation: “Mammy’s Boy”, the story by Arthur Caesar Camera: not known Film editor: Ralph Spence Film editor (1925 reissue): Jack White Titles: Ralph Spence Cast: Lloyd Hamilton (Claude Sappington); Tom Wilson (Bill Jackson); Tom O’Malley (Uncle Eph); Lucille La Verne (Aunt Lucy); Irma Harrison (Darktown’s Cleopatra); Edna May Sperl (Bill Jackson’s sweetheart); Sally Long (Claude’s sweetheart); Kate Bruce (Claude’s mother); Warren Cook (The Governor) Archival sources: Academy Film Archive, 16mm acetate negative; 16mm acetate fine grain master (638 ft.), plus two 16mm rolls of main titles and intertitles (generation undetermined); George Eastman House, 16mm acetate positive, (William K. Everson Collection/New York University), abridged version, 567 ft.; National Film and Television Archive (London), 35mm nitrate positive (#2,022,589A, 1,469 ft.); 35mm nitrate positive (#2,022,615 A, length undetermined); both prints are deteriorating (a 35mm acetate negative, # 71,032 A, was struck in 1953 from #2,022,589A ) Uncle Eph, an old negro working for the Sappingtons, nightly hauls contraband liquor to the dance-hall of Bill Jackson, head of the land agents of a rum-running fleet. Uncle Eph is under the impression that he is carting bananas. When the revenuers get after the old man, Bill Jackson’s wrath is aroused. He knocks out Uncle Eph and in a fight, stabs another man. Jackson puts the knife in the hand of the unconscious Uncle Eph who is arrested. Claude Sappington, writer of poetry and detective tales, is in love with the governor’s daughter. The governor, however, frowns on his suit. When Claude hears that his old servant and friend, Uncle Eph, is to be tried for murder, he blackens up and goes down to Jackson’s dancehall to save him by discovering the real murderer. Jackson gives Claude a job as bus-boy and suggests that he be the target of a knife-throwing contest. Claude doesn’t like the idea, so he bolts. He blunders into a baptismal ceremony, during which his burnt cork is washed away. Undaunted, he blackens up and tries again. In Jackson’s hotel, he wanders into the room of Darktown’s Cleopatra and hides under the bed when Bill Jackson comes. Jackson is trailed by his jealous sweetheart, who, in a fit of anger, accuses him of the murder which she witnessed. A merry fight ensues between the two girls and Jackson and Claude.

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At this time the revenuers arrive and raid the place. Jackson escapes in a motor boat. Claude and the revenuers follow and capture him. Claude brings him to the governor to confess. Uncle Eph[,] who has been convicted, is saved just as he is about to be hanged. The governor gives his consent to the match between Claude and his daughter. Press sheet from Copyright Material deposited at the Library of Congress, December 13, 1924, LP 20906

Claude Sappington, a writer of detective fiction, becomes a detective himself to clear the name of an old African-American family servant accused of murder. Learning that the servant has been the unwitting accomplice of a bootlegging ring, Claude dons blackface and goes “undercover” at the Black Cat Cafe to conduct his investigation. After numerous misadventures, he clears the servant’s name and saves him from hanging. (Note: This synopsis describes the five-reel version.)

One of the odder episodes in Griffith’s career revolved around production of the film that eventually became His Darker Self. The original idea behind this venture was for Griffith to direct Al Jolson in what would have been the latter’s film debut. The projected film, built around Jolson’s predilection for blackface comedy, was to be produced under the working title Black and White. Negotiations were conducted, and apparently finalized, in the early summer of 1923. Then, a scant week before production was to begin, Jolson abruptly boarded an ocean liner and sailed for Europe. The common explanation – although the star himself denied it – was that the monumentally egotistical Jolson, seeing himself on film for the first time in his screen tests, was appalled at his own appearance and fled from the camera. Whatever the cause, the immediate reality in June 1923 was that Griffith and his company were stuck with a considerable investment and no star. As a solution to this dilemma, the production was taken over by Griffith’s brother, Albert L. Grey, and completed with Lloyd Hamilton as the star. Although he is largely forgotten today, Hamilton was a very popular comedian in the 1910s and early 1920s, and by 1923 he was a star of long standing in the two-reel comedies of E.W. Hammons’ Educational Pictures. Grey and Hammons negotiated at length and ultimately formed a company, G & H Pictures, for the sole purpose of producing and distributing a single film that would serve as Hamilton’s introduction into features. (One of the questions at issue was whether Griffith’s name would still appear on the finished film; in the end, it didn’t.) The resulting film, directed by Jack Noble and with titles by the legendary Ralph Spence, opened in March 1924 as His Darker Self. The story, as adapted for Hamilton’s talents, concerned a writer of detective stories who went “undercover” in blackface to clear an old family servant accused of murder. Critical reaction to His Darker Self ranged from mildly enthusiastic to lukewarm. With no visible ties to Griffith, the film was reviewed simply as a Lloyd Hamilton picture and, secondarily, as a blackface comedy. (Although blackface makeup was commonplace in the show business world of the 1920s, some reviews of this film suggest that the idea of building a feature film around it was regarded as a novelty.) Whatever the critical reaction to His Darker Self, it suffered a dismal fate at the box office. Grey’s next move was to turn the five-reel feature over to Jack White, Hamilton’s regular director at Educational, to cut it down to two reels and reissue it as one of Hamilton’s standard short comedies in an effort to recoup some of the original investment. This two-reel version was released in 1925, and is apparently all that survives today of His Darker Self. In an effort to streamline the original story, the motivating subplot (involving the servant’s unwit160

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ting complicity in a bootlegging ring and the false accusation of murder) was dropped, and Hamilton, instead of a writer who aspired to be a detective, was represented as simply taking a correspondence-school course in detection. Other cut scenes included a climactic motorboat chase and some miscellaneous bits of comedy business, unrelated to the plot. The finished product, at the end of that convoluted production history, was a film of considerably less interest than the story behind it. One would be hard-pressed to find any hint of Griffith in it. The title list from the feature-length version suggests that the servant’s sentence – “to be hanged by the neck until dead” – might have offered a very weak echo of Intolerance, but the murder trial is missing altogether from the two-reel version. Today, if anything about His Darker Self hints of Griffith, it’s the cast: Kate Bruce as Hamilton’s mother, Tom Wilson in blackface (a specialty he had essayed for Griffith, in The Birth of a Nation, and also for other producers) as the Black Cat’s proprietor, and – missing, perhaps mercifully, from the two-reel version – Lucille La Verne in blackface as “Darktown’s Cleopatra”. Whatever promise this film might have held at the beginning of its journey, it fizzled out along the way. And yet, as Russell Merritt has pointed out to me, the story of His Darker Self ends with an ironic coda. Griffith’s breach-of-contract lawsuit against Jolson, delayed for years, finally came to trial in September 1926. On the stand, Jolson reversed himself and admitted that he had been dismayed with his earliest screen tests, that the movies made him look “like a zebra”. The trial ended (unhappily for Griffith) and was followed in October by a second trial, of a parallel suit brought by writer Anthony Paul Kelly, during which Jolson repeated the same remark. But a few days before the Kelly trial started, a new Vitaphone program opened at the Colony Theatre in New York. On the bill was a Vitaphone short, A Plantation Act, produced only a few weeks earlier and starring Al Jolson – in blackface. J.B. Kaufman

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609 D.W. GRIFFITH, INC.

AMERICA Alternate titles: America – Series 1: “The Sacrifice [of Freedom]”; Love and Sacrifice (U.K. release title) Filming date: August–December 1923 Location: Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York; Exteriors: Somers, New York (battle scenes), and historic sites (see text below) Presented by: D.W.Griffith Producer: D.W. Griffith Distribution: United Artists New York premiere: 21 February 1924, 44th Street Theatre Release date: 15 August 1924 Length: fifteen reels, 14,700 feet (New York premiere); copyrighted as fourteen reels (13,000 ft.); later cut to thirteen reels (12,600 feet), twelve reels?, and then to eleven reels (11,000 feet) Copyright date: 1 May 1924 (LP20288); copyright material submitted is stamped with date 9 June 1924 Director: D.W. Griffith Scenario: John L. E. Pell Story: Robert W. Chambers Camera: G.W. Bitzer, Marcel Le Picard, Hendrik Sartov, Hal S. Sintzenich Assistant director: Herbert Sutch Art director: Charles M. Kirk Artistic [set] designer: Warren A. Newcombe Construction director: William J. Bantel Film editors: Rose Smith, James Smith Music arranged and synchronized by: Joseph Carl Breil, Adolph Fink Titles: Robert W. Chambers Special effects: Edward Scholl Scenic artist: Charles E. Boss (according to Wagenknecht and Slide, The Films of D.W. Griffith, p. 195) Stills photographer: Frank J. Diem (according to Wagenknecht and Slide, The Films of D.W. Griffith, p. 195) Cast: Neil Hamilton (Nathan Holden); Erville Anderson (Justice Montague); Carol Dempster (Miss Nancy Montague); Charles Emmett Mack (Charles Philip Edward Montague); Lee Beggs (Samuel Adams); John Dunton (John Hancock); Arthur Donaldson (King George III); Charles Bennett (William Pitt); Dowling Clark (Lord Chamberlain); Frank McGlynn, Jr. (Patrick Henry); Frank Walsh (Thomas Jefferson); Lionel Barrymore (Capt. Walter Butler); Arthur Dewey (George Washington); Sydney Deane (Sir Ashley Montague); W.W. Jones (General Gage); Harry O’Neill (Paul Revere); Henry Van Bousen (John Parker, Captain of Minute Men); Hugh Baird (Major Pitcairn); James Milaidy (Jonas Parker); Louis Wolheim (Captain Hare); Riley Hatch (Chief of Mohawks, Joseph Brant); Emil Hoch (Lord North); Lucille La Verne (A Refugee Mother); P.R. Scammon (Richard Henry Lee); Ed Roseman (Captain Montour); Harry Semels (Hikatoo, Chief of Senecas); H. Koser (Colonel Prescott); Michael Donovan (Major General Warren); H. Paul Doucet (Marquis de Lafayette); W. Rising

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(Edmund Burke); Daniel Carney (Personal servant of Miss Montague); E. Scanlon (Household servant at Ashley Court); Edwin Holland (Major Strong); Milton Noble (An Old Patriot) Archival sources: Academy Film Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined); Cineteca Nazionale (Rome), 35mm acetate positive, English intertitles (received from Det Danske Filmmuseum in 1968, generation undetermined); Det Danske Filmmuseum, 35mm acetate negative, English intertitles (printed 1955 in Denmark, generation undetermined); 16mm acetate positive, English intertitles (received from George Eastman House 16 September 1954); George Eastman House, 35mm acetate positive (outtakes/excerpts); 16mm acetate positive (incomplete; generation undetermined); Library of Congress, 16mm acetate positive (1969 reissue); 16mm acetate positive (Killiam reissue), tinted; The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm acetate fine grain master (printed 1956 from 35mm acetate negative [10,674 ft., no longer extant] struck from a 35mm nitrate positive received from D.W. Griffith in 1938 and destroyed in 1975); National Film and Television Archive (London), 35mm acetate fine grain master. MUSIC – University of Minnesota (Arthur Kleiner Collection, Austrian Institute), original score (unspecified parts); Library of Congress (The Museum of Modern Art Collection), orchestral parts (1,1,2,1; 2,2,1; drums, strings); microfilm edition: Music 3236, Item 1 Nancy Montague, daughter of a Tory justice, sees her father wounded by a militiaman at Concord and her brother, Charles, who has fought with the Continentals, brought home dead. Nathan Holden, a dispatch rider before the war and an officer in the American Army afterward, is in love with Nancy. Captain Butler, with the consent of the British commander, brings into the war as allies the Indians of the Six Nations, and leaves the red men ravaging the country. He is a suitor for the hand of Nancy, but she is a witness of his barbarity and very nearly a victim of his drunken lust, being saved by the insistence of the Indians on starting the pillage. Holden spies on Butler, learns his plans and rides to warn the countryside and summons the soldiers. At the battle of Fort Sacrifice the colonists are saved by the arrival of the soldiers and Nathan and Nancy are united. George Blaisdell, Exhibitor’s Trade Review, March 8, 1924, p. 23

The history of the American Revolution of 1776 is related through its major events interwoven with the romance of Nathan Holden of the Boston Minutemen and Nancy Montague of the Virginia Tories. The first half sketches the background of the Revolution from Virginia to New England, while the second concentrates on the Mohawk Valley campaign.

The original version of America was copyrighted and released in fourteen reels, two reels longer than The Birth of a Nation or Orphans of the Storm. The existing version is much shorter: it is the one made for distribution in Britain, with a new title, Love and Sacrifice. The bitter wartime enmity of 150 years earlier, already neutralized in the original version, has been further softened for this version, primarily through title changes. The revised intertitles stress the evil Captain Walter Butler’s American birth and the hatred that the British had for this renegade who betrayed both his king and the newborn republic. In this version, the Revolution is characterized as a civil war, Englishman against Englishman, brother against brother. Even in the original version Griffith’s Anglophilia – strengthened by his warm reception in England in the spring of 1917 for the opening of Intolerance, the discussion with the British for the war propaganda film that became Hearts of the World, and the filming of episodes for The Great Love (filmed with the aid of English high society in the summer of 1917) – guaranteed an effort to 163

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be inoffensive to British sensibilities. He could hardly have been unaware of the fate of Robert Goldstein, the costumer who spent his earnings from his Birth of a Nation investment to produce a film called The Spirit of ’76 (Frank Montgomery, 1917) on the eve of America’s entrance into the World War and consequently spent several years in jail for making a film unfriendly to our allies. The making of America justifies the use of the word superproduction. Here was a subject big enough for the man who made The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance and Orphans of the Storm. Historical societies, historians, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the U.S. Army freely cooperated and gave advice. After all, here was America’s most respected director undertaking an extremely important subject, the country’s heritage. A total of four cameramen are credited. Unlike the making of The Birth of a Nation, the full glare of publicity lit every step of the production. Where it was possible, historical events were filmed in the original settings. The main sequences are: Lexington, Massachusetts, where the Nathan Holden-Nancy Montague romance is established; Williamsburg, Virginia, where the aristocratic Montague family entertains George Washington; the English Parliament, where taxation of the colonies is discussed; Boston, where the forced taxation without representation enrages the populace; the Virginia legislature, where Holden arrives as messenger from Boston; Northern New York, where the Virginia Montague’s brother lives on a rich estate, and Captain Butler rouses the Indians and plots to establish a new empire; Boston, where Butler confers with General Gage; 18 April 1775, Hancock and Adams flee to Lexington, where the Minutemen can protect them; Paul Revere’s ride and the stand at Concord Bridge; the Battle of Bunker Hill; the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; the signing of the Declaration of Independence; in the North, Tories and Indians join together under Butler’s command; Fort Esperance in the Mohawk Valley; the Cherry Valley massacres; Butler visits Ashley Court; Butler reveals his true purposes for an empire to his closest followers; winter at Valley Forge; Ashley Court, Nathan sent to fight with Morgan’s men, reunites with Nancy; Nathan rides to warn the settlers about Butler’s approach and again meets Nancy and her father when the troops arrive to rescue the refugees at the besieged fort where they have taken refuge; and the surrender of Cornwallis to Washington. America was thought of as the ideal vehicle for teaching American school children about their heritage. Whether it was much used for that purpose and its effectiveness with children might be interesting to study. Whatever the textbook character of the recreated historic scenes, they surely would at least have roused more excitement in the classroom than the usual dry history lesson. America was in distribution for years and was reissued. With the addition of the sale of stock footage, America eventually earned back its cost, but it was an expensive production and it was never very profitable. Educational films, however much requested by those who sought to elevate the medium and the industry, were never the most popular with the large public, and less than ever in the midst of the Jazz Age when this film was released. Griffith had won his independence to make films his own way, his prestige gave him everything he asked for, yet this time he came up wanting. The result, like the production process, was ponderous. Griffith’s great skill at personalizing history with the stories of individuals was not effective this time. The romance across the political lines, the rebel Nathan Holden and the royalist Nancy Montague, tended to be stultifying, perhaps because Neil Hamilton and Carol Dempster in these roles lacked the necessary electric presence. After a time, it begins to seem too much coincidence that Nathan and/or Nancy happen to witness so many of the key historic events of the Revolution. Nathan is sent here and there on official business and turns up over and again at significant moments. Carol Dempster, with her sharp profile, and especially in her ostrich-feather hat, is bird-like, as her head turns this way and that, watching all the events with a lively interest, while Hamilton 164

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seems emotionless as he sacrifices his love out of loyalty to the larger cause, and protection for the woman he loves to save the population at large. This is not Casablanca (1942). The flat performances could be as much in Griffith’s direction as in Hamilton’s reserve, perhaps even a symptom of the director’s infatuation with Carol Dempster. She gets the most closeups, always a measure of star power. But she is not one of Griffith’s strong females. Nancy Montague is quite ready to give up her royalist beliefs for the man she loves. The best performance of the film is Lionel Barrymore as the villainous Captain Butler, who betrays everyone in grand style and terrifies Dempster with his lustful actions. In his character, America left history behind: instead of the colonists rebelling against British control, they seem to be battling with an individual evil man who was betraying both Britain and the rebel cause to realize his own ambition to establish an empire. Griffith received some criticism from the historians for that. Griffith was more successful with the handling of such episodes as the ride of Paul Revere, which contains the first surge of excitement, but only occurs after we are a third of the way into the film, and the spectacular recreation of the historic battles of Lexington and Concord. The rescue sequences in the northern campaign further added to suspense toward the end. Army troops in large numbers were at Griffith’s disposal for deployment over original battlefields, and historic buildings and artifacts were made available. The camera placements, editing and rhythmic pace of these battle scenes are at Griffith’s usual high standard. They carry the powerful emotional charge of a people struggling for liberty against tyranny. But over all, America is unlikely to be considered as one of Griffith’s greatest films. Eileen Bowser

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610 D.W. GRIFFITH, INC.

ISN’T LIFE WONDERFUL Working title: The Dawn Filming date: July–August 1924 (in Germany); October–early November 1924 (in Mamaroneck) Location: in and around Berlin, Germany; Griffith studio, Mamaroneck, New York Producer: D.W. Griffith Production manager: Albert L. Grey Distribution: United Artists Westport, Connecticut preview: week before 22 November 1924 New York first screening: 28 November 1924, Town Hall New York public premiere: 30 November 1924, Rivoli Theatre Release date: 1 December 1924 Release length: fourteen reels (preview version); nine reels, 8,600 feet Copyright date: 1 February 1925 (LP21265) Director: D.W. Griffith Scenario: D.W. Griffith Source: “Isn’t Life Wonderful!”, the short story by Major Geoffrey Moss in Defeat (1924) Photographers: Hendrik Sartov, Hal Sintzenich Music compiled and synchronized by: Caesare Sudero [Cesare Sodero], Louis Silvers Cast: Carol Dempster (Inga); Neil Hamilton (Paul); Erville Alderson (The professor); Helen Lowell (The grandmother); Marcia Harris (The aunt); Frank Puglia (Theodor); Lupino Lane (Rudolph); Hans von Schlettow (Leader of laborers); Paul Rehkopf, Robert Scholz (Laborers); Walter Plimmer, Jr. (The American) Archival sources: FILM – Filmoteka Narodowa (Warszawa), 35mm acetate positive (English intertitles, generation undetermined; received from Cinémathèque française in 1959); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm acetate negative (printed from 35mm acetate positive, no longer extant); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined). MUSIC – University of Minnesota (Arthur Kleiner Collection, Austrian Institute), original score (unspecified parts); Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF), Brussels, original score (unspecified parts), 113 pages (two copies); Library of Congress (The Museum of Modern Art Collection), piano conductor and orchestral parts (1,1,2,1; 2,2,1,0; drums; strings), 113 pages (published by Robbins-Engel, Inc., New York, n.d.); microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Item 43 War has passed, leaving a long stream of refugees flooding from Poland into Germany, in search of food and shelter. Inga, a little orphan girl[,] is among the weary ones who march into Berlin, a long line of lame, halt, and blind, seeking rest, a place to sleep, a crust to eat. She comes with the family of an eccentric old professor. This family consists of Inga, the professor, the old grandmother, the professor’s spinster sister, and his son Theodor. His other son[,] Paul, is still at the battlefront. Inga and her companions take their place in the crowd of homeless ones who seek shelter. They eat their humble fare of a single potato, each one hopeful that on the morrow rooms will be found for them. Despite the hardships which they have endured, they can find a smile when a strolling player among the refugees cuts an antic.

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They are assigned to rooms, two rooms. One for the women and one for the men. By law each must be occupied by so many persons. The family of the professor has just the requisite number. They move into their new home. The professor takes a job correcting examination papers; Theodor secures work as a waiter in a night club; the old grandmother dreams of the old home they will never see again. And Inga [of] the day that Paul will return. A letter comes. It is from Paul. He is coming home. The boy reaches home shortly after the letter and greets Inga, his boyhood sweetheart[,] and his family. Inga and Paul set forth to find work, that they may do their share towards supporting the household. Inga gets work in a shop; Paul in a shipyard. The hard work is more of a strain than Paul can stand in his weak condition, after exposure at the front. He becomes ill. The entire family give [sic] all their energy to nursing him back to he[alth.] Inga grieves until she, too, is almost ill. She stints herself for […] dividing her meager meal of potatoes with the invalid that he may […] strength. But during his illness Paul realizes how deeply he and [Inga] love each other. Convalescing, he and Inga discuss marriage. Meantime however the value of the German mark has fallen […] and […] through the land. It is impossible for the family to get food. Often they are reduced to a diet of [turnips] for days at a time. The old grandmother fails steadily on this unwholesome food. Paul and Inga tell the family of their [desire] to marry. But they are laughed to scorn. They have no money, they are told. They can get no place to live, for the law will not permit a bride and groom to occupy quarters alone. They cannot save, for the mark falls so steadily that what they save one day is worthless paper the next. Secretly Paul secures an allotment of land to grow potatoes, and tends his garden plot after working hours. Inga gets work in a second hand shop, mending chairs, in order to save for her dowry. Good luck comes. A neighbor leaves a hen in Inga’s care. The hen taken daily by Inga to the common pasturing ground, provided by the government, lays eggs with which the strength of the old grandmother [is] nursed back to normal. The potatoes flourish. Paul takes Inga into his secret, and shows her his garden. He also found time to construct a cottage, with her name inscribed above the door. It is a humble little shelter, but the sight of it throws Inga into ecstasy. For it means they can marry after all. To complete their happiness, brother Theodor is given a roll of liverwurst by some American visitors to the night club. Paul brings home a bag filled with potatoes; Theodor produces the precious liverwurst – the first meat the family have [sic] seen in weeks. Inga prepares the feast, to which even the hens have generously contributed a few eggs. The professor, his old mother, and his sister, sit down gloomily expecting the usual fare of turnips. Paul produces a huge plate of boiled potatoes; Theodor the liverwurst; Inga the eggs. Joy radiates from every face. They cheer; they shout; they […] ravenously. For the first time in months they have not only food enough but food to spare. Inga summons the neighbors. They troop in […] partake of the feast. The whole house rings with joyous excitement. The strolling player has brought his accordion. They hold an impromptu dance, in which the entire family and all the neighbors take part. Paul and Inga divulge the big secret of the evening. They have a home prepared for themselves. Paul has grown a potato crop. They can get married at last. The old grandmother, who from the first has outwardly opposed the marriage, divulges a secret, too. She has made over her wedding gown for Inga. The girl tries it on. Now surely the wedding will take place.

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But in other homes there is no joy. Hungry workingmen walk the streets searching in vain for work. Their wives frequent garbage cans [in] search of crusts for food. Feeling against profiteers who control the food market, and against the rich employers[,] runs high. Fifty murders are committed each day; hold-ups by workers seeking food are of hourly occurrence. Paul and Inga take a wagon to harvest their potato crop. This will supply food for the family, and make their marriage possible. In the forest they are stopped by a group of laborers determined to seize food from smugglers who profiteer it. Their cart is searched and found empty. They go on their way. They reap their crop, and start back to their home by a different road. Again they are stopped by hungry men out of work. Accused of being a profiteer Paul shows his workingman’s card from the shipyard. Inga explains that they are depending on the potatoes to get married. The men are on the point of letting them go. But hunger is stronger than sympathy or pity. The men knock the young couple down, and steal the potatoes. Inga and Paul return to consciousness. Inga creeps to the wagon. It is empty. Hans [sic] is disconsolate. How can they marry now? Where is the happy home they have nurtured all these weary months? But Inga cheers him. They still have each other, she points out, and no matter what happens, that alone makes life wonderful. Advertising sheet synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, February 1, 1925, LP21265 [stamped with date March 23, 1925]

In the wake of the First World War, a family of Polish refugees makes their home in a village on the outskirts of Berlin. Each of them finds work to support the family as best they can. Paul, the older son in love with an adopted orphan named Inga, returns from the war suffering from poison gas. Near death, he recovers to work in a shipyard, dreaming of someday earning enough money to marry. Economic conditions deteriorate under Germany’s ruinous inflation, but Paul is assigned a plot of ground where he can grow vegetables and build a small house out of ammunition boxes. Slowly, conditions improve. Paul and Inga harvest their first crop of potatoes, and other family members contribute to make the wedding a possibility. Catastrophe strikes when the couple harvest the vital crop upon which their marriage and the family’s winter crop depends. A gang of roving marauders fall on Paul and Inga’s potato wagon and, using the excuse that the couple are war profiteers, steal their entire food supply. Some time later, however, after their house is built and a new potato crop harvested, the couple marries and the family rejoices.

This modest film was an extraordinary one-of-a-kind for the 1920s, in some ways a throwback to Griffith’s Biograph one-reelers, in others a forerunner of the semi-documentaries made after the Second World War. One of Griffith’s least popular 1920s films, its rediscovery came in the mid-1940s when directors like Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini paid tribute to it, and it became discussed as something of a model for neo-realism. Symptomatic of the critical shift, when Iris Barry wrote up Griffith’s film in 1926 for her book Let’s Go to the Movies, she described it as “not merely bad, but boring” (p. 223). Fifteen years later in her Griffith monograph, she referred to the same film as “a little masterpiece ... a sensitive and often touching pro-German picture which most forcibly conjures up the tragedy of defeat and hunger” (Barry, D.W. Griffith: American Film Master, p. 31). Documentary filmmaker John Grierson, writing in 1946, linked its box-office failure to the precocious style of its social exposé: “realism ... can have its way if it is as rough-shod as the Covered Wagon, as sentimental for the status quo as Cavalcade, as heroic in the face of hunger as Nanook. But heaven 168

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help it, if, as once happened in Isn’t Life Wonderful the hunger is not of Eskimos but of ourselves” (Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, p. 171). The original impulse behind Isn’t Life Wonderful was that of an angry exposé. As he sometimes did at Biograph, Griffith started from newspaper headlines, in this case frontpage stories chronicling the horrific consequences of the recent French occupation of the Ruhr. Today, that military action is little more than a footnote in modern German history, usually remembered – if it is remembered at all – as one of those events that facilitated Hitler’s rise to power. At the time, however, the French occupation was recognized as a critical turning point in 1920s European affairs, the event that effectively ended Allied unity and led many, including Griffith, to perceive Germany as a victim of a punitive peace. At issue was French premier Poincaré’s decision to force Germany to pay its war debts by taking over its industrial heartland and redirecting the region’s coal, steel, and iron to France. To cut these resources off from Germany, as the French military proceeded to do, was to bring the economic life of the whole country to a standstill and the government to the point of disintegration. What American newspapers showed was a country in a state of undeclared war. Headlines told of strikes, acts of sabotage, food riots, mass deportations, and economic blockades. Such reports, together with a twenty-six-page Weimar government pamphlet documenting FrancoBelgian atrocities in the Ruhr, were methodically stored in Griffith’s studio files. For the son of a Confederate soldier, tales about occupying armies and victimized workers had obvious echoes. Reports of mass deportations and workers cut down by military troops were no less resonant for the man who had staged similar scenes at Biograph and in Intolerance (1916). The catalyst came in the form of a recently published book dramatizing conditions in Germany, a collection of six short stories written by Geoffrey Moss called Defeat. Moss, a British military officer in the Grenadier Guards, had left the service and turned to fiction writing in order to denounce what he considered the injustices of Allied post-war policy. He had already published one bestseller a year earlier, a novel called Sweet Pepper about a female British attaché’s life in Budapest during the Allies’ dissection of the Habsburg Empire in 1920. Now Moss turned his attention to Germany. Each of the six tales in Defeat was meant to illustrate a different aspect of Germany’s suffering under the French occupation. As he had with Sweet Pepper, Moss hammers away at the cruel spectacle of an historic civilized country carved up and put at the mercy of foreign rabble. In Sweet Pepper, what hits Moss’ nerve is the unworthiness of those who have been permitted to annex Hungary’s lands. The stories in Defeat transfer the same struggle to occupied Germany, where the battles are made more poignant by the prior collapse of what he calls “the old faiths”. How Griffith discovered Moss’ book or who introduced him to it is unknown. But once he found it, Griffith acted quickly. He was back from Rome scarcely two weeks, his negotiations with Mussolini’s bankers to make films in Italy having collapsed, when he bought the movie rights to Moss’ Defeat and immediately started work. Months of pursuing will-of-thewisp million dollar projects were now followed by weeks of frenetic activity in which Griffith’s company operated around the clock to make overseas filming arrangements. Contracts were signed and casting assignments made even before Griffith had settled on precisely which Moss story he wanted to film. Whirlwind casting calls kept players in last-minute suspense: only hours before passport deadlines did actors learn who would go to Europe and who would be used once Griffith returned. He knew he wanted Carol Dempster, but whether she would play Freya, the shrewd showgirl in “The Wrong Receipt”, Lotchen, a beleaguered wife, in “The Nacht Lokal”, or Inga, the shop clerk in “‘Isn’t Life Wonderful!’”, was anybody’s guess. In the end, Griffith took three actors, three cameramen, and “an arrangements director” with him, figuring to develop his story during the ten-day voyage. 169

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Working out of the swank Bristol Hotel in Berlin, Griffith struck eyewitnesses as being in exceptionally good spirits while scouting locales and auditioning his German and Austrian actors, rehearsing and shooting with remarkable self-assurance. The reminiscences of cast and crew members draw a picture of an affable, hardworking Griffith able to overcome language barriers and local customs with ease. Griffith’s ability to charm became one of two abiding memories of the Americans who worked on the picture. The other was the desperate poverty they saw in Berlin. The company returned to Mamaroneck in October where duplicate sets were built and the filming completed, and by early November, Griffith was ready to sneak a fourteen-reel (two and a half hour) version unannounced in Westport and other Connecticut townships, followed by a formal preview at Montclair, New Jersey, and then a private screening for the German Consulate in New York. The reviews were uniformly favorable (“... marked a new standard for films”, “... one of the most daring experiments in picture history”, “... should be instrumental in promoting mutual understanding”). Everybody thought the film too long, but the reviewers were curiously silent on the two most nettlesome questions: would American audiences accept a sympathetic portrait of Germans suffering from the War, and would audiences find the film too bleak? Apprehensive, Griffith pared the film down to nine reels, booked the film into a New York grind house (the Rivoli Theatre), attracting an opening night audience that included Fritz Lang, UFA’s Erich Pommer, and Ernst Kallman, and then waited for reviews. The New York critics were both impressed and puzzled, moved by the film’s somber tone, but thrown off by a film that shared so little with other contemporary American movies. The trade press, as enthusiastic as the New York dailies, got stuck on a predictable chord. Calling it a “depressingly drab little tale”, the Moving Picture World reviewer wrote that “we seriously doubt its appeal to the masses” (December 13, 1924). The Moving Picture News and Reel and Review concurred; the Exhibitor’s Trade Review called the film “a genuine screen jewel” (December 13, 1924, n.p.) but pronounced it all but unsellable. The coup de grâce came from Photoplay’s editor William Quirk, who in a famous editorial (December 1924, p. 2) used Isn’t Life Wonderful’s début as an occasion to attack Griffith himself, deploring the turn his career had taken, and urging him to sell his studio. The problem, Photoplay contended, was that Griffith had lost touch with Hollywood; out of touch with Hollywood, the magazine argued, he had lost contact with civilization. Isn’t Life Wonderful illustrated the results: “your very habits of life have made you austere. You literally have withdrawn from contact with things about you. You have created a wall between yourself and the outside world”. Photoplay’s editor had a suggestion: I am not recommending that you acquire puttees, a swimming pool and a squad of Jap valets. Nor am I suggesting that you pal around with Elinor Glyn. Yet, if I had my way, I would imprison Cecil De Mille at Mamaroneck for a while, and I would loan you his Hollywood trappings, each and every one of them. […] You must sacrifice yourself for the good of pictures. Let someone else take charge of your soul for a year or so. Faust tried it – and had a good time. Otherwise he would have been forgotten by poetry and history. (ibid.)

To make the film more palatable to the general public, he deleted all references to the French occupation of the Ruhr (in the new version, his hero’s near-fatal ailment, originally gas poisoning suffered in a riot put down by the French militia, is attributed simply to “the war”), turned his German family into a group of Polish refugees, altered Hans’ name to Paul, reinstalled Lupino Lane’s comedy scenes, and – apparently to reassure his audiences that he hadn’t “gone native” while in Germany – inserted a brief anti-Bolshevik satirical scene that 170

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portrayed a trio of dispossessed Russians as barbaric buffoons. Finally, to seal the film with an artistic imprimatur, he edited into his opening titles a portion of the glowing review he received from the New York Post. It was in this form that the film began its nationwide tour in mid-February 1925. The critics, at first respectful, then with growing sarcasm and vituperation, suggested that the Great Man had produced a second-rate film. It was not merely that the film had no spectacle, no villains, no plotting, and no intrigue. The subject, they agreed, was without interest. The Philadelphia Inquirer acknowledged that Isn’t Life Wonderful was “realistically done”, but called the film contrived and thought the theme of hunger passé. In 1923, one might have sat through a picture showing the starvation of postwar Germany ... Now, however, the world has gone on to different things – selfishly and unjustly perhaps – but nevertheless it is no more gripped by tales of starving refugees. (The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 24, 1925, p. 17)

Harshest of all, Chicago and Hollywood critics ignored the movie altogether. Chicago’s all-powerful Balaban and Katz chain refused to book it, and Isn’t Life Wonderful played only in the second-run Lubliner and Trinz neighborhood houses. There, amidst the nation’s heaviest concentration of German-American and Polish-American neighborhoods, it went virtually unpromoted and unreviewed. In Los Angeles, where it played a one-week grind accompanied by six vaudeville novelty acts and an Aesop’s Fable cartoon, the leading newspapers published capsule plot summaries, but no reviews. Crueler blows were yet to come. Griffith may have comforted himself thinking Isn’t Life Wonderful caviar to the general populace in America. But he had great expectations for its European run, where he thought it would have particular meaning and be better understood. He was particularly anxious for a showdown with the German directors who had won such acclaim for chiaroscuro lighting, oblique angles, and mordant narratives. France he had written off, but he sent brother Albert Grey Griffith to promote the film heavily in England and Germany, with the idea of launching a subsequent campaign throughout Western and Eastern Europe, and then, with any luck, into the Soviet Union. The plan never had a chance. Brother Albert appeared not to have seen the film he was promoting. Either that, or he hoped that British audiences would not notice that his brother’s latest was not an epic. In either case, this die-hard partisan of the Griffith roadshow attraction decided to sell the film as a spectacle laced with comedy. In advertisements, British comic Lupino Lane was billed over Carol Dempster and Neil Hamilton. He mounted a gala London opening in the grand tradition that his brother deliberately avoided in the United States, complete with a symphony orchestra, reserve seats, and a live prologue, described as “a kind of apologia for the film”. Even the Prince of Wales, England’s future King George VI, was in attendance. The results were disastrous. Not only did the film come under fire as a propaganda piece for Germany, it was persistently attacked for its depressing squalor. Most reviews simply repeated what America’s midwestern papers had discovered. The London Bioscope was typical in calling it “a long drawn-out study of post-war sufferings, embodying a slight love-story ... There is practically no dramatic interest. Monotonously sombre and depressing, it is squalid without being tragic” (April 2, 1925, p. 65). Others, including Iris Barry, concluded he was simply not keeping up with evolving silent film techniques: “Griffith, I feel sure, hadn’t when he made Isn’t Life Wonderful? [sic] seen any film for five or six years. That is to say, he may have physically seen them, but they had meant nothing to him. He knew he was a great director. He didn’t think he had anything to learn from anyone. He didn’t learn anything. 171

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He remained in technique... exactly where he had been at the moment of his greatest success” (Barry, Let’s Go to the Movies, p. 223). Albert Griffith’s diagnosis was that the film needed more comedy. Having lost just under $30,000 in England for a four-week run, Albert Griffith and his entourage visited Germany and offered the film to UFA. Erich Pommer, who praised the film so highly when he visited Griffith’s studio in New York, quickly declared it unsellable in Berlin. Distributors in Paris, Rome, and Vienna concurred (“It brings back too vividly the hardships which the German people and the Poles have gone through”, wrote United Artists’ European bureau chief Croswell Smith to Albert Banzhaf [November 14, 1927, The D.W. Griffith Papers]). For a brief moment, it appeared that the Soviet Union might distribute it as an anti-capitalist propaganda film, but this deal, too, quickly fell through. In short, Isn’t Life Wonderful never played Germany; in fact, after its unsuccessful fourweek London run, it was never screened anywhere in Europe. The film originally meant to dramatize the plight of the Germans at the hands of the Allies, by 1925 had become something of an embarrassment. Especially in Germany, amidst the new era of the Dawes Plan, which provided for the French evacuation of the Ruhr and delivered enormous loans to Germany, reminders of the turbulent past became awkward. As Pommer wrote Griffith’s brother, “we in Germany must preach optimism, if we are to adapt ourselves to the great new rhythm of the world’s progress. Your film in its basic element is pessimistic, and we cannot see our way to distribute a production which glorifies a bushel of potatoes as the thing to be most coveted by German workers” (Pommer to Griffith, April 17, 1925, in The D.W. Griffith Papers). Russell Merritt

Ironically, as Griffith set out to make a film set during Germany’s hyperinflationary period of 1923, his own financial situation was in turmoil. Saddled with debts, he strove to save his company, D.W. Griffith, Inc., by secretly closing a deal with Famous Players-Lasky at a time when it was assumed he would continue on with United Artists as his distributor. It has been suggested that Griffith welcomed a chance to leave America for some location shooting in Berlin just as the various revelations, accusations, and recriminations surrounding the two company’s tussles over the director were heating up in June of 1924. Richard Schickel has summarized this financial imbroglio in his biography, D.W. Griffith, An American Life (pp. 497–507). At any rate, Griffith took the still quite unusual step of shooting part of scenes abroad, as he had filmed portions of Hearts of the World during World War I. And as in there, he included an opening title to point this out: “PRODUCED UNDER THE PERSONAL SUPERVISION OF D.W. GRIFFITH. SCENES MADE IN GERMANY IN THE ACTUAL LOCATIONS”. Otherwise spectators might simply assume that, as for almost all American films, the action was staged in sets or out of doors in areas near the studio. He had cleverly planned his story so that he needed only three main actors to appear in exteriors. Carol Dempster, Neil Hamilton, and Frank Puglia, as well as cinematographer Hendrik Sartov, went to Germany with him on 4 July. They spent July and August shooting in the older districts of Berlin and in the Kopenick suburb (spelled Copenick in the intertitle introducing it). Griffith returned to the United States in September and shot the interior scenes, integrating them into the location footage so smoothly that a spectator is unlikely to notice how few actors actually appear in outdoor scenes. Griffith finished the film in November, shortly before its first screening, in New York on 28 November. It was the last film produced by D.W. Griffith, Inc., and Griffith moved to Famous Players-Lasky for his next features. The filming in Germany took place the year after the events depicted. Inflation had been 172

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a problem in the country during the post-war years (an American dollar fetching 550 Marks in mid-1922 and 7,500 Marks by year’s end). It spiraled out of control into severe hyperinflation during 1923. Between January and May, Germany’s currency went from 22,400 to 54,300 Marks to the dollar. On 11 June, a streetcar ticket in Berlin cost 600 Marks. By 3 September, the same ticket was 400,000 Marks. The country’s economy effectively collapsed during October, when the Mark was four billion to the dollar. The implementation of the American-devised strategy contained in the Dawes Plan brought stability through a new currency, the Rentenmark, in November. Isn’t Life Wonderful is often admired as a modest and realistic film in the midst of Griffith’s sentimental melodramas and costume pictures of the 1920s. Still, it is a peculiar sort of realism, one which remains at the service of the same simple, overarching thematic principle that underlies his most ambitious and grandiose films. In Intolerance (1916), the closing titles and images present a future world in which tolerance brings about “perfect love” and “peace forevermore”. The sweeping generalization of Isn’t Life Wonderful comes at the beginning: “FOR WHERE THERE IS LOVE THERE IS HOPE AND TRIUMPH – WHICH IS WHAT MAKES LIFE WONDERFUL”. A similar contradiction seems to lurk in each film. Intolerance spends most of its length demonstrating the universality and endurance of hate, yet it posits that tolerance could somehow reshape the entire world in the future. Isn’t Life Wonderful concentrates for most of its length on the considerable and realistically portrayed miseries that its central family suffers during hyperinflation, and its final portion successfully focuses a great deal of suspense on the couple’s humble potato crop, which is stolen in the penultimate scene. As a result, the heroine Inga’s quick shift from despair to optimism seems hopelessly implausible (for one thing, her marriage to Paul supposedly depends on that crop). In the cheery epilogue, the viewer is also left to wonder how the family survived until the following year’s potato harvest, presumably taking place after the hyperinflation in the autumn of 1924, just a few weeks or months before the release of Griffith’s film. One of the introductory titles perhaps reveals a bit of Griffith’s traditional way of thinking: “THE STORY IS LAID IN GERMANY ONLY BECAUSE CONDITIONS THERE WERE MOST FAVORABLE FOR SHOWING THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE OVER HARDSHIP”. Concrete social circumstances, however compellingly presented, remain subsidiary to Griffith’s thematic concerns. That said, however, for much of its length the film is considerably more realistic and somber in tone than his previous features had been. The location shooting allows for a series of documentary-style shots as “WAR’S HARVEST”, a line of Polish refugees, to be presented. Inga’s introduction betrays only a slight urge toward glamorizing Carol Dempster. In the initial long shot of the family, she looks plain and wan, while after the cut-in to a medium close-up, she looks somewhat prettier. The shot is far from the ethereal, soft-focus shots of Lillian Gish characteristic of Griffith’s typical portrayals of his heroines. The scene of Inga working in a shop and trying to sell a hat to an old lady presents the action in a determinedly quiet, flat fashion well suited to a realistic style. Similarly, the sequence in which Inga waits in line outside a butcher shop and watches as the prices rise repeatedly is quite an accurate depiction of how quickly the German Mark lost its value during this period. That same scene appears to use a number of real working-class extras, and others appear elsewhere in the film. Griffith happened to visit Germany at a time when its most famous émigré director, Ernst Lubitsch, was making his second Hollywood film. Granted, Isn’t Life Wonderful is trying for a very different tone from The Marriage Circle (premiered on 3 February of that year). Still, a comparison of the two films shows Griffith employing a rather loose version of classical continuity style that has changed little since the late 1910s. Lubitsch, in contrast, had quickly mastered the more up-to-date Hollywood style and made a film that displays a highly sophisticated grasp of its principles (there is a single mismatched eyeline in The Marriage Circle).

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Lubitsch was fast replacing Griffith as the director most admired by industry practitioners, critics, and the sophisticated movie-going public. To say that Griffith never learned the new filmmaking norms that had developed during his career would be an exaggeration. He was capable of using shot/reverse shot and maintaining screen and eyeline direction to a reasonable extent. True, he did not learn to match action and position, and the viewer is likely to get the impression that the few really close matches in the films of this period resulted more from chance than design. In a way, some of Griffith’s features echo the pattern of his Biograph shorts. The need to crank out so many one-reelers meant that some of his most masterful shorts were made in the midst of a series of far less imaginative, polished films. He simply did not have the time to come up with brilliant ideas and honed style for every film. The same unevenness is found among sequences in some of his features. A beautifully photographed, skillfully staged sequence with clever and original touches may be followed by another where the framings seem to be chosen with little thought as to how they will cut together, and where the mismatches become particularly noticeable. In some ways the old-fashioned, occasionally clumsy style of the film may enhance its sense of realism, bordering at times on a documentary look. Nevertheless, Isn’t Life Wonderful has many moments that recall the Biographs and the mid-1910s features more than the relatively sophisticated films Griffith had made in the immediate post-war years. For one thing, there is a surprising lack of dialogue titles, especially early in the film. During the late 1910s and 1920s, Hollywood films shifted from a heavy dependence on expository intertitles to an avoidance of these in favor of letting dialogue carry the exposition whenever possible. Neither Paul’s nor Inga’s speech is given in a dialogue title until remarkably far into the action. Similarly, expository titles intrude upon actions that could be conveyed with no title at all. When Inga is alone in the shop where she works, she thinks of a sumptuous chicken dinner. Her thoughts are conveyed in standard Griffith fashion, by a cut-in from an establishing medium-long shot to a medium close-up; fade; a shot of the food; fade; a return to the medium close-up; and finally a cut back to the establishing framing. This clearly depicted action, however, is punctuated by a title, “HUNGER–HAUNTED”, before the cut to the closer view of Inga. The staging and cutting are at times distinctly out-of-date. In the scene by Paul’s sickbed when he seems near death, Griffith cuts from a general shot of the group around the bed to isolated framings of Inga, followed by a fairly lengthy scene of her in the kitchen, emoting for a while before fainting. This isolation of an actress to allow for virtuoso acting worked well enough in earlier films, where Blanche Sweet or Lillian Gish could carry it off, but it becomes a bit tiresome with Dempster, whose strengths do not lie in this type of performance. Indeed, the whole placement of the kitchen and bedroom side by side, with Inga and her aunt moving back and forth between them, irresistibly recalls the rows of side-by-side rooms that made up the interiors of many Biograph films. Another distinctly old-fashioned device, the tableau, appears in the scene in the woods where the thugs come upon Paul and Inga with their potato cart. For about six seconds all action freezes with the thugs in an attitude of menace and the couple registering fear. It is hard to imagine another Hollywood film of this late date using such a lengthy pose. The film also contains more skillful uses of devices familiar from earlier in Griffith’s career. The scene of Inga taking part of her own dinner to serve the ailing Paul begins with a very nice shot past a mirror with Inga’s face partially blocked (though the effect is somewhat vitiated by a cut to an ordinary medium close-up). Inga’s ruse of stuffing pads into her cheeks to hide her starved appearance from Paul recalls the similar bravery of the Little Sister in The Birth of a Nation (1915) when she decorates her dress with “ermine” made of cotton. Her 174

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command to Paul, “YOU MUST GET FAT – LIKE ME”, is somewhat undercut by the fact that Neil Hamilton looks handsome and robust throughout the film, while Dempster is convincingly frail. Another familiar Griffithian touch comes in the early scene introducing Inga and Paul’s love. After a brief kiss, there is a shot of her lowering her head to his shoulder and him lowering his face until it is blocked by her head. The suggestion of characters’ emotions without showing their faces during the most emotional part of an action harks back at least to the homecoming scene in The Birth of a Nation, but Griffith had used it in other films as well. Perhaps the most charming extended passage in the film comes after Paul and Inga have harvested their potatoes and they are hauling their loaded cart slowly through the woods. When they stop to rest, the teasing between the two – with cutaways to the wind in the treetops – is quite relaxed, and Dempster is more genuine in her emotional portrayal than she is in most of the film’s interiors. In the latter, Griffith is more inclined to isolate the actress in medium close-ups and allow us to watch her in what is intended to be a passage of virtuoso performance akin to what Griffith had earlier elicited from Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, and his other female Biograph stars. One aspect of the film that may enhance its realism is the fact that the characters’ goals – beyond simply finding food and shelter – are not formulated until quite far into the film. In the sickbed scene, Paul and Inga joyfully agree to marry after he recovers, and this leads eventually to his building a shack and planting a potato field to support them. Moreover, Griffith does not create a distanced, schematic portrayal of the social causes of the inflation – the sort of thing he had done with A Corner in Wheat (1909) with the systematic contrasts between rich and poor. In Isn’t Life Wonderful, shortly after Paul and Inga formulate their goals, the world portrayed in the film broadens a bit as Paul’s brother Theodor gets a job in a ritzy nightclub. The introduction of this setting allows for a contrast between the classes, but Griffith does not develop this into a systematic parallel throughout the film, nor does he suggest that the rich patrons are responsible for the hyperinflation. Instead, he contents himself with creating a plausible depiction of the effects of hyperinflation on a specific group of people who are portrayed as individuals. Isn’t Life Wonderful did not save Griffith’s production company. Not surprisingly, given its grim subject matter and unglamorous approach, it lost money. Moving to Famous PlayersLasky, the director lost a considerable degree of control and went into the period which saw an undeniable decline in both the quality of his films and his standing among critics and sophisticated audiences. The unusually realistic style of Isn’t Life Wonderful perhaps temporarily disguised the increasingly old-fashioned look of Griffith’s filmmaking, but that look became quite apparent in subsequent films. I have mentioned that Lubitsch took over Griffith’s place as the preeminent director in America. Some contemporary critics explicitly compared Griffith to more up-to-date directors. On the occasion of a revival of Broken Blossoms in 1925, Robert E. Sherwood criticized its dependence on extensive intertitles: “Unfortunately, while Chaplin, Lubitsch, Vidor and many others have moved ahead with the times, Griffith has stood still. He has never learned that a movie camera can speak for itself” (quoted in Schickel, op. cit., p. 514). Leonard Hall said of The Drums of Love (1928): “D.W. has been our first and foremost, our best beloved, our pet genius whom we could always count when the great lords from overseas – the Murnaus, the Lubitsches, and the Stillers – arrived with their great bags of tricks to show us how it is done. And that’s why it’s so tarnation sad when the Grand Old Man turns out a ‘Drums of Love’” (quoted in Schickel, op. cit., p. 539). Sad indeed. Schickel has noted that Griffith made no attempt to meet the major local filmmakers of the day when he was in Germany and attributes this failure to “his resentment and envy of the innovators who were challenging his position” (op. cit., p. 503). Such a motive seems somewhat unlikely, since none of the German innovators’ films had yet had a major success 175

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in the United States. The sole hit, Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (released as Passion in late 1920) was a costume epic along the traditional lines of Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) and some of Griffith’s own films. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (1924) was the film that would draw American attention to the distinctive techniques of contemporary German cinema. It does seem odd, however, that an American director so lauded for his contributions to the repertory of cinematic technique should take such an interest in contemporary German life as subject matter and yet not attempt to socialize with his counterparts there or to observe their methods in the studio. Possibly a tight shooting schedule made such activities difficult, but we can only speculate as to why Griffith did not take advantage of this visit to meet at least briefly with such figures as Fritz Lang, Murnau, Paul Leni, and the other directors who created such a distinctive set of films during the early 1920s. Perhaps he simply was not interested in contemporary cinema other than his own. Although Griffith influenced untold numbers of filmmakers, it is hard to think of any way in which others influenced him. Kristin Thompson

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611 FAMOUS PLAYERS-LASKY

SALLY OF THE SAWDUST Working title: Poppy Filming date: 9 March–10 July 1925 Location: Famous Players studio, Astoria, New York; exteriors: Greenwich, Connecticut; New York State: New York City; Syosset; Hicksville; Great Neck; Kissena Park, Flushing; Huntington; Douglastown; Bayside; Long Island Speedway, Islip; Rosyln; Whitestone; Jackson Heights; Long Island Motor Parkway Producer: D.W. Griffith Distribution: United Artists Patchogue, New York preview: 21 June 1925 Chicago premiere: 20 July 1925, Roosevelt Theatre New York premiere: 2 August 1925, Strand Theatre Release date: 2 August 1925 Release length: ten reels, 9,500 feet Copyright date: 8 September 1925 (LP21804); “author of photoplay: D.W. Griffith, Inc.” Director: D.W. Griffith Scenario: Dorothy Donnelly, Forrest Halsey Adaptation: Forrest Halsey Source: Poppy, the stage musical (1923) by Owen King and Dorothy Donnelly Photographers: Harry Fischbeck, Harold S. Sintzenich Additional photography: Frank Diem, J. Roy Hunt Assistant directors: Erville Anderson, Frank Walsh Art director: Charles M. Kirk Film editor: James Smith Music: Louis Silvers; cue sheet compiled by James C. Bradford Cast: Carol Dempster (Sally); W.C. Fields (Prof. Eustace McGargle); Alfred Lunt (Peyton Lennox); Erville Alderson (Judge Henry L. Foster); Effie Shannon (Mrs. Foster); Charles Hammond (Lennox, Sr., Peyton’s father); Roy Applegate (Detective); Florence Fair (Miss Vinton); Marie Shotwell (Society lady); Glenn Anders (Leon, the acrobat); Miss Case (Stand-in for Carol Dempster); Charles Slattery (Stand-in for W.C. Fields); Tammany Young; Jim, the Lion Archival sources: FILM – Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate positive (parts of reels 2–3 missing, AFI/Paramount Collection); 16mm acetate positive (1969 reissue); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm acetate positive (from Killiam 35mm acetate negative, 9,617 ft.); 35mm nitrate positive (fragment, from National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, 1,737 ft., tinted, edge code 1925); Academy Film Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined). MUSIC – George Eastman House, cue sheet NOTE: The production history of the film is discussed by J.B. Kaufman, “‘It Was Always Funny Working With Fields’: Producing Sally of the Sawdust and That Royle Girl”, Griffithiana, vol. 21, nos. 62–63, May 1998, pp. 39–79. Prof. Eustace McGargle is a merry and active side-show entertainer with a small-time traveling circus. A young widow, injured in a trapeze fall, confides that she is dying and wishes him to look after her little girl, revealing that she is the daughter of strict parents, her father ordering her out when she married a circus man. McGargle becomes attached to the child, and as Sally McGargle,

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daughter of the “great professor”, she grows up waif of the circus, and finally becomes McGargle’s assistant. Sally makes herself generally useful about the circus tent and lot. She walks with the Professor in the parade, does her tricks with the elephants and then helps Leon, the trapeze performer, in his ballyhoo act. When the big show is over the Professor does his stuff. In gaudy costume he mounts a platform and juggles and then kids the onlookers, while Sally leads in the applause. Then Sally does her stunts, dancing and acrobatics, while the Professor keeps the applause going. Then comes the day when Leon falls in love with Sally and the Professor realizes the one time little girl has grown up and that he must assume parental responsibilities. He decides to find her grandparents, if possible, and give her up, even though he knows it will wrench his heart. The circus goes broke. The Professor, as usual, has no money. His last dollar has been spent telegraphing for a job. He gets the job, but no advance transportation money. He and Sally must walk. Sally has saved a quarter, and buys two sandwiches, and a cigar for “Pop”, as she calls McGargle. Footsore and weary after a long drill down the railroad tracks, they decide to steal a ride on the “blind baggage.” Two tramps have stolen on the same train, and the conductor, at a way station, signals the engineer to open the water tank spout. Sally and “Pop” are washed off the platform, drenched. But the station is the one they want, for there the carnival in which they are to work is being held. Their strange appearance attracts the attention of Peyton Lennox, son of the very wealthy Mr. Lennox, close friend of Judge and Mrs. Foster, Sally’s grandparents. Judge Foster still despises Circus folk. Peyton Lennox falls in love with Sally. Prof. McGargle swaggers about, and Judge Foster warns the society folk managing the carnival to watch this man. That evening young Lennox goes to the carnival ground and finds Sally sitting in a lonely merry-go-round, playing her uk[u]lele and singing. He sits beside her, to her surprised delight. The elder Lennox, warned by Judge Foster that his son has been seen with Sally, surprises them, berates his son, and denounces the girl. Young Lennox, to prove that Sally can appear to as great as advantage as society girls of the resort, has her appear, masked, in a most beautiful gown, at a social function. When she [is] unmasked all are surprised, but she is ordered from the house by Judge Foster. In the meantime, the Professor has been arrested as the result of a little three[-]card monte game, but escapes through the connivance of Sally as she returns. Sally is arrested as an accomplice. McGargle goes through a series of harrowing experiences, but finally is freed and rushes to the court room where Sally is being arraigned, having also made an ineffectual attempt to escape to go to his aid. McGargle rushes into the court room, where Judge Foster is sitting in judgment over Sally. He identifies the girl as the Judge’s grand-daughter. Mrs. Foster is overjoyed, the Judge dismisses the case, a reunion follows, and as young Lennox comes into the scene to vow his love for Sally, the old circus faker, with aching heart, strolls away, sad but still jaunty. But Sally misses her “Pop” and rushes after him. They all welcome him into the family. He becomes a successful realtor. Press book synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, September 8, 1925, LP21804 [stamped with date September 10, 1925]

Orphaned by her mother’s early death, Sally finds herself dependent on her “Pop”, a lovable rapscallion and confidence man who adopts her and raises her as his own. For many years, Eustace McGargle carries a letter from the dead mother that would introduce her daughter 178

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to her real family. But the “Professor” finds it difficult to give the child up. Nonetheless, when she begins to mature into a young woman, he determines to find Sally’s folks, only to discover that her straight-laced grandfather is a judge who hounded his daughter from his own home and now seems determined to persecute his granddaughter too. The son of a rich associate falls in love with the girl and seems willing to introduce her into his society set. Her grandfather, however, almost manages to send her to a home for wayward girls. McGargle finally races to Sally’s rescue and sees her safe in the arms of her doting young suitor. The Professor tries to fade out of her life. Sally, however, makes it clear to all the new people in her life that she will not be happy unless they also welcome her “Pop”.

Sally of the Sawdust is a peculiar project for many reasons. Though it is not without pictorial scope, it lacks the grandeur of D.W. Griffith’s great epics. It is a comedy, a form Griffith apparently had consigned to the likes of Mack Sennett and Billy Quirk in the Biograph period. In addition to Griffith’s supposed lack of comic gifts, Sally of the Sawdust relies on the pairing of W.C. Fields, a clown fresh from the Ziegfeld Follies, with an actress considered a lesser light in the great firmament of stars Griffith had bequeathed to the cinema. Carol Dempster had first appeared as an extra dancer in Intolerance (1916), and Griffith had been featuring or starring her in his films beginning with The Girl Who Stayed Home (1919). Yet, of Sally of the Sawdust’s leading lady, Frederick James Smith of The Motion Picture Classic admits: “it was not until Isn’t Life Wonderful? [sic], that I thought Miss Dempster could act” (August 1925, p. 48). Worst of all, the great director’s personal luster was beginning to tarnish. The box-office success of The Birth of a Nation (1915) turned into notoriety as well as fame but did not assure Griffith the independence he craved. The failure of the Fine Arts studio portended future difficulties. In 1919, Griffith complained to Frederick James Smith in The Motion Picture Classic that because of studio interference at Paramount-Artcraft, “tender little scenes …were mercilessly cut [from A Romance of Happy Valley and The Girl Who Stayed Home] to speed up the deluxe program” (n.d., n.p. clipping in the Robinson Locke Theatrical Scrapbooks at the New York Public Library, vol. 209, hereafter RLTS. Bibliographical references were often cut off, not noted, or missing in these scrapbooks). Fortunes rose and fell after that, but whatever the reasons Griffith advanced for his perceived “failures”, by December 1924 critical opinion had become so harsh that Photoplay’s critic, James Quirk, was emboldened to exhort the erstwhile master: “the time has come … when you should take an accounting of yourself” (Schickel, D.W. Griffith: An American Life, p. 502). Thus skepticism flavored Griffith’s new association with Paramount from the first. In fact, critical reception of Sally of the Sawdust was approving – if double-minded. In the same review that noted the improvement in Dempster’s acting in The Motion Picture Classic, Smith praised Sally of the Sawdust for being “best in just the field that Griffith has been weakest – comedy”. In the November 1925 issue of The Motion Picture Magazine (p. 55), Laurence Reid countered that the film was “a most compelling story … in the director’s best manner, one saturated with pointed comedy which is always well-balanced with pathos”. It seemed that to the evaluating community, Sally of the Sawdust was a typical Griffith offering and a departure from it at one in the same time. Indeed, for all its apparent anomalies, Sally of the Sawdust bears the indelible stamp of Griffith’s thinking. Cognizant of the need for a solid project to begin working at Paramount, Griffith turned to a proven stage success. Dorothy Donnelly’s Poppy would provide the same security as Lottie Blair Parker’s Way Down East had in 1924. Each had enjoyed theatrical successes. But more critically, Poppy’s story could be exploited to express all the dramatic 179

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oppositions that typically interested Griffith. Country innocence is compared to city experience, freedom to constraint, respectability to disrepute, intolerance to open-mindedness, probity to love. And at Sally of the Sawdust’s core is the pervasive theme that formed the basis of drama in so many of the Biographs as well as in The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and even Broken Blossoms (1919). The death or absence of a mother results in the relationship of a girl with her father or a male guardian who must raise her to the point of sexual awakening. Of course, the messages conveyed in this mini-genre usually were quite complex and emotionally difficult. If humor arose, comedy certainly did not. Where Sally of the Sawdust touches Biograph roots, Biograph forms are echoed. This is particularly true of the opening scenes in the Foster family home. This prologue is framed in a pair of illustrative portraits that verge on tableaux, so condensed is their drama, so ritualistic their gestures. In the first image, harmony is depicted between mother and child, an expression that will be reprised later in the film between granddaughter and grandchild. Here, at the film’s beginning, the daughter dances gracefully while the mother accompanies her on the piano. The young dancer is clearly depicted as a free spirit. If her mother is indulgent, however, her father is a prude. Marriage is always a difficult negotiation between father and daughter in Griffith’s work; marriage to an entertainer, a circus performer, no less, is a recipe for disaster. In the second opening scene, then, the beloved daughter is banished by the stern father who will not accept her chosen spouse. Both of these scenes are staged in the family parlor much as they would have been in a Biograph. The fiancé even is framed in the doorway as he would be in a Biograph: highlighted on the sunny, bowered doorstep, the symbolic boundary between home and world, childhood and maturity, virginity and experience. Griffith’s practice of distilling a dramatic situation to its most significant essentials charges the film’s beginning with these meanings and provokes these interpretations. In this, the opening scenes have the virtue of expressive efficiency. On the other hand, the configuration of this particular expulsion from the family paradise is so stiffly acted, particularly by Erville Alderson as Judge Foster, that the performance seems antique, almost a parody of Griffith’s classic stagings. Alderson’s ineffective characterization seems to point to a double-mindedness on Griffith’s part. Alfred Lunt certainly thought the director inattentive and reported a great deal of difficulty in getting a handle on the “boy”’s role, the young love interest, Peyton Lennox. Lunt, a stage-trained actor who would have stellar theatrical successes, must have felt at sea without a script or specified dialogue, neither of which Griffith seemed willing to provide. In Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By (p. 91), Lunt reports that when asked for lines, Griffith replied: “Say anything – ash can, tomato can, ketchup”, a stream of consciousness that confounded the actor. Lunt’s malaise may explain his sometimes hectic presentation of a character that at the same time feels distinctly marginalized. As if to add insult to dramaturgic injuries, his young hero uncharacteristically plays no part whatsoever in rescuing his beleaguered beloved in the film’s final chase-race sequence. But the performances of Alderson and Lunt are not the measure of Griffith’s interest in Sally of the Sawdust. At best, the characters of Peyton Lennox and Judge Foster are distractions from the film’s central pairing – W.C. Fields and Carol Dempster. Once the film leaves Judge Foster’s stuffy Connecticut parlor and runs away to the circus, as it were, the old Biograph forms of the introduction loosen up and the conventions of juvenile romance are pre-empted by the relationship between Sally and her “Pop”, between Dempster and Fields. The transition from Foster family parlor to the circus and the formation of the new familial relationship is made though two familiar configurations. In the first sequence of shots, a dying mother placed downscreen entrusts the welfare of the toddler Sally to the surrogate father, “Professor” Eustace McGargle. The second sequence begins with a circus parade reminis180

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cent of all the public demonstrations Griffith staged with marching soldiers and cheering crowds in previous Civil War films. Sally of the Sawdust’s circus parade is a festival of detail that has a claustrophobic studio feeling at the same time that its very closeness brims with excitement. The parade both contextualizes Sally’s life and demonstrates the march of time between her childhood and her young adulthood. But it also serves as a vehicle for the same sort of slow disclosure of the major female star that so characterizes Griffith’s work. Dempster and Fields both march in the parade. But Sally’s/Dempster’s first appearance is a mere glimpse, a tease, plunged as she is into the colorful crush of bespangled performers, animal cages, acrobats, clowns and McGargle’s own exhibition of cane twirling. Griffith delays the introduction of his heroine/star with shots of elephants entering tents and dancing hootchykootchy girls until the moment when Fields leaves the “stage” and Dempster is left alone in a shot with a performing elephant. Finally, in the spotlight, Dempster is required to demonstrate the “strange, whimsical creature” the titles claim Sally has become. The actress mugs for the camera in close-up, puts Lucy the elephant through her paces, and gamely climbs up on the beast’s back to show that Sally is indeed “part tomboy, part woman, her only world the easy-going circus”. Often considered Griffith’s albatross, Dempster is perfectly capable of miming the wistful charm required by female characters in such a situation. Her scenes with Effie Shannon (as Mrs. Judge Foster, Sally’s grandmother) are quite affecting – partly because Shannon recalls so many of the qualities of Biograph’s remarkable Kate Bruce. However, as Griffith visualized it, Sally of the Sawdust required qualities beyond girlish charm. Sally of the Sawdust needed an actress of physical daring, and here Dempster exhibits the willingness that sent Lillian Gish out onto the ice floes in Way Down East. Dempster’s gamine boards elephants, scales walls, climbs down trees, hangs from their branches, battles and head-butts her adversaries with a will. Moreover, there is a sharp, aggressive quality about Dempster that is quite dissonant with the girlish trappings, and therefore the postures, that Griffith had devised to convey maidenly spunk in Mae Marsh, Constance Talmadge and Dorothy Gish. On Dempster’s body, these physical tropes warp into an odd crouch and cramp her legs into a strange knockkneed scramble from which she occasionally breaks out into the kind of kick-fighting pre-figured in Marsh’s hops and Talmadge’s shin-battering performance in Intolerance. Dempster’s face also sometimes contorts into something very much like a parody of the “sunlight and shadows” style Griffith developed with his other actors. This blend of physicality with elements of Griffith’s classic gamine configuration makes more sense if Dempster’s characterization is considered an attempt to build a comic persona complementary to Fields’ own. Indeed, it would be quite wrong to see her performance as separate from Fields’. The two actors form a mini-constellation around which the film’s comedy is conceived and from which the film’s emotional energy flows. However Griffith’s attention might have wandered from other roles, this aspect of the film had his full attention. Conceptually then, Sally and McGargle are a pair, a comic partnership like any other classic comic pair. Just as Fields sports the distinctive baggy coat, top hat and shirtless collar and cuffs of a clown, so Dempster is given a squished and shapeless hat over unruly hair, mugging close-ups and peculiar walk. With this apparatus, she delivers a performance that gives physical scope to the more delicately detailed comedy of Fields’ parodic refinements. Sally is McGargle’s accomplice when his confidence games get him into trouble. At other times, they trade the role of “straight man” with each other. Dempster showcases Fields’ vaudeville turns (her “ta-da” gesture reappears poignantly when, their familial relationship unbeknownst to either character, Sally dances while her grandmother accompanies her on the piano in the Foster mansion). Fields, in turn, is required to create a showcase for Dempster’s dance numbers. In this, he serves as surrogate admirer of Dempster the actress as well 181

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as indulgent first audience and entrepreneur of Sally’s emerging talents as a circus performer, a complicated set of pro- and intra-spectacular positions from which Dempster is viewed. Furthermore, the emotional relationship between Sally and her “Pop” is centralized in their collaboration to create the film’s comic set-pieces. The smaller turns, the hobo train ride and the confusion in the bakery are dominated by Fields, who exploits each of the situations in small gestures, comic displacements that cascade into larger and larger exaggerations. His body constantly in play, Fields finds the most preposterous postures in a given situation, no matter how small. When he and Sally hitch a ride on a train, for instance, his feet and legs are farcically crabbed up to protect their luggage even as he and Dempster huddle precariously on the train’s open platform. In each situation, Fields finds successions of inanimate objects – hat, cane, suitcase – and portrays them as conspirators against any possibility of situating himself comfortably in the world. His inventions are so integrated into his performance that they become the “natural” expressions of his eccentric character. Dempster’s comedy is larger, broader, louder. Second banana to Fields in the smaller comic situations, she becomes his two-fisted partner in the film’s large-scale action sequences, the grand melée at the circus that resolves the first act of the film, and the race-chase-rescue that resolves the film as a whole. In the first melée, she energetically dives into the dirt under a circus wagon and hollers “Hey, Rube!” with a vigor that almost makes her silent voice audible. Boinking her Pop’s attackers with a plank, she generates the heat in the fray while Fields is charged with exposing the comic absurdities of battle. Just before the fight’s resolution, for instance, he fends off his assailants in the now-classic parody of fisticuffs: holding an opponent at bay, in this case hand to the man’s throat, while he swings vain punches in the open air. The mounting mayhem is finally resolved by Sally’s arrival with Lucy the elephant. But the interior dynamic of the fight depends on the shifting registers between Dempster’s enthusiastic scrapping and Fields’ comic embroidery. A similar harmony is found in the twenty-minute action sequence that resolves the film. Two venerable action structures, the chase and the race to the rescue, are braided together with inventive variations on the typical structural outcomes. In one section of the resolving structure, Sally does her best to defend herself in court, but is unable to convince Judge Foster of her innocence. In desperation, she escapes the courtroom in an effort to delay the judgment that will send her to a home for wayward girls. After scaling the walls of the courtroom to reach a window from which she jumps into a tree, she runs from hiding place to hiding place – the roof of a shed, a field of thick weeds. As she runs, more and more of the community is awakened to pursue her until she finally is caught. In one sense the chase sequence is harrowing and heroic because it highlights Sally’s terror and her brave struggle to preserve her freedom in the face of her grandfather’s intolerance. But in its form, the chase recalls the old Biograph accumulation farces in which the whole town becomes involved in the comic pursuit of a miscreant over hill and dale. This hybridized chase structure is intercut with McGargle’s race to Sally’s rescue while he is chased in turn by a band of moonshiners whose operation he has unwittingly discovered in the woods. Once again, pathos and comedy are blended. As Sally begins to testify, McGargle learns of her plight and escapes his captors. Fields first steals a car that has to be “urged” to start by stabbing a cane into the ground until the engine catches and the car gets going. Fields next runs afoul of a policeman directing traffic at a traffic circle. While Sally is tearfully pleading for her freedom in the courtroom, Fields and the policeman dance through a comic routine that ends with the frustrated officer picking the clown up bodily, flinging him behind the wheel of the car and thereby restarting the race to the rescue. Once Sally is on the run, the rescue seems to settle into its usual form until the moment when McGargle is discovered to actually be behind his pursuers, racing furiously to catch up to them (another 182

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Biograph echo). Only after Sally is caught by her tormentors do the comic complications that have drawn out and enhanced the race finally abate. Fields literally “breaks out” of the structure by smashing through a fence to shake off his pursuers once for all. Even after he detaches from the moonshiners, he still takes a funny bumping ride over a newly ploughed field that dumps him into the dirt. Finally, he arrives at the courtroom in time to deliver the long withheld news: that his foster daughter is really the Fosters’ granddaughter and the judge, once again, has misjudged his own kin. This revelation touches the secondary theme of Sally of the Sawdust, the sexual awakening of a young girl. While the clowning between Dempster and Field creates a central dramatic pairing, it also certifies the innocence of a relationship between a young girl and an older man who so often finds her arms twined around his neck and her body pressed tight to her own. But Griffith is not unaware of this aspect of the story. In fact, the subtheme of Sally of the Sawdust plays out in a series of McGargle’s epiphanies about Sally’s burgeoning womanhood. Griffith elects to play these discoveries in various keys before a transition to later scenes in which Dempster is not clowning at all. Sally’s transformation begins at the circus where she is noticed then assaulted by Leon the Acrobat (Glenn Anders in appropriately brillantined hair). Sally fights Leon off with vigor and McGargle’s eventual help, but this trauma leads Sally’s “Pop” to realize that he has responsibilities as a protector as well as a guardian. The incident also recalls to McGargle the promise he made to take the girl to her grandparents, a scene that is played for all the affection and poignant sense of loss that the circus fakir feels at the prospect of losing his ward. The emotional register of this discovery shifts in the bakery, when a hungry Sally hides two biscuits in her bosom. In this case, the usual hug issues in a comic realization that Sally indeed is “growing up”. But the final measure of Sally’s maturation is taken outside McGargle’s presence and thus outside the context of clowning. In and around the Foster community, Griffith provides another view of Sally and stages it in scenes verging on his oft-manifested adoration of his current female star. The effect did not go unnoticed. The critic of The Motion Picture Classic (November 1925) found Sally of the Sawdust’s plot “pertty [sic] bad”, but nonetheless admired “the beautiful lyric moment … when little Sally comes to a grave in the family plot of a New England cemetery”, as well as “the loveliest love scene on the hillside of a private estate” (n.p. clipping in RTLS). These two scenes, it should be noted, are preceded by a walk along a garden path on which Sally views with longing an affectionate interaction between a mother and her daughter. Furthermore, they are regulated by the gaze of the would-be suitor, Lunt’s Peyton Lennox, whose dialogue mattered far less than his role as maestro of Sally’s/Dempster’s transformation from rootless waif to desirable wife. Lennox’s recognition of Sally’s “true” nature begins at the graveyard where Dempster’s portrayal of Sally’s vulnerable longing for a mother was noted. Her performance is delivered in romantic close-up portraiture and is directly connected to Lennox’s gaze by cutting. The young man’s appreciation of Sally’s qualities escalates on a hillside where, lying side by side, Lennox attempts to kiss a girl who is both surprised and flattered by such new intimacies. This is magnified in one of the most blatant apotheoses Griffith ever staged for a female star: Sally’s native allure is fully glamorized when Dempster, decked out in couture and a transfiguring lighting plan, models, en tableau, before the rich men and jealous women of Peyton’s society set. The plot suggests that Lennox is attempting to show Sally’s suitability to a group of people who would ordinarily not accept her. But the sequence is managed in the most carefully controlled glamour photography and stands as a testament not only to the transformation of a circus tomboy, not only to the recognition of the princess in the commoner, but to Griffith’s recognition and appreciation of Carol Dempster’s qualities before the camera and his desire that these be made manifest to everyone. 183

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In the end, neither that appreciation nor its successful box office have lifted Sally of the Sawdust into the pantheon of Griffith’s major films. It does suffer from a sort of flickering interest on Griffith’s part, a lack of engagement in some of its aspects. But Sally of the Sawdust demonstrates conclusively that Griffith’s talents for comedy were better developed than anyone would have thought. More importantly, the maturity of the film’s love scenes, the inventiveness of its unlikely comic pairing, and the liveliness of its final chase sequence suggest that Griffith was fully capable of “taking an accounting” of himself and finding powers that were by no means exhausted. Joyce Jesionowski

THEATRICAL SOURCES Critics, writing disparagingly of Sally of the Sawdust, have cited as the film’s several obvious flaws Griffith’s unease with the métier of comedy, the quickly discernable limits of Carol Dempster as the ingénue Sally, and the unfortunately restricted talents of Alfred Lunt as her romantic support. Although some of these critics and Griffith biographers have located the principal theatrical source of Sally of the Sawdust in the 1923 stageplay Poppy, none – to my knowledge – has questioned the play’s considerable weaknesses: an entertainment long on music, song, and dancing but altogether deficient in originality. It lacks the kind of plot and characterization which would readily translate into a compelling film. Nor have these critics recognised that, typically, Griffith has visited more than a single dominant dramatic source for his material, here, with Sally of the Sawdust, going back to the “circus waif” plays of the 1890s for mise-en-scène and characterisation. Poppy, itself, is distinctly second-hand: from all appearances, it is an attempt to resurrect, and to render an American version of, a once-viable artefact from an earlier decade of musical comedy. In that respect – and also to the degree that it offered Griffith a subject for a modern comedy – it is a questionable choice. However, to place both Sally of the Sawdust and Poppy in the context of the early and mid1920s, it may be helpful to recall that both the stage and film dramas emerge from a period in which Europe and America were coping with, and attempting to recover from, post-war economic depression, high unemployment, a dearth of males of marriageable age (many having died in the Great War), and, more recently and more devastatingly, the great worldwide Spanish influenza pandemics of 1919–20 which, through fear of contagion, had necessarily restricted theatre-going and other forms of public sociability. Recreating Poppy from earlier material and following it with Sally of the Sawdust are, in essence, gestures in refashioning a more opulent, more joyous, more innocent, and more democratic world than many had experienced for somewhat above a decade. Poppy’s immediate source, and the shadow behind Sally of the Sawdust, is the 1896 Gaiety Theatre (London) The Circus Girl, a musical play in two acts by James Tanner and Walter Palings, with music by Ivan Caryll and Lionel Monkton and song lyrics by Adrian Ross and Harry Greenbank. Running for 494 performances in London, a second company reached Manhattan in 1897, where it gave 197 performances. The Circus Girl was, in many respects, typical of the Gaiety musical. It had Girl in its title (like A Gaiety Girl, The Shop Girl, The Runaway Girl, A Country Girl, The Earl and the Girl, and so forth), which focused attention on its fashionably attired female chorus and leading actresses. Gaiety musicals were also notable for the elaborateness and pictorial accuracy of their mise-en-scène. Typically, The Circus Girl’s subject matter involved an ingénue – a singer and dancer – initially despised and condescended to because of her apparent low origins – here a performer in a circus – and because she has attracted the attentions of a patrician suitor. The heroine’s lowly status is abruptly altered by the discovery of a missing will which places her – by birth, if not by inclination – 184

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amongst the gentry, and brings entitlement to an unsuspected fortune. However, before such discoveries can be made, the girl and her suitor have fallen out – over misunderstandings of sincerity, the barrier of class, and strategies of coping with, or eliding, social disapproval – and have been eventually reconciled. Gaiety intermarriages between social classes were permissible when money was a part of the adhesive. Gaiety musicals stopped briefly after 1903, when the theatre was demolished, but emerged in a second Gaiety and continued on a reduced scale until 1939. Griffith certainly would have known Gaiety musicals through their North American tours and their survival in regional light opera company and amateur repertoires. Poppy was performed at the Apollo Theatre in Manhattan from early September 1923 and would have come directly to Griffith’s notice. At that date a resident in nearby Mamaroneck, Griffith, in every likelihood, attended more than one performance, viewing enough to have realised that its insubstantial “book” required major alterations to translate it into a film. As a stage musical, Poppy, a three-act drama by Owen King and Dorothy Donnelly (and not exclusively by Donnelly, as Griffith’s opening title announces), with music by Stephen Jones and Arthur Samuels, enacts the reintegration of the orphaned Poppy (Sally’s predecessor) into the polite society of Green Meadow through the unlikely agency of her foster father, “Professor” Eustace McGargle. McGargle, in this pre-Griffith version, is a former actor, now reduced to petty theft, forgery, and illegal gambling on street-corners and at fêtes and fairs. Poppy wins the love and respect of the local rich juvenile. Marriage will follow. Poppy finds, if not a mother, then a grandmother and a relationship with McGargle which still acknowledges his parental role. She puts her questionable past behind her. She wins respect and approval from the local community. Although Poppy is a comedy, it shares many similarities with Griffith’s more serious efforts. It may be described, without too much exaggeration, as Way Down East in motley. We must now go beyond simply identifying these predecessors to determine what they offered to audiences, and to understand how Griffith refashioned these sources to arrive at his film. If Poppy presented Griffith with a degree of singing and dancing which were simply beyond reproduction in silent film and which, in any event, lay beyond the deplorably finite talents of Carol Dempster, the stage production handed to Griffith, by way of compensation, W.C. Fields in the role of Professor McGargle. Fields, whose variety bill-matter identified him as “The Eccentric Tramp Juggler”, had appeared in seven successive annual productions of the Broadway revue-spectacle Follies from 1915 through 1921 and, as a variety artiste, had taken part in comedy sketches, but, until Poppy, had not sustained a full-length dramatic role. Fields was most notable for his intentional juggling “accidents”, “unintentionally” dropping a ball or a hat or a balancing stick, then abruptly recovering the errant prop, the hat kicked from the floor onto his head, the ball slammed to the floor only to flip into a coat pocket or back into the rotating circle of juggled objects, the fallen stick to rise a foot or elbow. Fields likewise juggled cigar boxes and, keeping three or more in the air, could switch outer boxes from left to right or high to low, always maintaining a centre box hovering directly in front of him. Fields would then throw all boxes into the air and, manoeuvering an unseen elastic string, cause them all to land in a neat stack. We see fragments of these beloved routines in two episodes of the film where Sally and McGargle appear onstage together, but Griffith subverts these moments, pushing Fields into the soft-focus background and foregrounding the egregious Dempster. Only the combined miracles of video and the replay-buttons allow us to savour these brief traces of Fields’ glory. Poppy’s script was loosely structured, giving Fields the character of a mendacious, cowardly, self-aggrandising, and only occasionally principled rascal, but also providing narrative gaps into which Fields might insert these practised juggling routines or moments of improvised comedy. When Poppy was performed elsewhere than 185

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Broadway, the role of McGargle was allocated to other variety artistes, often those who played implausible homemade musical instruments. Fields’ xylophone playing is an echo of such alternative casting. Although Griffith misuses Fields, he makes amends by altering the setting of Poppy – not so much a carnival (although it is called that) as a genteel fête patronised by the gentry, nouveau-riche, and middle class of a village in Connecticut’s commuter belt – to a more robust and demotic environment. Griffith, perhaps recalling that the Gaiety Circus Girl was praised for the gritty-yet-glittery realism of an entire act in the ring and for the variety and skill of the acts presented there, initially shifts Sally of the Sawdust to a working circus, a one-ring “mudshow” tank-towning through Western Pennsylvania (for instance, the coal fields of West Virginia) with parades, caged lion, obedient elephants, tired voltige acts, and a sleazy midway where such grifters as McGargle and his gambling cohorts and adversaries congregate and prey upon each other. Only belatedly does he revert to the local fête, but then uses this setting to underline the shallowness and vast wealth of the community in which Sally will eventually settle. Griffith knows that these two worlds are set far apart. Griffith also makes substantial and improving alterations to Sally of the Sawdust’s plot: whereas Poppy’s identity and her position as the local heiress are revealed by McGargle to the inhabitants of Green Meadow at the end of the first act, Griffith shifts his disclosure of Sally’s identity to the latter moments of his film. The effect is twofold. Suspense as to whether Sally will be reunited with her family is maintained, but, more importantly, the character of McGargle remains ambiguous. His paternal concern for Sally is undiminished, but his uncertainty whether to restore her to her family and his protracted willingness to use Sally as a means to escape those he has bilked, encourage the audience to believe that the pair will depart Green Meadow with Sally none the wiser and her fortune unclaimed. There is a further clue to Griffith’s attitude to his principal theatrical source: the film’s incidental music. Some of Poppy’s vocal numbers by Stephen Jones and Arthur Samuels were published in dance-band arrangements and piano reductions for domestic consumption and enjoyed some popularity apart from the musical throughout the early 1920s, yet none of these tunes find their way into the finished film. Philip Carli, who reconstructed and recorded the piano soundtrack for the Kino video of Sally of the Sawdust, reports that not a trace of the Jones-Samuels score was used either by Louis Silvers, who regularly scored for Griffith, or by James C. Bradford, who provided the more than ninety musical cues from Silvers’ orchestral score. Griffith, perhaps more than slightly embarrassed by his choice of Poppy, chose to put some distance between his source and his finished film, changing title, the names of characters, locales, and even plot. Poppy was consigned to history. David Mayer

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612 FAMOUS PLAYERS-LASKY

THAT ROYLE GIRL Alternate title: D.W. Griffith’s “That Royle Girl” Filming date: 6 July–20 October 1925 Location: Famous Players studio, Astoria, New York; exteriors: Chicago; Flushing, New York; Jackson Heights, New York; Douglastown, New York; 92nd Street Ferry, Astoria, New York Presented by: Adolph Zukor, Jesse L. Lasky Producer: D.W. Griffith Distribution: Paramount Pictures New York premiere: 10 January 1926, Strand Theatre Release date: 7 December 1925 Release length: ten or eleven reels, 10,253 feet Copyright date: 8 December 1925 (LP22094) Director: D.W. Griffith Screenplay: Paul Schofield Source: That Royle Girl, the serial (from December 1924) by Edwin Balmer in Hearst’s International magazine and Cosmopolitan (through July 1925); published as a novel, New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1925 Camera: Harry Fischbeck, Hal S. Sintzenich Assistant to Hal S. Sintzenich: Joe Low Assistant cameramen: Arthur De Titta, George Peters, William (“Bill”) Miller, Charles Gilson, J. Roy Hunt, George Webber Art director: Charles M. Kirk Film editor: James Smith Cast: Carol Dempster (Joan Daisy Royle [The Royle Girl]); W.C. Fields (Her father); James Kirkwood (Calvin Clarke [Deputy district attorney]); Harrison Ford (Fred Ketlar [King of Jazz]); Marie Chambers (Adele Ketlar); Paul Everton (George “Three-G” Baretta); George Rigas (His henchman); Florence Auer (Baretta’s “girl”); Ida Waterman (Mrs. Clarke, Calvin’s mother); Alice Laidley (Clarke’s fiancée); Dorothea Love (Lola Neeson); Dore Davidson (Elman); Frank Allworth (Oliver, newspaper reporter); Bobby Watson (Hofer); Mary Meeker; Paul Gilbert; Alice Weaver and the George White’s Scandals (dancers); Miss Case (Stand-in for Carol Dempster); in shooting rehearsals (actual inclusion in cast is uncertain): Dore Davidson, Bobby Watson Archival sources: FILM – none known. MUSIC – George Eastman House, cue sheet NOTE: The production history of the film is discussed by J.B. Kaufman, “‘It Was Always Funny Working With Fields’: Producing Sally of the Sawdust and That Royle Girl”, Griffithiana, vol. 21, nos. 62–63, May 1998, pp. 39–79. Daisy Royle [is] a product of the slums, daughter of a lazy drunken morally weak confidence man and a sickly mother who eases her suffering with drugs. A frail, delicate type but, forced to look out for herself, she grows up a mixture of hoydenish tomboyishness [sic] and wistfulness, innocent of the world’s evils and finding inspiration and solace in confiding her sorrows to the statue of her ideal, Lincoln. After many hard knocks, she becomes a mannequin and gets in with a fast jazzy set, falling in love with Ketler [sic] [,] an orchestra leader who has separated from his wife.

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Mrs. Ketler is murdered. Ketler is convicted on circumstantial evidence and Daisy is involved. Clarke, the district attorney, who looks down on girls of Daisy’s type is strangely attracted to her, and although she does not love Ketler she determines to save him as she knows he was with her at the time of the murder. Learning from a rival gangster that Baretta, a gang leader, is the murderer, with the aid of a newspaper friend she attracts Baretta and plays upon the jealousy of his sweetheart until in a quarrel the truth comes out. Daisy and her friend are captured by the gangsters and imprisoned in a cellar. A storm which develops into a cyclone wrecks the building and Clarke finds her. Convinced that he has misjudged her and unable longer to fight down his love, he takes her in his arms, while Ketler, who has proved a cad goes back to his old haunts. C.S. Sewell, The Moving Picture World, January 23, 1926, p. 342

Joan Daisy Royle, an idealistic youngster living in Chicago’s South Side, wants the man in her life, nightclub bandleader Frank Ketlar, to give up jazz in order to become a serious composer. But when Ketlar’s estranged wife is murdered, Ketlar is still the Jazz King and becomes the defendant in a sensational trial. In the courtroom, Joan meets aristocratic district attorney, Calvin Clarke, who though secretly attracted to Joan, humiliates her on the witness stand and gets Ketlar convicted. Convinced that the real murderer is a gangster named Three-G Baretta, Joan disguises herself as a party girl, and along with her loveable wastrel of a father, infiltrates the gangcontrolled nightclub. She gets the evidence she needs, but when her identity is revealed, is pursued across the city rooftops. A cyclone erupts and destroys the nightclub letting Joan escape through the whirling debris. Together with the district attorney, Joan reaches the governor in time to stay Ketlar’s execution. But she has discovered Ketlar’s superficiality and as Ketlar goes off with a chorus girl, Joan finds true love with the principled prosecutor.

With That Royle Girl, Griffith entered mainstream assembly line production full bore. Even his low-budget potboilers for Artcraft and his Mamaroneck programmers – The Girl Who Stayed at Home, Scarlet Days, The Idol Dancer, and One Exciting Night – had been marketed and passed through the exhibition pipeline with more care than this. And because it was cofinanced by United Artists, Sally of the Sawdust, Griffith’s first Paramount contract film, at least permitted Griffith to choose the script and import his own cast. But That Royle Girl was in every respect a Paramount contract film. Except for Dempster, the cast was assembled entirely from the roster of Paramount’s contract players (even Fields, the Ziegfeld star, was part of Paramount’s stable, albeit a highly paid one), the script chosen by the front office, and the crew assembled from the Paramount pool. Griffith treated it literally as a means to an end – contract filler that, if reasonably successful, would help him toward the financing of his dream project an epic production of Bartley Campbell’s yesteryear plantation hit, The White Slave. Griffith’s name was still prominently featured in the advertising, but mainly the film was sold as a crime thriller with a hodge-podge of up-to-date sensations: THEY SAID IT WOULD NEVER BE PLAYED IN MARYLAND! BUT HERE IT IS – D.W. Griffith’s “That Royle Girl”. JAZZ: Chicago. The Loop. Glittering Michigan Boulevard. Jazz babies. The jazz belt. Packed with Pep. COMEDY: Carol Dempster and W.C. Fields (the new screen comedy genius), the inimitable pair of Sally of the Sawdust. THRILLS: Fast roaring Chicago. The cyclone. The chase. Only the master hand of Griffith could have made it.

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Dempster as Daisy Royle, a flapper who reads books, keeps a diary, and idealizes Abraham Lincoln, was made to sound like Lorelei Lee, then at the start of her long career as the diamond-digging philosopher Anita Loos was turning into a household name in her stories for Harper’s Bazaar. Assorted “sayings” of Daisy Royle were quoted in each ad to suggest the spice and wit of a dizzy ingénue. The heroine came across as something of a bizarre, peculiarly Griffithian hybrid: an old-fashioned flapper who is appropriately torn between a new-fashioned “Jazz King” and an Ivy League aristocratic district attorney. Judging from his chitchat with the press, Griffith took the assignment in stride. The production went smoothly – a week of location shooting in Chicago in July 1925, then another four weeks in Astoria. Trouble came only toward the end of the filming when Griffith was stuck for a finish. Edwin Balmer had not finished the magazine serial on which the film is based by the time Griffith started production, and when the final episode did appear – in the July 1925 issue of Cosmopolitan – Griffith found it unusable. He quickly cobbled together a last-minute rescue that recycled the tornado sequence in One Exciting Night, but, ever the showman and eager to put his own stamp on a formula picture that he now called “very lame”, he devised a spectacular finale that drove the film significantly over budget. A production still reproduced in Richard Koszarski’s The Astoria Studio and Its Fabulous Films (p. 112) shows nineteen Paramount cameramen with nothing but goggles to protect them from wind machines. Koszarski cites a Paramount press release claiming it took four days to sweep the leaves and dust out of the studio; by the time the sequence was finished, Griffith had created a storm that tore apart three city blocks worth of sets. The cyclone was widely praised (Sisk in Variety [January 13, 1926] called it and the “melo finish” the film’s two redeeming features; and the man at the San Francisco Examiner [December 1, 1925] claimed “What that black funnel does couldn’t even be hinted at in screaming headlines”). But otherwise the critics were lukewarm and, except in Los Angeles, That Royle Girl died at the box office. The intelligentsia who had been gunning for Griffith ever since the box-office success of Way Down East swooped down on this one with talons extended. Robert Sherwood in Life (February 4, 1926) called it a “wild, reckless melodrama” that “exhausted some twelve reels of dreary celluloid”. T.S. at The New Yorker, monocle firmly in place, tried the humorous approach: With “That Royle Girl” now decorating the front mural of the Strand, Mr. David Wark Griffith, saintly showman, established himself beyond all shadow of doubt as the magnified Samuel Shipman of the cinema. He is indisputably the grand master of moralistic-melodramatic balderdash. He has the corner of treacle, mush, and trash and automatically is out of our set. Not that we are against melodrama, if done strictly in terms of blood and thunder by a James Cruze, but when it is doled out in huge unappetizing chunks all plastered and dripping with pure moral flapdoodle, it gets boring and irritating to the point of nausea. It begins to affect us like some noxious stimulant administered against our will in large doses. So we usually sit writhing in our seat, unable to escape into the fresh air, aching to leap up and either destroy or embrace the screen; to write to the Times; to strangle a great-uncle; or to call up ex-Mayor Hylan and condole with him. […] Finally, if Mr. W.C. Fields, who has the eye-opener of a part in this, sticks to Mr. Griffith he will surely be fired by Mr. Ziegfeld as being no comedian. (T.S., “The Current Cinema”, The New Yorker, January 16, 1926, pp. 26–27)

The dailies were kinder, but the consensus was that Griffith’s search for high moral purpose slowed down a film about jazz, gangsters, bootleg liquor, and nightclubs. Conversely, Griffith loyalists found the new material vulgar or inconsequential. 189

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Awfully sorry, Mr. Griffith, but I don’t like “THAT ROYLE GIRL”. Balmer’s interesting story comes to the screen hectic, trashy, and improbable melodrama. Cheap and unreal as it is, one finds it hard to believe that Griffith was the director. It is absolutely NOT in the Griffith style. (Mae Tinee in The Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1925) It has been recklessly peppered with hokum and ten-twent’-thirt’ effects – and that goes for the acting too. With the exception of W.C. Fields, there is nobody in the cast who has a sincere moment – no, not one. Miss Dempster whom I usually like immensely, seemed to me the essence of affectation and if she ever goes through another picture wagging her forefingers as she does in this one I think she will drive me mad. (The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 12, 1926)

Variety, even more critical of Dempster, called it “the poorest thing Griffith has turned out in a great many years” (January 13, 1926). The film had its champions, but they saw it as no more than lightly likeable. Behind the jazz, crime, and lurid trial, The Los Angeles Evening Herald (20 January 1926) saw familiar Griffith patterns that had become quaintly old-fashioned: The modern girl is vindicated again....Taking the picture as melodrama, and that is all anyone could take it to be, it is good entertainment for those who like to hiss the villain, cheer the hero and weep for the heroine.

Idwal Jones of the San Francisco Examiner (December 5, 1925) called it: melodrama de luxe … real gun stuff served up with class. Griffith made it, and his brand is visible on every yard as it unfurls on the Imperial [Theatre] screen. He laid himself out to do a regular thriller, peeled off his coat, and got something fuller of action than a battle royal in the glassworks district ...

Part of the old-fashion charm was the sheer proliferation of chases and narrow escapes. The Bear’s Head – an inn with twice as many trick doors as slammed in The Bat. There is a delirium of doors, escapes, spies, plug-ugly waiters, and double-crossers. The general effect is of a threering circus. In the nick of time she phones in the confession to headquarters, but before the police come, a cyclone happens. ... [Audiences …] will thrill to the hairbreadth escape of the beautiful heroine from the collapsing storm cellar and the “Gorilla” beside whom Gyp the Blood and Lefty Louie were infants in arms. (ibid.)

The surprise is that Dempster, the Variety review aside, generally came off better than Fields, who was generally written off as tiresome. W.C. Fields frequently gives one a little too much of his comical conduct. One is prepared to laugh and enjoy a scene in which he is punched and laid low, but when the same thing occurs seven or eight times it loses its humor. (The New York Times, January 11, 1926) In a vain effort to make a comedy, Griffith has dragged in W.C. Fields as the girl’s father, but he doesn’t belong in the picture, no matter how you look at it. He has nothing to do, and does it just like a man with nothing to do would do it. (Variety, January 13, 1926) There is subtlety and delicacy in his management ... except in the attempts at comedy with W.C. Fields, who shows up pitifully in this film after being so genuinely comic in Sally. One would say

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if he doesn’t do better hereafter, FP-L’s $5,000 a week is wasted. (George C. Warren, “Griffith Film Masterpiece”, The San Francisco Chronicle, December 5, 1925) W.C. Fields with his pale derby, juggling tricks, and comedy, does exactly the sort of business he did in “Sally,” light and rather inconsequential. (San Francisco Examiner, December 5, 1925)

Griffith might have borne the criticism, but the poor box-office returns stung. Looking back at the film in the wake of The Sorrows of Satan, his subsequent big-budget Paramount disaster that put an end to all Griffith’s hopes for an independent feature, Griffith became bitter about That Royle Girl, arguing that its failure was not his fault. He complained that he had been forced to make it. According to a letter he wrote Adolph Zukor, I begged Mr. Lasky to let me get out of doing this picture as I did not think I could make the right kind of picture out of it…. I afterwards discovered that this story had been turned down by other directors and also learned that it had been purchased before the last chapters had been finished…. The result [was] that I was forced to do the best I could with a very lame idea. (Griffith to Zukor, November 10, 1926, in The D.W. Griffith Papers)

It’s difficult to imagine from the reviews what the film might look like today. The seduction scene Robert Sherwood describes as “the [hammiest] camera effect that it has ever been my privilege to witness” sounds demented enough to be intriguing: Miss Carol Dempster, about to sacrifice that which is dearer than life itself, suddenly pauses at the brink of iniquity – the scene fades to a close-up of Abraham Lincoln – and then dissolves back to Miss Dempster returning resolutely to the strait and narrow path. (Life, February 4, 1926, p. 87)

But another line in Sherwood’s review hints that Griffith had also caught the wave of 1920s xenophobia. In Edwin Balmer’s original story, the patrician district attorney that Daisy Royle falls in love with is a xenophobic snob, fearful that Chicago is being taken over by immigrant rabble. He longs for stronger deportation laws and considers marriage an opportunity to strengthen the country’s old blood: He must marry. If not for himself, then for them, for their blood and heritage, for their duties and their traditions, for the sake of the home and all the people of the past who had made him, he must take a wife and have children. (“That Royle Girl”, Cosmopolitan, April 1925)

Griffith apparently preserved at least something of this. This, at least, is how I interpret Sherwood’s cryptic comment: There are overtones in That Royle Girl which are not particularly pleasant; they have been apparent in all the Griffith pictures, from The Birth of a Nation on, but never before to such an obvious extent. (ibid.)

A collection of stills from That Royle Girl survives at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that document a scene where Dempster disguises herself as a chorus girl to spy on the gangsters who have framed the “Jazz King” for the murder of his unfaithful wife. What stands out – aside from Dempster in a platinum blonde wig, enormous string boa, and jetblack silk hot pants – is William Cameron Menzies’ fantastical set. Menzies has designed the 191

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nightclub as an ultra-manufactured Art Nouveau fantasy decorated with Egyptian bird gods and an enormous gypsum statue. A Pharaoh sits on a block decorated with hieroglyphs, presiding over a shiny dance floor and musicians dressed in snappy tuxes. The streamline effect couldn’t be more remote from Belshazzar’s Hall of Babylon. Instead, it’s a reminder of the slick studio professionalism that marks the Paramount and Art Cinema Griffith productions, which are full of bravura effects and witty moments, but which also bury what had been distinctive in Griffith’s work. Russell Merritt

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613 FAMOUS PLAYERS-LASKY

THE SORROWS OF SATAN Filming date: 1 March–16 September 1926 Location: Famous Players studio, Astoria, New York Presented by: Adolph Zukor, Jesse L. Lasky Producer: D.W. Griffith Associate Producer (Eastern studio): William Le Baron Distributor: Paramount Pictures New York premiere: 12 October 1926, George M. Cohan Theatre Release date: 5 February 1927 Release length: nine reels, 8,691 ft. Copyright date: 7 February 1927 (LP23647) Director: D.W. Griffith Screenplay: Forrest Halsey Adaptation: John Russell, George Hull Source: The Sorrows of Satan; or The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire, the novel (1895) by Marie Corelli Photographers: Harry Fischbeck, Arthur De Titta Art director: Charles M. Kirk Film editor: Julian Johnson Titles: Julian Johnson Miniatures: Fred Waller, Jr. Cast: Adolphe Menjou (Prince Lucio de Riminez [Rimanez]); Ricardo Cortez (Geoffrey Tempest); Lya de Putti (Princess Olga Godovsky); Carol Dempster (Mavis Clare [Claire]); Ivan Lebedeff (Amiel); Marcia Harris (Landlady); Lawrence D’Orsay (Earl of Elton [Lord Elton]); Nellie Savage (Dancing girl); Dorothy Hughes (Mavis’ chum); Josephine Dunn, Dorothy Nourse, Jeanne Morgan Archival sources: FILM – George Eastman House, 16mm acetate positive (William K. Everson/New York University Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm acetate fine grain master (from 35mm acetate negative, printed ca. 1960 from 35mm nitrate positive). MUSIC – George Eastman House, cue sheet; Library of Congress (The Museum of Modern Art Collection), cue sheet (typescript, carbon), 5 pages; microfilm edition: Library of Congress, Music 3236, Item 712 We see a garret bedroom. Geoffrey Tempest is typing a manuscript. Looking over his shoulder we notice a line about Lucifer disputing the word of God. For this sin he is being cast from Heaven. A Voice says that each soul which offers resistance, entitles him to an hour of peace within the Gates of Paradise. Geoffrey completes his work and goes down the hall to Mavis Claire, another struggling writer. In a shabby Bohemian restaurant, they drink to the success of his novel. Prince de Rimanez Enters Next day, his publisher tells Geoffrey that the public isn’t interested in supernatural beings. What they want is “sex”. Discouraged, he leaves the office and meets Prince Lucio de Rimanez, a mysterious nobleman. The latter takes the youth to a sumptuous hotel, saying he has news for him.

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Slightly affected by the wine, Tempest is transfixed at the sight of a lovely woman, Princess Olga, who enters with her father. Rimanez informs Geoffrey that he has been made sole heir to twenty-five million dollars by a forgotten uncle. The Prince also makes mention of the fact that Olga’s parent is seeking a wealthy husband for his daughter. The boy is overwhelmed by the prospect. A Parting With Mavis To avoid a painful parting with Mavis, Geoffrey writes a note. Amiel, Rimanez’ secretary, delivers it. She can’t realize that their love idyl [sic] is over. Tempest is introduced to a life of ease and luxury. His courtship of the Princess is successful and there is a spectacular wedding. It is in these scenes that an idea is “planted” – Rimanez possesses some strange, supernatural power – that he is Satan. Geoffrey’s Marriage Unhappy Married life proves a failure for Geoffrey. While he doesn’t suspect Olga’s adoration of Lucio, he soon discovers her to be a sham and a fake. One day, dining with some wealthy friends, he sees Mavis, forlorn and poorly clad. She is with some sympathetic associates. As the girl leaves, Tempest rises to follow. Rimanez warns the writer that if he returns to Mavis, he will strip him of all his riches. “Do you know who I am?” Lucio shouts. Lucio Disclosed as Lucifer The walls part. Rimanez strides toward the lovers. No longer mortal, he is now disclosed as the mighty Lucifer. Geoffrey appears an insignificant human figure next to this apparition. The lights dim and Lucio regains his normal shape. Geoffrey is firm. He will return to Mavis. The Youth falls in her arms. Slowly, another change comes. We are back in his bedroom. Tempest has finished his story. It is morning. Mavis enters and Geoffrey speaks of his wonderful theme. Paramount press sheet synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, February 7, 1927, LP23647 [stamped with date February 9, 1927]

A prologue shows the war in Heaven. Satan is expelled and told that he can spend an hour at the gates of Paradise for every soul that resists his temptations. As the main story begins, Geoffrey Tempest and Mavis Clare are struggling writers living in tiny apartments opposite each other. They share a meager meal at a local café; later Geoffrey seduces Mavis. The next morning she regrets this, but he says he will marry her, and they buy a license. Geoffrey goes to pick up some money from his editor and is told that his book reviews are no longer acceptable. Mavis sells her first story and prepares dinner for Geoffrey to celebrate their happiness and good fortune. Geoffrey returns home and is visited by Prince Lucio, Satan, who claims to be an old friend of the family bringing news of a large inheritance for Geoffrey. He lures Geoffrey out to a fancy restaurant, where Lucio introduces him to the exotic Princess Olga. Despite initially wishing to return to Mavis, Geoffrey succumbs to Olga and marries her. Prince Lucio encounters Mavis at a party and attempts to lure her into evil. When she resists him, he is pleased to have earned his hour of happiness. As Mavis continues to write her stories, Geoffrey’s marriage turns sour, until he witnesses Olga declaring her love to Prince Lucio. When Geoffrey confronts Olga, she commits suicide. Geoffrey, in a rage, condemns God, and Prince Lucio reveals himself as Satan. He pursues Geoffrey back to Mavis’ apartment, where her prayer drives Satan away. 194

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It is easy to dismiss The Sorrows of Satan as one of the artistic and financial failures among Griffith’s late features. It certainly has the earmarks of a project that was not near to the director’s heart. The executives at Famous Players-Lasky essentially pressed him to adapt Marie Corelli’s old-fashioned allegorical best-seller of 1895. The finished film was taken from him and reworked in ways of which Griffith disapproved. The Sorrows of Satan failed spectacularly at the box office, and antagonism between the director and studio officials led him to leave Famous Players -Lasky. The rest of his career was a driftage further out of the mainstream of Hollywood filmmaking; Griffith produced his own last films and distributed them through United Artists (for an account of the film’s making and release, see Schickel, D.W. Griffith: An American Life, pp. 517–28). To be sure, The Sorrows of Satan displays some of Griffith’s least appealing tendencies, most notably toward the literalization of the struggle between good and evil, in this case through the personification of Satan as Prince Lucio. What praise the film receives from historians tends to focus on the sets and lighting and on the performances of Adolphe Menjou as Prince Lucio and Carol Dempster as the heroine, Mavis. The film, however, bears intriguing traces of what would appear to be a heavy influence from contemporary German cinema. The slow pacing, the static staging, the slightly greater variety of unusual camera angles, the frequent placement of the actors with their backs to the camera, and the tendency to create parallels and contrasts between situations by means of settings all give this film a distinctly Germanic look. The muted, almost motionless performances of the actors in some scenes specifically echo Kammerspiel films of the 1920s. Some of these traits are at odds with the norms of Hollywood cinema that were firmly established by the mid-1920s. Although American filmmakers did pick up some of the flashier aspects of German cinema, most notably the freely moving (entfesselte) camera, the ponderous rhythms of many imported films were quite alien to Hollywood’s typical fast-paced approach. If Griffith was deliberately playing with a gradual, quiet development of the drama – and these devices are too systematically used to suggest that they resulted from accident or incompetence – he was at least intermittently successful. The result was not calculated, however, to endear the film to audiences used to livelier fare. Ironically, Isn’t Life Wonderful, though partially shot in Germany, bore almost no trace of evidence that Griffith was aware of what was going on in that country’s filmmaking. However, he presumably learned something of it in the interval. Stylistically, the most obvious influences would come from Ewald André Dupont’s Varieté (1925) – assuming he saw that film. At first glance, the timing would seem to be wrong. Varieté was released in America in July 1926, achieved a considerable success, and made a star of Lya de Putti, who plays Princess Olga in The Sorrows of Satan. Griffith shot The Sorrows of Satan beginning on 1 March 1926, and he was editing by the time Varieté came out. (Further editing by the studio went on after Griffith turned in the film, which premiered in mid-October.) Given that Paramount, Famous PlayersLasky’s distribution firm, released it in the United States, however, one might expect that Griffith could have seen it earlier. Studios did often show innovative imported films to their employees to keep them abreast of stylistic and technical developments. Still, even if Griffith did not see Varieté, the influence of other German cinema seems to pervade The Sorrows of Satan. For example, the scene of Satan chasing the hero, Geoffrey, through the streets to the heroine’s apartment shows the pursuer as a menacing shadow. The shadow of his arm and claw-like hand that falls across the heroine’s door recalls the climax of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) so closely that it seems very unlikely to be a coincidence. Griffith’s quasi-Germanic style in The Sorrows of Satan is matched by a narrative that is 195

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very peculiar by the standards of typical classical Hollywood films. The prologue set in Heaven, where a brief battle occurs and Lucifer is expelled and renamed Satan, ends with a peculiar premise. A divine ultimatum is given to Satan: “FOREVER THOU SHALT TEMPT THE SONS OF MEN TO SIN AGAINST THE GOD WHO MADE YOU BOTH! ONLY WHEN ALL MEN TURN FROM THEE, CANST THOU RESUME THY GLORIOUS PLACE AT GOD’S RIGHT HAND – YET FOR EVERY SOUL THAT RESISTS THEE, THOU SHALT HAVE ONE HOUR AT THE GATES OF PARADISE!” Such an offer would

seem to give Satan little incentive to make really concerted efforts to tempt people, since his failure earns him redemption, short-term or permanent. Once the prologue in Heaven ends, a long stretch of action goes by without the two main characters, Geoffrey and Mavis, conceiving specific goals or encountering setbacks. We know the basic situation from the start: both are struggling writers at the ends of their sparse resources. Geoffrey anticipates that tomorrow he will receive a check for some reviews he has written. Even when the main dramatic action of this first section of the film – Geoffrey’s seduction of Mavis – occurs and she regrets having given in to him, he immediately agrees to marry her, assuring her that he loves her even more now. Given that she is in love with him, this seems to solve the seduction problem, and we see them happily purchasing the marriage license. The storyline does not even involve Mavis becoming pregnant, as one would expect in a situation like this. Shortly after this she sells her first story and seems poised for at least modest success as a writer. This state of affairs seems more suited to the end of a film than to its beginning. Satan does have a goal pending, yet a long time elapses after the prologue, during which there is no reference to him or his mission. Certainly there is no clue yet that one of these main characters will become his victim. By the time Prince Lucio appears on the scene, we may not be concentrating much on that aspect of the plot, having become more involved with the characters’ plights. The lengthy section of the film up to the seduction does contain some ellipses, but its slow rhythm and lack of important incident make it almost give the impression of mundane, everyday life playing out in real time. Relatively late in the action, however, Prince Lucio arrives to break up this undramatic state of affairs by tempting Geoffrey into deserting Mavis for wealth and the beautiful Princess Olga. Even now the usual sorts of goals that protagonists typically conceive in Hollywood films fail to materialize. Once Olga seduces Geoffrey, their marriage quickly follows. Thus Geoffrey has no goal, Satan is apparently not pursuing his goal, and although Mavis obviously wants Geoffrey back, she makes no attempt to do anything about it, merely watching sadly from afar as Geoffrey and Olga leave for their honeymoon and then sitting in her apartment plugging away at her stories. The criteria for Satan’s success or failure are unclear. How long do his victims have to decide whether or not to resist him? We might expect Lucio to move on from Geoffrey to tempt others – and he may indeed be off somewhere luring other people into sin – but there is no hint of it. Instead, he seemingly moves in with Geoffrey, presumably to keep an eye on him. The next temptation attempt does not begin until Lucio sees Mavis at a party thrown by a successful artist. It would have been quite simple to make one premise of this scene be that Satan has deliberately set out to make Mavis his next victim, arranging to encounter her at the party. The fact that he instead meets her there entirely by chance gives his offer to her an arbitrary feel. Indeed, in keeping with the absurd premise that his failure as a tempter will earn him an hour at the gates of Heaven, he does not seem to try very hard in his temptation of Mavis. This seems causally inconsistent with the fact that he had spent a great deal of time and effort to win Geoffrey over to evil. Lucio’s brief and half-hearted effort with Mavis also contrasts with Geoffrey’s very persistent attempts to seduce her, a process which is quite extended – and successful. This strange narrative, with its determined avoidance of serious conflict and actively pursued goals, often meshes rather well with the equally unconventional style of the film. 196

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One aspect of The Sorrows of Satan strongly suggests that Griffith had managed to see Varieté before its American release: the frequent placement of the actors with their backs to the camera. The notion that Emil Jannings could act with his back (most notably in the film’s frame story) was raised in reviews of the time (see George C. Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness, p. 380). There had in fact been many scenes placing actors with their backs to the camera in films from different nations, but the concept came to public attention with Varieté. Griffith certainly exploits it systematically in The Sorrows of Satan. In the pawnshop episode – arguably the best scene in the film – Griffith stages most of the action with Dempster and Cortez facing away from the camera. In the long-shot establishing view, they walk along the sidewalk, then pause and turn to gaze into the display window of a pawnshop. In the medium shot that follows, their bodies are angled slightly toward each other, so that we get a three-quarters rear view, with their faces partially visible. Here Geoffrey pulls out his watch and shows it to her, though the positioning of the actors hardly provides the best view for the spectator to see what he is doing. A title follows: “LOOK HERE – I CAN RAISE A LITTLE MONEY ON MY OLD WATCH”. The scene returns to the same framing, with Mavis shaking her head, presumably to indicate that she does not want to go into the shop with him. His furtive glances around the area suggest that they both are ashamed of being seen in such a place. There is a reasonably well-done match on the action of Geoffrey looking around as a cut leads to a new, tighter long shot of the pair from three-quarters rear, and he goes into the shop. The same medium-shot framing returns as Mavis faces directly away from the camera and looks into the shop window. A medium close-up shows what she sees, roughly from her point of view: a group of cups and saucers, including one with a flower painted on it. The point-of-view pattern is disturbed, however, when a second close shot displays the cups from a different angle – a clumsy way of handling Mavis’ viewing of the cups, and one which perhaps indicates one aspect of continuity editing that Griffith never wholly mastered. The same medium-shot framing of Mavis’ back returns, and Geoffrey comes out to join her. He is now seen in profile, she in three-quarters rear view once more. As he displays the money, both seem pleased at the amount, and, seeing her interest in the cup, Geoffrey re-enters the shop to buy it. The same tight long shot frames her again from the rear, waiting for him. A cut-in shows her yet again in a three-quarters rear view as a hand appears in the window, and she guides it to the specific cup she wants. (The hand extending into the scene from an unseen space had long been a signature technique of Griffith’s.) This new framing is calculated to place her again with her back squarely to the camera as she turns toward the door in anticipation. A long shot shows Geoffrey coming out to join her and her reaching for the package he carries. In the next shot, a cut-in to a medium view of the couple in profile, Mavis unwraps the cup, and a woman walks into the shot from the foreground, pausing to peer at the package and then exiting frame left. Mavis and Geoffrey turn briefly, startled, to look after her. (Passersby looking at Mavis become a puzzling little motif. In a later scene, the musician who lives in her apartment building looks curiously at her as he walks past, and when Mavis chases the car taking Geoffrey away, a strange cut moves inside a building to view her past a woman looking out a window. These actions may simply be present to impart an air of realism.) The pair then return their attention to the cup, looking delightedly at it before he re-wraps it, and they begin to turn toward the right. A reasonable good match on action (never one of Griffith’s strengths) links to another long shot as they go out right with their arms around each other. This charming and carefully structured scene serves at least two functions. In terms of narrative causality, it simply explains how the couple has the money to purchase a wedding license when they had been seen as completely broke the night before. It also introduces the 197

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motif of the teacup. One technique that was increasingly being used in classical Hollywood films during the 1920s was the emblematic visual motif (such as the Crackerjacks box in Fred Newmeyer’s and Sam Taylor’s Girl Shy [1924], or the small teddy bear in William A. Wellman’s Wings [1929]). In The Sorrows of Satan, Geoffrey and Mavis will be parted for much of the rest of the film, and Mavis basically does little during a long stretch of the action but sit in her room typing or longing for Geoffrey. The cup is obviously linked with him, and she gazes at it occasionally, giving her some business to enliven these essentially static scenes. Thus the pawnshop sequence – which might seem less important than the screen time allotted to it would suggest – actually occupies a significant place in the plot. By the way, one might speculate that the inclusion of the nosy passer-by might reflect some influence from Ernst Lubitsch as well. From 1924 on, reviewers were commenting on the “Lubitsch touches” in that director’s films, and Griffith might have thought that adding little extraneous actions like this one could enliven his scenes. The pawnshop scene also demonstrates clearly that Griffith knew exactly what he was doing by placing the actors with their backs to the camera in some scenes, and by extension that the surprisingly static scenes where the actors barely move is also part of the unusual, Germanic approach to performance in this film. The technique reappears more briefly in scenes like the one in which Geoffrey returns to the apartment building after losing his position as a reviewer. He pauses at the top of the stairs, his back directly to the camera, and apparently considers whether he should speak to Mavis. After a cut to Mavis putting her typewriter on her table, there is a return to Geoffrey, seen in a shot with virtually no movement. One of the film’s most noticeable aspects is its delicate, static approach to acting, going beyond “a certain underplayed naturalism”, as Richard Schickel has described it (op. cit., p. 520). A notable scene presents Prince Lucio in a room at an artist’s house during a party. He has just encountered Mavis for the first time, and he tries to tempt her into furthering her career by introducing her to a famous publisher – with the implication that some sort of sexual exchange would be involved. The close-up of Mavis looking at him is so static that it almost looks like a freeze frame. There are none of the expressions that typically pass across Griffith’s actresses’ faces in such situations. Mavis’ stare could simply imply that she is fascinated, even mesmerized, by the Prince. In the long shot that follows, again the “action” consists simply of the pair standing, staring at each other until Mavis takes one small step toward Lucio – again implying that she is under some sort of spell. Even after Mavis rejects the offer, however, the pair remain standing in stiff, formal poses for some time before she leaves. It is hard to imagine a Hollywood director (including Griffith in his earlier films) staging a climactic scene of satanic temptation and virtuous resistance without considerable use of facial expressions and gestures. The slow rhythm of the acting in such scenes looks peculiar in a U.S. context, but anyone who has watched a significant number of German films of the era – especially the first half of the 1920s – will find it familiar indeed. As far as Carol Dempster is concerned, much of the praise that this performance has drawn – it is generally considered one of her best – may result from the fact that she is so subdued here in comparison with past films. The tediously girlish skittishness that she displayed in Dream Street is gone, and to a considerable extent, so are the lingering close shots where she registers a changing series of emotions in the manner of the virtuoso turns by some of the Biograph actresses. In The Sorrows of Satan, when she receives her first check from a publisher, Dempster presses a handkerchief to her mouth, thus partially blocking our view as we watch the gradual look of joy that crosses her face as she realizes what has happened. The moment where Mavis sets the table in happy expectation of serving Geoffrey dinner includes her carefully placing the cup and saucer on the table. Given that she has just sold her first story and is waiting for her fiancé, we could easily imagine Dempster doing a bit of 198

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the skipping and hopping that so often signify Griffithian heroines’ joy, but again the performance avoids that. When Mavis looks into Geoffrey’s apartment and realizes that he is gone, Griffith holds on her puzzled reaction, but not nearly as long as one might expect from similar scenes in, say, Hearts of the World (1918). The subtlety that she attains here goes hand in hand with the nearly static staging of many scenes and with the frequent placement of the actors’ backs toward the camera. Along with the acting, Griffith’s use of settings in The Sorrows of Satan is unusual. They function in part to create systematic parallels and contrasts in a way that seems uncharacteristically precise for him. The early section of the film is remarkable for its resolute insistence on small, dark, boxy sets for Geoffrey’s and Mavis’ apartments and for the little café where they share a meager meal. All this creates a sense of the characters (and spectators) as trapped in this narrow little area, and helps pave the way for the dramatic revelation of the enormous interiors at the high-society restaurant and Geoffrey’s mansion that will come later in the film. Geoffrey’s and Mavis’ apartments are so alike in appearance, however, and they are lit and framed so similarly that they also create a series of graphic matches as Griffith intercuts shots of the two. In this way he compares their similar situations as struggling writers, and suggests that they are meant for each other despite Geoffrey’s lengthy desertion of Mavis. A simple contrast is created when Griffith cuts from Mavis’ apartment, with its Spartan bed and other furnishings, to the Princess’ bedroom in Geoffrey’s mansion, dominated by an absurdly tall four-poster bed. The sorts of parallels and contrasts emphasized by the sets also occur occasionally in the juxtaposition of scenes. Mavis receives notification of her first sale of a story directly before the scene in which Geoffrey’s editor tells him that his reviews are no longer suitable, thus cutting off his one tiny source of income. Much later, just after Geoffrey sits forlornly in his mansion saying Mavis’ name over and over, Mavis seems to go a bit delusional for a stretch and ends by saying “Geoffrey” over and over. This brief “mad scene” is fairly compelling, largely because of Dempster’s quiet performance. The editing displays Griffith’s usual strengths and weaknesses at this point in his career. He had largely mastered the 180-degree rule early on, and seldom violates screen direction in any of his features. He never had bothered to match position or action closely, and although there are some good matches in The Sorrows of Satan, there are some horrendous mismatches as well – as in the scene of the Princess descending the stairway during the wedding scene. Griffith also calls upon a device familiar from his films going back to the Biograph days. In the restaurant scene, Geoffrey stares offscreen left with an abstracted expression. A cut takes us to Mavis’ apartment, where she is preparing dinner for him, including her carefully placing the cup and saucer on the table. The scene then returns to the restaurant and Geoffrey. This technique, what one might term a mental eyeline match, serves in Griffith films to indicate that one character is thinking of another. At the same time, however, we are to assume that the scene apparently being seen in the character’s mind is also happening in reality. Mavis really is preparing the meal exactly as we see her doing, for later Geoffrey’s actions are intercut with hers, and the table is set exactly as it had been in Geoffrey’s “thoughts”. By the 1920s, the standard approach would be to show the character thinking and then a shot of what he or she remembers – but the shot would be a repeated one from an action that occurred earlier in the story. Thus, in standard usage, it is usually quite clear that the visualized thought is both a mental event – a remembrance – and a past real event. In Our Hospitality (Buster Keaton and John Blystone, 1923), Buster Keaton even plays on the convention for humor when the hero remembers his vision of the Southern mansion he had hoped he was inheriting. When he sees the shack that has actually been left to him, the shot of the mansion is repeated – and the house explodes. Griffith’s failure to adjust his technique in such ways 199

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helps give his late features an old-fashioned look. The scene in the restaurant in The Sorrows of Satan, however, does demonstrate Griffith’s ability to maintain proper screen direction. Just before this moment, Geoffrey had been looking off right toward the vampish Princess Olga, seated at a nearby table. In the shot that begins the series where Geoffrey thinks of Mavis, however, he has turned and faced off left, making it fairly clear that he is no longer looking at the Princess. Apart from the various systematic traits discussed above, The Sorrows of Satan contains isolated touches that are worth noting, including: the Princess’ little glance into her hand mirror as she sits dying from a self-administered dose of poison; Geoffrey’s pacing in and out of patches of light in his mansion at night, and Prince Lucio’s move into silhouette just before revealing his true form as Satan; the Princess’ use of her cigarette for a brief but vivid suggestion of fellatio as she flirts with Prince Lucio from a nearby table (Griffith attempting to out-De Mille De Mille?); Prince Lucio’s look of distaste as the priest makes the sign of the cross during the wedding ceremony. Finally, one has to like a film where the hero nearly goes to hell primarily because he writes book reviews that run counter to popular tastes. I have suggested that Griffith uses certain techniques in a systematic and unconventional way in The Sorrows of Satan. Such usage does not necessarily imply that it is a good film. It is an uneven film at best. Still, looking at it in the context of its period suggests that it should not be dismissed as quickly as historians usually do. Kristin Thompson

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614 COLUMBIA PICTURES CORPORATION

[SCREEN SNAPSHOTS] Archival title: Screen snapshots [Excerpts No. 5] Alternate archival title: [Unidentified John Jones No. 127, Screen snapshots] Filming date: December 1926 Location: Los Angeles Release date: 1927 Copyright date: not known Cast: William Boyd, Alan Hale, Claire Windsor, John Bowers, Victor McLaglen, Charlie Chaplin, Fred Niblo, Gilbert Roland, Norma Talmadge, D.W. Griffith, Edmund Lowe, Lilyan Tashman, Marion Davies, Corinne Griffith, Walter Morosco, Tony Moreno, George Bancroft, Mae Murray Archival sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate positive (AFI/John Jones Collection), incomplete

William Boyd and Alan Hale save a young woman from being crushed by a falling steel girder in a behind-the-scenes look at Skyscraper (Howard Higgin, 1928). Claire Windsor and John Bowers share a romantic moment on the set of The Opening Night (Edward H. Griffith, 1927). Hollywood stars, including D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Marion Davies, Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe, turn out for a glamorous film premiere.

Screen Snapshots (1922–58) was Columbia’s longest running short subject, and featured candid (if staged) glimpses of Hollywood at work and play. Although most issues included at least one segment devoted specifically to Columbia, the series did showcase both films and actors from other studios. In this episode, Griffith is shown attending a motion picture premiere with Fred Niblo, Norma Talmadge, and Gilbert Roland. The film is not named in the excerpt, but appears to be a December 1926 Los Angeles screening of Camille (Fred Niblo, 1927), for Niblo directed Talmadge and Roland. Griffith was in Los Angeles at the time to meet with Joseph Schenck about working again for United Artists. Camille did not have its New York premiere until April 1927, but sources indicate Griffith was in England then. Mike Mashon

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[D.W. GRIFFITH RETURNS TO LOS ANGELES] Filming date: 1927 Location: Los Angeles Release date: not released Length: one reel Copyright: not copyrighted Camera: not known On camera: D.W. Griffith, Joseph Schenk, Douglas Fairbanks, Erich von Stroheim, Estelle Taylor, Sid Grauman Archival sources: UCLA Film and Television Archive, 35mm acetate negative

This event followed Griffith’s humiliating withdrawal from Paramount after The Sorrows of Satan. Oddly enough, Cecil B. DeMille had left Paramount after an argument with Adolph Zukor over the same production. Unlike DeMille, Griffith didn’t want to make it, but Zukor insisted. The film turned out unsatisfactorily; it was very expensive and was a box-office disaster. So here is Griffith coming back to work in Hollywood for the first time since 1919, to receive this triumphal reception, laid on by Joseph Schenck to mark Griffith’s return to United Artists. Douglas Fairbanks and Erich von Stroheim are on hand to greet him, as, of course, is Joseph Schenck. Estelle Taylor and Sid Grauman can also be seen. The date is 1927 (The Drums of Love was made in 1927 and premiered in January 1928). This item was once available on 16mm from Blackhawk as Memories of Silent Stars No. 3: Personalities on Parade. Kevin Brownlow

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[D.W. GRIFFITH ON THE SET OF THE KING OF KINGS] Filming date: early 1927 Location: Los Angeles Release date: not known Camera: not known Cast: D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille Archival sources: UCLA Film and Television Archive, 35mm acetate negative

D.W. Griffith is seen with Cecil B. DeMille while looking at a film strip; a man in Arab costume stands nearby. The excerpt is reproduced in the documentary D.W. Griffith, Father of Film (Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, 1993). DeMille had tried to interest Griffith in joining his organization, but he politely declined. Griffith thought of The King of Kings as “a marvelous achievement”, and in later life said that people always thought he had made it. Kevin Brownlow

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617 FEATURE PRODUCTIONS CORP.

TOPSY AND EVA Filming date: Spring 1927 Location: United Artists studio, Los Angeles Distribution: United Artists Los Angeles premiere: 16 June 1927 Release date: August 1927 Release length: eight reels, 7,456 feet Copyright date: 13 July 1927 (LP24175) Director: Del Lord; additional scenes: D.W. Griffith Production consultant: Myron Selznick Continuity: Scott Darling Adaptation: Lois Weber Source: Topsy and Eva, the burlesque (1924) by Catherine Chisholm Cushing Camera: John W. Boyle Titles: Dudley Early Editor (revisions): D.W. Griffith Cast: Rosetta Duncan (Topsy); Vivian Duncan (Eva); Gibson Gowland (Simon Legree); Noble Johnson (Uncle Tom); Marjorie Daw (Marietta); Myrtle Ferguson (Aunt Ophelia); Nils Asther (George Shelby); Henry Victor ([Augustine] St. Claire) Archival sources: Library of Congress, 16mm acetate negative (Anonymous Collection); 16mm acetate positive (AFI/Jonathan Sonneborn Collection); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined) Topsy, the little black imp, is offered for sale at an auction of negroes of the Shelby estate by Simon Legree, and when no one is willing to bid for her, Eva St. Claire offers a solitary nickel and gets her. In company with Uncle Tom, a colored patriarch, and other slaves, Topsy is turned over to St. Claire’s sister Ophelia for correction and cleaning. Ophelia is from New England and hard to get along with and Topsy hates her instinctively. On Christmas Eve, St. Claire learns that his cotton crop has burned and he has no money with which to meet a note in the possession of Legree. George Shelby, whose estate the money-lender had foreclosed, offers to try and persuade Legree to extend the debt. While Shelby is on his mission, Marie[tt]a De Brie, his fiancée and the ward of Simon Legree, confronts the money-lender and tells him that she has found a will made out by her father which would entitle her to a huge fortune. Legree, who has always maintained that her father left her a pauper, sees his ill-gotten fortune disappearing and is on the point of doing his ward bodily harm when he sees Shelby arriving. He forces the girl into her rooms and locks the door behind her. Shelby’s plea for mercy is unavailing and Legree accompanies him back to St. Claire’s home, where he demands his money back or the slaves for whom the note was given. Not being able to pay, St. Claire is forced to yield his servants, Topsy included, and as Legree is driving off with them, Eva, who had become hysterical with grief over her friend’s departure, runs after the wagon and falls in the snow in a faint. She is taken back to the house and a doctor is summoned, who gravely announces that she can be restored to health only by the presence of Topsy. St. Claire and Shelby consult and the former gets out his family trinkets and gives them to Shelby, who leaves for the purpose of rebuying [sic] the slave girl.

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In the meantime, Topsy escapes from Legree and is chased by him and his servants up a tree close to Marietta’s window. When Topsy is within reaching distance Marietta hands her the will with instructions to get it to Shelby in a hurry. At this point, Legree breaks into the room, but as he reaches for Topsy she drops from the limb and falls into a snow bank. She escapes towards the river just as Shelby is driving in. Legree and Shelby engage in a fierce fight in Marietta’s room, but the heavier bulk of the shylock proves too much for Shelby and he is knocked unconscious. Legree is fearful that Topsy will succeed in getting away with the will and he orders the bloodhounds after her. Topsy is struggling against great drifts of snow when she espies a pair of skis and following a fast trip down a hill she lands onto a horse equipped with snowshoes, but her progress is slow. She is digging her mount out of the snow for the third time when she hears the baying of the hounds and decides to run. The dogs and Legree are almost up to her when she reaches the river’s edge. She steps onto a cake of ice and floats away. Legree follows her example and the two are jumping from one cake to another when the man slips into the icy waters and is carried over a waterfall. Topsy reaches land and wanders into a graveyard where a number of runaway slaves had sought refuge on hearing the dogs. She goes through a harrowing experience as the spooky figures of the fugitives flee before her, but she manages to get out and arrives at the St. Claire home just as hope for Eva’s recovery is abandoned. Topsy drops to her knees and prays for her friend’s recovery. “Oh, Lord,” she cries. “Don’t take little missy! Take me instead. You got plenty of white angels. Have a black one!” The prayer is answered and Eva revives and so happy is Ophelia over the miracle that she forgets herself and places Topsy in bed beside Eva. The pair soon fall asleep in an affectionate embrace. Press book synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, July 13, 1927, LP24175

Topsy, a young slave, is purchased at auction by Augustine St. Claire and becomes fast friends with his little daughter Eva. When St. Claire suffers a reversal of fortune, Topsy and other slaves are reclaimed by the cruel Simon Legree. But Topsy escapes from Legree and foils his other schemes, and the two girls are reunited.

If the quirky tastelessness of Topsy and Eva takes us by surprise today, it’s partly because the film evolved from a stage background which was well known in 1927, but is alien to today’s popular culture. By the 1920s Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been firmly entrenched in the American consciousness for a good seventy years. So familiar were its characters and situations that a burlesque musical-comedy version could be introduced on the stage without explanation. The theatrical version of Topsy and Eva, technically a new and entirely separate play, opened in 1924. The script by Catherine Chisholm Cushing recast parts of the original story with the eponymous child characters at the forefront of the action, as a vehicle for the fully-grown (if petite) Duncan sisters: glamorous, dimpled Vivian Duncan as Eva, and irrepressible Rosetta Duncan in blackface as Topsy. Critical reaction was mixed, and in some cases dumbfounded, but the show achieved some success in Chicago, where the Duncans enjoyed a strong fan base, and in New York. In 1927 First National agreed to produce a film version to cash in on that success, and incidentally to beat Universal’s lavishly mounted “legitimate” production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the screen. But the process of 205

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transforming what was essentially a series of vaudeville turns into a cohesive screen story was not a smooth one. Various writers and directors, including Lois Weber, were assigned to Topsy and Eva, despaired of the task, and washed their hands of it before it finally emerged at United Artists in the hands of veteran Sennett director Del Lord. Through his United Artists connection, Griffith was called in desperation at the last minute to save the film. According to a 1927 letter written by Raymond Klune, Griffith recut the majority of the picture and shot a considerable number of new scenes. Given this chaotic production history, the hybrid appearance of the finished film is hardly surprising. In some scenes, the producers’ original intention to record the stage Topsy and Eva on film is still evident. This especially applies to the sections featuring Myrtle Ferguson, reprising her stage role as Ophelia, and her byplay with impish Rosetta Duncan. Other passages are more resolutely cinematic. One scene, with a dramatically side-lit Gibson Gowland (as Legree) threatening Marjorie Daw over her inheritance, seems a deliberate reference to his earlier performance in Greed (1924). Today we can only speculate on Griffith’s contributions. The graveyard scene, with its patented Sennett “fright” gags, can probably be attributed to Lord (who retained sole directorial screen credit), while the occasional scenes of drama or pathos, and the three-way intercutting of the climactic chase, may well be Griffith’s work. As Variety put it (June 22, 1927), Griffith “was called in about 10 days before the picture got its initial showing to straighten things out. He no doubt did his best, but is probably not bragging about it”. As for the Duncans, they blithely disregarded the critics and continued to play Topsy and Eva on the stage for years afterward. As late as 1935 we can see them reviving the characters in a Vitaphone short, Surprise. J.B. Kaufman

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618 ART CINEMA CORP.

THE DRUMS OF LOVE Alternate title: Drums of Love (according to copyright records) Working title: Scarlet Apple; Dance of Life Filming date: September–November 1927; alternate ending: February 1928 Location: Art Cinema studio, Formosa Avenue, Los Angeles Presented by: D.W. Griffith Producer: D.W. Griffith Distribution: United Artists New York premiere: 24 January 1928, Liberty Theatre Release date: 31 March 1928 Release length: nine reels, 8,350 feet Copyright date: 13 April 1928 by Feature Productions, Inc. (LP25144); “Based on the historical incident in the life of Francesca da Rimini” Director: D.W. Griffith Production manager: Bobby North Assistant directors: Thornton Freeland, Herbert Sutch Adaptation: Gerrit J. Lloyd Source: “based on the historical experience of Francesca da Rimini” (subtitle on print) Photographer: Karl Struss Assistant photographers: Harry Jackson, G.W. Bitzer Set designer: William Cameron Menzies, Park French Set decoration: Casey Roberts Costumes: Alice O’Neill Film editor: James Smith Musical score: Charles Wakefield Cadman, Sol Cohen, Wells Hively Titles: Gerrit J. Lloyd, (uncredited:) D.W. Griffith Cast: Mary Philbin (Princess Emmanuella [Emanuella]); Lionel Barrymore (Duke Cathos de Alvia); Don Alvarado (Count Leonardo de Alvia); Tully Marshall (Bopi); William Austin (Raymond of Boston); Eugenie Besserer (Duchess de Alvia, Aunt to Cathos and Leonardo); Charles Hill Mailes (Duke de Granada); Rosemary Cooper (The Maid); Joyce Coad (The Little Sister) Archival sources: George Eastman House, 16mm acetate positive; Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate negative (“European” version); 35mm acetate positive (Mary Pickford Collection), r. 1 and 9; 16mm acetate positive (Mary Pickford Collection), with two separate endings. MUSIC – University of Minnesota (Arthur Kleiner Collection, Austrian Institute), unspecified parts (possibly compiled after the film’s initial release) Don Cathos de Alvia, a giant of a man, gnarled, lamed and stooped by war, rules with tyrannical sway over a large dominion. With him, in his battles and on great occasions of state, is his handsome brother, Leonardo. The two brothers are bound by a solemn oath of faith to strike death to anyone who will dishonor the name of their house. A great battle takes place between the forces of Cathos and the Duke de Granada. The latter is defeated and to save his head and the last remnants of his domain, he consents to give his daughter, Emanuella, in marriage to Cathos. As he is about to call for his bride-to-be, Cathos

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finds that it will be necessary for him to remain at home, entertaining a foreign ambassador. He sends Leonardo to bring the bride home. Emanuella, trembling, waits for her future husband. She has learned to picture Cathos as a dread, inhuman monster, an ogre to whom she is to be fed for political purposes. As the court herald announces the approach, she cringes, but on hearing applause coming from the balcony, she steals a cautious glimpse and sees a noble[-]looking youth enter. Her fears vanish. Mentally she visions [sic] herself at his side – his bride – and the illusion flushes her face with happiness. Gayly, she steps down the stairs leading from the balcony and joins her father who is discussing the marriage terms with Leonardo. The Duke de Granada introduces her to Leonardo, explaining that he is the brother of Cathos who has come to escort her. A look of despair clouds Emanuella’s features. On their way to the de Alvia Castle, the girl and boy fall in love. They arrive at the castle and Emanuella meets Cathos. She shrinks involuntarily at the grotesqueness of the man she is to marry. Cathos senses what is going through her mind and gives her an opportunity to withdraw but Emanuella shakes her head and the marriage ceremony is gone through. After the wedding, Leonardo and Emanuella strive desperately to forget their love. Twice Leonardo seeks to leave, believing that he can forget at a distance. Each time, however, Cathos prevents his going, laughingly suggesting that he is jealous. Again Cathos goes to war and Leonardo attempts to join him, but this Cathos forbids. His brother’s duty, he maintains, is to protect his (Cathos’) wife during his absence. That night, Emanuella and Leonardo meet to discuss their future, not knowing that concealed behind the portieres the malicious court clown is overhearing their protestations of love. The clown rides to Cathos who at first refuses to believe. The continued recital of his brother’s and wife’s dishonor, however, inflames Cathos’ mind and he determines to see for himself. The clown had told him that Emanuella was to signal Leonardo at midnight. Accordingly Cathos stations himself where he can get a full view of the window. Soon he sees the figure of Emanuella framed against the window. She stands there undecided for several moments and Cathos, apparently satisfied that nothing is to happen and that the clown has lied, is about to turn away when he sees the shade of the window lifted several times. Shocked, Cathos sees his brother enter Emanuella’s apartments. Cathos climbs up to the balcony and, infuriated, he bursts in on the frightened pair. Impulsively he accuses Emanuella and Leonardo of unfaithfulness and as the enormity of the crime against his name and honor becomes more apparent, he begs Leonardo to say that he has committed no dishonor. Leonardo will not lie to Cathos, who staggers backward in the room dejectedly. As Cathos rushes forward to slay his bride, Bopi slinks into the room; when poor Cathos lowers his dagger and turns from Emanuella in dismay, Bopi steps up to him, reminds him of his wife’s betrayal, and says he will be laughed at if he does not go through with the deed. Cathos turns on Bopi, shouting, “Who knows now?” The clown answers, “I do!” As Cathos clutches him by the throat, Bopi brings his dagger out. Cathos grabs the clown’s dagger hand. Suddenly Cathos realizes that dagger is his way out, through self-sacrifice. He releases Bopi’s hand and as the clown’s dagger does its fatal work Cathos gives the final twist to Bopi’s jugular vein. Leonardo begs forgiveness of the dying Cathos and that great soul forgives both lovers as his eyes close. On a prayer bench Leonardo and Emanuella kneel, side by side, in prayer. Press book synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, April 13, 1928, LP25144

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Cathos’ handsome brother Leonardo falls into passionate love with Emanuella. Back at the Alvia court, their affair is consummated and discovered by the jester, Bopi, who informs Cathos. In torment, Cathos stabs the lovers to death.

From the time of his first Biograph films, D.W. Griffith was always seducible by solemn “art”. Presented with art director William Cameron Menzies (fresh from Roland West’s 1927 The Dove, for which he would win an Academy Award), cinematographer Karl Struss (fresh from F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, also 1927, for which he too would win an Academy Award), Griffith came up with a story inspired by doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca for a film that is beautifully crafted but off-balance in structure and slow in pace. Variety’s positive review (“a sweet comeback for Griffith”) nevertheless recognized that it would be a hard sell to the mass audience: “Drums of Love is a loge section film. The art centers will love it. That’s sure. Its basic appeal is to the playgoer who thoroughly enjoys the Theatre Guild” (February 1, 1928). The most telling initial notice was from The New York Telegram: “Reviewing a Griffith picture is like nothing else in the experience of an American picture fan. For, after all, D.W. has been our first and foremost, our best beloved, our pet genius whom we could always count on when the great lords from overseas – the Murnaus, the Lubitsches and the Stillers – arrived with their great bag of tricks to show us how it is done. And that’s why it’s so tarnation sad when the Grand Old Man turns out a Drums of Love” (January 28, 1928; quoted in Schickel, D.W. Griffith: An American Life, p. 539). Were it not such an extraordinarily dark tale, it would be easier to see this strangely titled film (“drums” of love are nowhere to be found in it) as Griffith’s first “Hollywood” movie. When he had last directed in Los Angeles in 1919, he had still been his own producer. Now he was back with an excellent employee’s contract for what turned out to be the first of four features produced by Joseph Schenck (initially at his appealingly named Art Cinema Corporation) for release through United Artists, of which Schenck was also president. These films would essentially put an end to Griffith’s career. The structure and style of The Drums of Love are unconventional and not without interest. After a static scene of the Alvia brothers swearing eternal love for each other at their father’s deathbed, shot with Karl Struss’ recognizably misty diffusion, the perspective switches to a sequence more characteristic of Griffith. The brothers lead troops to victory in a large-scale battle against the Duke of Granada’s forces. It’s the sort of scene, however, that would usually climax a Griffith film and here it’s tossed off perfunctorily. Most of the rest of the film will rely for spectacle on unconvincing glass-shot effects. Unusual for Griffith too is the fluid mobility of the camera in early scenes, especially of carefree Emanuella at her father’s home. The tone of the rest of the film seems also to weigh down the camera. The performances are so varied in expressiveness as to lead to a disastrous imbalance in the film as a whole. Top billed was Mary Philbin, a pleasant enough actress who was developing an odd career repeatedly playing the lovely consort of deeply deformed but good-hearted men, after Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925) and The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni, 1927), but released widely only after Griffith’s film). Dolled up in a goldilocks wig and “recently home from the convent”, she is paired here with Don Alvarado, one of the low-rent replacements after Valentino’s death. His acting range appears so extremely limited that, by the climax of The Drums of Love, his character’s passion and guilt register as a Kuleshov test – an identical expression distinguished only by whether it is edited next to Emanuella or a portrait of his brother. “Sometimes there is a lethargy about his actions”, in The New York Times’ understatement (January 25, 1928, p. 4). The human interest in the film arises from the convincing and even endearing performance of Lionel Barrymore as Duke Cathos, the 209

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“LAME HUNCHBACK, A SUPER-DWARF” in an intertitle’s description; it was “this actor’s outstanding camera achievement to date”, in Variety’s verdict. When Emanuella first sees Cathos, he’s shadowed in expressionist darkness that emphasizes his heavy brow, broad mustache, and hairy hands, but he’s also immediately rather winning in mocking his own hump and letting her know that she’s quite free to withdraw from the marriage “and none will be the worse”. (It’s her father who again forces the union.) Barrymore provides the rare flashes of wit in a film too weighed down by intertitles penned by Griffith with his former publicist Gerrit J. Lloyd; “it would … have been far more satisfactory to include in the captions phrases that were less hard and contained an element of charm”, as The New York Times noticed. As the un-comic jester, Tully Marshall skulks around melodramatically as if testing out the character he will use to drool on Gloria Swanson later that year in Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1928). It becomes evident that Griffith’s rooting interest in all this court intrigue is entirely with Barrymore’s sad, lonely, deformed duke, and we too become increasingly impatient with pampered Emanuella for preferring the dim, handsome brother. The Drums of Love comes close to being a fascinating film – if we weren’t forced to spend so much time with the two lovers. The difficulty that Griffith and Schenck had in marketing the film is evident in the survival of two different last reels. The plot description above recounts the film’s original story as seen at the Los Angeles and New York premieres. After Cathos is informed by the jester of the liaison between his brother and his wife, they enact a long, heavy finale of guilt, honor, sacrifice, and murder. Emanuella declares “I MUST DIE”. Cathos kisses and stabs her, then even more regretfully must stab his brother: “DEATH BEFORE A STAIN ON OUR HONOR”. Anticipating another Lionel Barrymore film, Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the two dying lovers crawl toward each other, even while they beg Cathos’ forgivness and while Struss’ photography gets even mistier. In a strikingly composed and dark coda, Cathos kisses the hands of the two bodies on a bier and walks slowly off, tormented and hunched more than ever. “The closing incident” might be a problem, The New York Times hinted. Variety elaborated that “[d]oubts have been expressed as to whether the beauty values here can overcome the tragic double killing at the finish”, but noted that “Greta [Garbo] passes on in both Flesh and the Devil and Love …”. However, MGM had come around to revising the end of Love (Edmund Goulding, 1927) – an adaptation of Anna Karenina – so that Anna and Vronsky live happily ever after, a version released widely earlier in January 1928. Griffith and Schenck apparently decided to try the same thing. In the revised final reel of The Drums of Love put into general release by late February 1928, the brothers again fight and Emanuella again recognizes “I MUST DIE”. However, this time Cathos stabs the ever-intrusive jester, and is mortally wounded in return. After the two lovers beg his forgiveness, Cathos expresses his dying satisfaction with a logic that didn’t bear much scrutiny: “ONLY BLOOD COULD WASH THIS STAIN FROM ALVIA HONOR – IT IS BEST THAT IT BE MY BLOOD”. The final shot shows the two lovers together, praying. There is no record that the revised ending improved the film’s box-office appeal. Indeed, the new ending may have made things even worse, by closing off the film by rewarding the annoying lovers. Scott Simmon

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619 ART CINEMA CORP.

THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES Filming date: Spring 1928 Location: Art Cinema studio, Formosa Avenue, Los Angeles Presented by: Joseph M. Schenck Distribution: United Artists West Coast preview: La Jolla, California, 25 May 1928 Los Angeles premiere: September 1928, United Artists Theatre New York premiere: 12 October 1928, Rialto Theatre Release date: 13 October 1928 Release length: ten reels, 8,180 feet Copyright date: 17 October 1928 (CIL25734); “Feature Production Corp.” penciled on material submitted for copyright Director: D.W. Griffith Adaptation: Gerrit J. Lloyd Source: The Single Standard, the novel (publication undetermined) by Daniel Carson Goodman Photographers: Karl Struss, G.W. Bitzer Film editor: James Smith Sound system: Movietone (also released as silent) Musical score: R. Schildkret, Hugo Riesenfeld Titles: Gerrit J. Lloyd Cast: Jean Hersholt (J.C. Judson); Phyllis Haver (Marie Skinner); Belle Bennett (Mrs. Judson); Don Alvarado (Babe [Jim] Winsor); Sally O’Neil (Ruth Judson); William Bakewell (Billy Judson); John Batten (Friend of the Judsons) Archival sources: George Eastman House, 35mm fine grain master (silent version); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined); magnetic sound track master “The Battle of the Sexes” begins when money and a gold-digger charge the Judson home. The Judsons are supremely happy for J.C. Judson has made a financial killing on a big deal. The money not only brings happiness to his wife, his daughter and son, but Judson himself finds contentment in life and asks for nothing better than spending the evenings with his family. Marie Skinner asks more from life. Hers is a complicated existence and for that existence she must have money and lots of it. She hears of Judson’s good fortune and plans a campaign. Her first move is to take an apartment next to the Judsons. That done, she stages a scene to bring about the meeting. Seeing a mouse, she screams for help. Judson hears her and rushes into her apartment, whereupon she falls into his arms. They have met. Judson is overwhelmed by his conception of Marie. Young, beautiful, alone in the world. Fate – he thinks – has brought them together. He woos her with gifts. Nothing is too good for her. Diamonds, pearls, emeralds, jewelry of every description. It is enough when she says: “They are beautiful – and you are sweet.” But what Marie really wants is to have Judson buy some spurious bonds. She is ordered to do this by her lover, who insists that she prolong her campaign until Judson buys them – otherwise he will get another girl.

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Desperate, Marie further involves Judson in a hopeless compromise. During all this time, Mrs. Judson has remained ignorant of her husband’s philandering. One night, going to a night club with her son and daughter, she is amazed to see her husband dancing with Marie Skinner. She sees them in sensuous embrace. She is stunned, not only by the manner of their dancing and the fact that everyone is watching them, but she wakes up to the fact of what is going on. Like a woman suddenly gone insane, she dashes out of the night club. She cannot believe it, yet she knows it to be true. Her children try to calm her, but it is as though she has partially lost her mind. She wanders in a dazed condition to the roof of their apartment. She doesn’t know where she is – she only knows that her husband has deserted her – cast her away for another woman. In her delirium she almost falls off the roof, when her daughter, Ruth, saves her. The girl determines to bring her father back. She gets a revolver and enters Marie’s apartment. She confronts her. There is a struggle in which Ruth is disarmed. As they are fighting, Jim, Marie’s lover, enters. A moment later, Judson’s knock is heard on the door. Ruth and Jim rush into an adjoining room. Judson sees Jim’s cane on the piano and flies into a frenzy of jealousy. Rushing into the room, he finds his daughter an unwilling captive in Jim’s arms. He rages and fumes and denounces Ruth, who turns on him and recites the whole category of his sins. Then she leads him into the next room, where Marie and Jim are embracing. Disillusioned and broken, Judson leaves. Some months later it is the Judson wedding anniversary. The whole family is gathered there – all but Judson. Billy blindfolds Mrs. Judson, while Ruth, who had arranged things, signals her father, who is waiting in the hall. As the blindfold is lifted, Mrs. Judson’s eyes fall on her husband. For a moment she steps back – the children are so eager and plead with such feeling that she forgives her husband and she rushes impulsively into his arms. It is the wife who wins “The Battle of the Sexes”. Press book synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, October 17, 1928, CIL25734

Businessman J.C. Judson, who has cleared a fortune in a real-estate deal, is targeted by a golddigger and her gigolo boyfriend. Flattered by the girl’s attentions, Judson leaves his wife and children and attempts to start a new life. Soon, however, he discovers the golddigger’s true motives and is rudely disillusioned. Chastened, he returns to his loving family.

Few films can offer as revealing a perspective on Griffith’s late-1920s career as his 1928 remake of The Battle of the Sexes. Remakes were a rarity in Griffith’s career anyway, but his two versions of this story were separated by a gap of fourteen years – fourteen turbulent years that saw a world war, the rise of the Roaring Twenties, and vast social changes with which, we have often been told, Griffith could not keep up. In a sense The Battle of the Sexes disproves that notion, for it takes place in a world very different from that of 1914. Unfortunately only a fragment of the 1914 Battle of the Sexes is known to survive, but from that fragment and from contemporary publicity and reviews we can gather a sense of the tone Griffith took in that version. As Donald Crisp strayed from his loving wife and children to dally with an adventuress, there can be little doubt that Griffith depicted such infidelity seriously, delivering a stern warning to anyone (erring husband or adventuress) who would threaten the sanctity of the home – a warning not unlike those he had delivered more than once in his recent Biograph films. What a difference in 1928! The plot is the same, but the 1928 Battle of the Sexes is framed as a comedy, complete with wisecracking titles and designed almost exclusively for enter212

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tainment value. An index to the contrast between the two versions can be seen in their casts. The straying husband, played in 1914 by rock-solid Donald Crisp, is portrayed in 1928 by the short, pudgy, vulnerable, and frequently ludicrous Jean Hersholt. The temptress, as played in 1914 by a young Fay Tincher, was attractive enough but clearly a lightweight. In 1928, as played by blonde bombshell Phyllis Haver, she’s the star of the picture. Her golddigger (in updated late-1920s parlance), a voracious glamour girl with a heart of brass, is both firmly in control of the plot and thoroughly likable, quite the most entertaining thing in the film. Against her formidable charms poor little Hersholt hasn’t a chance, and his character becomes more sympathetic as a result. Griffith has not, of course, abandoned his value system altogether, and midway through the picture he shifts gears. The damage wrought upon the businessman’s family is clearly meant to be taken seriously. Here again, however, the film’s cast works against a severely moralistic preachment: the members of the businessman’s family, the bedrock of the original film, are played in the remake by the weakest members of the cast. Belle Bennett, fresh from notable “mother” roles in such films as Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925) and John Ford’s Mother Machree (1928), was probably an obvious choice to play the wife/mother, but she registers little or no impression; as Variety observed (October 17, 1928), she “is inclined to be monotonous in her simplicity”. Sally O’Neill and Billy Bakewell, as the businessman’s children, are hardly a match for Lillian Gish and Bobby Harron in the original, and their disconcertingly strenuous efforts to project youth and vivacity are no help at all. The surviving fragment of the 1914 Battle of the Sexes is the scene in which the businessman and his paramour are discovered at a cabaret by his family. Comparing this fragment with the corresponding sequence in the remake allows us to see how Griffith’s technique has changed in the intervening years. Paul Spehr has noted (The Griffith Project, vol. 8, pp. 5–7) the complexity of the 1914 sequence, which is broken down into four camera positions. But the 1928 version has been expanded in every way: more camera positions, more varied activity by the principals and by the other nightclub patrons (with a running gag involving a diner at a nearby table), not to mention a much larger and more glamorous nightclub – surely a reflection of how such places had changed in real life during the 1920s. This eye-popping nightclub set is the work of William Cameron Menzies, who recycled it the following year in Roland West’s Alibi. (It’s interesting to note that this establishment is identified as “Helen Logan’s” nightclub. The glimpse of the feminine singer, seated atop a piano at the beginning of the sequence, reinforces the obvious reference to Helen Morgan, already a familiar symbol of New York nightlife by 1928.) The fluidity of the sequence, and the rest of the film, is further enhanced by occasional dolly or tracking shots. Billy Bitzer had photographed the 1914 Battle of the Sexes (along with several hundred other Griffith films) single-handed, but for the remake he was teamed with the distinguished cinematographer Karl Struss, whose mobile camera had recently been used to good effect in Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927) among other films. Perhaps the most striking of the moving-camera shots in The Battle of the Sexes comes as Belle Bennett, in a daze, wanders deliriously on the roof of the apartment building. As she totters dangerously near the edge, the camera, in a sudden point-of-view shot, plunges sickeningly straight down the side of the building. Another technical note: The Battle of the Sexes was released late in 1928, the key transitional year of the talking-picture revolution. It was released with a synchronized score, augmented with sound effects and – in Phyllis Haver’s singing scene – the sound of her voice, loosely synchronized with her singing image onscreen. This was apparently the film’s one concession to the talkies, but it was enough for Variety to classify it explicitly as a sound film. Griffith, for his part, was unhappy with the soundtrack and registered a futile complaint with 213

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United Artists over the music in the opening and closing scenes. Where Griffith had envisioned a tender arrangement of “Together” or “When You and I Were Young, Maggie” in these scenes, the score supplied up-tempo comedy music instead. Although the 1928 Battle of the Sexes vividly illustrates the tremendous social changes that had occurred since 1914, it seems a little unfair to suggest, as some writers have, that Griffith was prostituting himself by producing a mere “entertainment” film. After all, the golden-era Griffith had never been averse to entertaining his audiences. And even if Griffith had wanted to reinvent himself at this late date, there would have been little chance. (Before The Battle of the Sexes was released he wrote to his distributors, quoting some studio visitors who had compared the film to the writings of Chekhov, and urging that this idea be conveyed to the critics!) In any case, if the Battle of the Sexes remake was intended to restore Griffith’s reputation as an up-to-date director, the attempt was unsuccessful. Critics were unanimously disappointed in the film, more than one comparing it unfavorably with Paramount’s The Way of All Flesh (Victor Fleming, 1927), which had featured a similar plot situation and Belle Bennett and Phyllis Haver in comparable roles. If Griffith’s standing in the industry he had done so much to build was to be restored, some other film would have to do the job. J.B. Kaufman

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620 FOX FILM CORPORATION

[UNIDENTIFIED NEWSREEL EXCERPT: BEAUTY CONTEST?] Series: Fox Movietone News Filming date: 1928? Location: not known Release date: not known Length: 99 feet Diretor: not known Camera: not known On camera: D.W. Griffith Archival sources: Photoplay Archives, 35mm acetate negative

D.W. Griffith and two unidentified men are seen while they are examining photographs, possibly of beauty contest winners. The scene is very staged: the three stand together, look at the photos and smile. There are even close-ups of each. Griffith, dressed in high collar, looks rather formal. The film must be related to some beauty contest, because the footage is marked with the word “BEAUTY” at both ends of the reel. Because the material available at the time of this writing is in negative form, it is hard to recognize the two men with Griffith, but they are favoured with close-ups, so they must have been of some consequence. References are from the Movietone News – it appears to be earlier than that – Roll 14A No. 16311 and 16316. There are also numbers that probably refer to this sequence: 700.8/1571, followed by (BEAUTY). Although marked Movietone, the footage is full aperture and no one speaks to the camera. Kevin Brownlow

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621 ART CINEMA CORP.

LADY OF THE PAVEMENTS Alternate title: Lady of the Night (U.K. release title) Working titles: The Love Song; Masquerade Filming date: Fall 1928 Location: Art Cinema studio, Formosa Avenue, Los Angeles Presented by: Joseph M. Schenck Distribution: United Artists San Francisco sneak preview: week of 10 November 1928 Los Angeles premiere: 22 January 1929, United Artists Theatre Release date: 16 February 1929 Release length: nine reels, 8,329 feet (sound version); eight reels, 7,495 feet (silent version) Copyright date: 4 February 1929 (LP79) Director: D.W. Griffith Scenario: Sam Taylor, Gerrit J. Lloyd Dialogues: George Scarborough Adaptation: Sam Taylor Source: “La Paiva”, the story (publication undetermined) by Karl Gustav Vollmoeller Camera: Karl Struss Assistant camera: G.W. Bitzer Set designer: William Cameron Menzies Costumes: Alice O’Neill Film editor: James Smith Special effects: Ned Mann Sound system: Movietone (talking and singing sequences) Theme song: “Where Is the Song of Songs for Me?” by Irving Berlin, performed by Lupe Velez Additional songs: “Nena”, “At the Dance”, performed by Lupe Velez Music arrangements: Hugo Riesenfeld Titles: Gerrit J. Lloyd Cast: Lupe Velez (Nanon del Rayon); William Boyd ([Count] Karl von Arnim); Jetta Goudal (Countess Diane des Granges); Albert Conti (Baron Finot); George Fawcett (Baron Haussmann); Henry Armetta (Papa Pierre); William Bakewell (A pianist); Franklin Pangborn (M’sieu Dubrey, dance master) Archival sources: FILM – Arthur Lennig Collection, 16mm acetate positive (generation undetermined); Mary Pickford Foundation (Los Angeles), 35mm acetate negative; The Museum of Modern Art, 35mm acetate positive (from 35mm acetate negative at the Mary Pickford Foundation). MUSIC AND SOUND – Det Danske Filmmuseum, synchronized soundtrack discs (incomplete set: parts 1 and 3; 6 and 9; 10 [?]); George Eastman House, synchronized soundtrack discs (incomplete set: parts 1 and 3; 5 and 7; 6 and 9); Matty Kemp (Mary Pickford Foundation Collection?), synchronized soundtrack discs?; Miles Kreuger, Institute of the American Musical, Los Angeles (sheet music? synchronized soundtrack discs?); University of Minnesota (Arthur Kleiner Collection, Austrian Institute), unspecified parts (possibly compiled after the film’s initial release)

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Karl von Arnim, military attaché to the Prussian legation at Paris, discovers that the beautiful French Countess Diane des Granges to whom he is engaged is unfaithful to him and in a fit of anger he tells her that he would rather marry a woman of the streets. Enraged by the deliberate insult, Diane sends for Finot, the chamberlain to Napoleon the Third – over whom she has some hold – and tells him of a plan to force Karl into marrying a woman habitué of one of the low drinking dives of Paris. The chamberlain objects to being an agent in this intrigue, but under pressure gives in and agrees to find such a potential mate for Karl. Finot goes to “The Smoking Dog Cabaret” and discovers Nanon, [a] beautiful Spanish girl who dances and sings there. He attracts the girl’s attention by flinging a golden coin her way and under promised of more money gains her consent to play a practical joke on “someone” by making him fall in love with her. Nanon arrives at Diane’s apartments and is instructed in the social virtues by the Countess until she is a nearly perfect example of what a demure, convent bred girl should be. Later Nanon, now called La Paiva, makes her debut to society and is presented at a formal ball where, she is made to understand, she will meet the man she is to beguile. Nanon is introduced to many men – short, fat and ugly diplomats – and each one causes her to shudder for fear it is the one she is to make love to. Bored and perhaps a little frightened by the pomp, she seeks to escape in the memories of her past, so she prevails upon a pianist to accompany her as she sing “Where Is the Song of Songs for Me?”, a happy little melody she learned when a child. The first few bars of the song revive her courage and she is but halfway through the melody when she sees Karl in a handsome military uniform before her, transfixed by her beauty and song. As she sings the closing words of the song, “I love you,” Nanon finds the eyes of the young man boring into hers. An introduction follows and Nanon learns from Diane that Karl is the man. She is astounded and almost a bit afraid of the consequences, but she advances the affair until, later, Karl begs her to marry him. Nanon who sincerely loves him in return, meanwhile[,] has learned of Diane’s plot through the sympathetic Finot and she puts Karl off, telling him she could never become his wife. Disappointed, and not understanding the reason for his dismissal, Karl goes but leaves a rose in Nanon’s hands with the plea that she send it to him in the event of a change of mind. Diane enters later and persuades Nanon to marry Karl on the promise that she will never tell him of Nanon’s past life at “The Smoking Dog” cabaret. Diane makes the one condition that for her silence she be privileged to give a wedding banquet to the newlyweds. Nanon consents happily and she sends for Karl and accepts him. Later, at the banquet, Diane makes an announcement to the effect that she has a surprise and, to the horror of Nanon, the “Smoking Dog” orchestra comes into the magnificent room and gets ready to play. Diane then suggests that Nanon sing “Where Is the Song of Songs for Me?”[.] The girl realizes that she has been tricked and rising resolutely from her chair at the table, she joins her former associates and starts to sing. She falters and with a cry of utter despair she falls into the arms of Papa Pierre, proprietor of “The Smoking Dog” and leader also of the orchestra. There is consternation among the guests. Karl rises perplexed and is about to go to Nanon when Diane stops him and says: “Evidently they are her friends.” Finot gets the guests and orchestra out of the room and the Countess calmly takes some bills out of a purse and holds them out to Nanon while Karl, astounded, looks on. “This is your money,” says Diane to Nanon, then turning to Karl she says, “You wanted to marry a woman of the streets. Well, you have.” Nanon thrusts the money from her and tries to tell Karl of her innocence in the plot to marry him, but she does not deny her former life at “The Smoking Dog”. Karl blazes at her in hate and proceeds to walk away. At this moment Nanon, as a final gesture of desperation, halts him and calls the guests in from an adjoining room. When the elegant people are assembled she tells them

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of Diane’s intrigue. A hum of disapproval wilts Diane, and Nanon, exhausted by the fury of her tirade, runs out of the room before Karl can stop her. She seeks the solace of Papa Pierre and the cabaret, and once more she sings there, but in a listless, heart-broken voice. Everywhere she sees visions of Karl: the gross face of a sailor forms into the handsome features of him. She sings the love song once more and as she reaches the final words, “I love you”, Karl comes from the far end of the room and takes her into his arms. Putting a cape gently about her shoulders, Karl leads her past […] benevolent Papa Pierre and acknowledges a blessing from the old man […] passes out into the beyond of a new life. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, February 4, 1929, LP79 [note in pencil: “9 reels”]

Paris, 1868. Karl von Arnim, a young officer attached to the Prussian legation in Paris, learns that his fiancée, the Countess Diane des Granges, has been unfaithful. He breaks their engagement, rashly asserting that he would rather marry a “woman of the streets” than marry her. Determined to humiliate von Arnim, the Countess sets out to arrange just that. She enlists Nanon, an entertainer at The Smoking Dog Café, to deceive the young Prussian into believing that she is a young lady of breeding who has just arrived from a Spanish convent. Nanon and von Arnim fall in love and are married. At the wedding banquet, the Countess reveals the girl’s true identity, after which Nanon flees to The Smoking Dog in despair. Karl follows after her and the two are reconciled.

While hardly box-office failures – they ultimately grossed approximately $625,000 each, making just enough money to break even – The Drums of Love and The Battle of the Sexes were disappointments for director D.W. Griffith and producer Joseph M. Schenck, both financially and critically; the latter film, especially, was savaged by critics as being, among other things, “badly acted, unimaginatively directed and thoroughly third-rate”(Richard Watts, Jr.), as well as being “tricked out here and there with evidences of distinctly bad taste” (Katherine Zimmerman). Griffith’s chronic inability to find suitable properties for himself, coupled with his increasingly heavy drinking, had caused Schenck to lose confidence in him even before The Battle of the Sexes was finished. As that film was being readied for its premiere, Schenck announced that Griffith would begin production on The Love Song, working from a script by Sam Taylor that was, in turn, based on a story by German author Karl Vollmoeller. Taylor was an industry professional with strong credits, having collaborated with Harold Lloyd as a writer and director on several of his most successful features – among them, Grandma’s Boy (Fred Newmeyer, 1922), Safety Last (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923), Why Worry? (Fred Newmeyer, 1923), Girl Shy (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1924), and The Freshman (Sam Taylor and Fred Newmeyer, 1925) – as well as directing Norma Talmadge releases under Schenck’s supervision. His solidly crafted shooting script for what would become Lady of the Pavements offered Schenck the hope of a box-office success. Griffith was given two rising stars as his romantic leads – Lupe Velez, who had recently appeared opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho (F. Richard Jones, 1928), and William Boyd, an actor who would later make his mark as Hopalong Cassidy. Jetta Goudal, a dark beauty who had gained some notoriety as an exotic vamp, was cast as the vindictive countess. Karl Struss, assisted by Griffith veteran G.W. Bitzer, beautifully photographed William Cameron Menzies’ evocative sets. Gerrit J. Lloyd’s titles were well suited to the Ruritanian flavor of the story and avoided the Victorian prose so characteristic of Griffith’s more personal films. 218

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The result of all this was a well-made film, one that paid tribute to the wonders of the Hollywood studio system. Like many American releases of the late silent period, Lady of the Pavements was a polished production that entertained its audiences through a deft combination of attractive onscreen talent, obvious high production values and efficient behind-the-camera support. Critics praised the film for its look and its performances. Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times (March 11, 1929, p. 22) described it as “a handsome production, with spacious and lavishly furnished settings, brilliant photography, faultlessly fitting uniforms and voluminous crinoline skirts”. The critic for Film Daily pegged it as “a fine woman’s picture [with a] nice love interest played against colorful backgrounds. A beautifully mounted production”. Variety, as usual, summed it up best: “Photography, production detail, etc., all Grade A. […] ‘Lady of the Pavements’ should find a cordial reception” (March 13, 1929). But the same reviewer discerned something else of much greater importance: Good, but not great entertainment dominated by Lupe Velez, Joseph M. Schenck’s new and interesting personality of Mexican extraction. D.W. Griffith has manipulated his story and people in something less than “the master’s” best style, but with an eye for new-fashioned sex appeal that will increase the jingle of mazuma [i.e., money] at the b.o. “Lady of the Pavements” is apt to be the most successful money picture for Griffith in several years. He adds nothing thereby to his artistic prestige, but possibly he will square much at the pay box.

Without a doubt, Lady of the Pavements was a stylish entertainment, and with it Griffith revealed that he was able to suppress his natural inclination to dominate a project, disappearing into the spirit of the piece just like any other contract director. Unfortunately, Griffith also was utterly unsuited to the milieu of the Second Empire, an historical period for which he had little feel and even less interest; as a result, for all its stylishness, the film is curiously cold, without substance or wit. What one admires about Lady of the Pavements is its surface, not its soul. For all of the flawed and unsuccessful films he had directed during his career, never before this could Griffith have been accused of making a film lacking conviction. Here, two of his three lead actors work as if he is barely even on the set. In the case of supporting players Henry Armetta, George Fawcett and Franklin Pangborn, Griffith gives them a great amount of latitude, allowing them to experiment with their characterizations in such a way as to suggest that he understood they would infuse his film with what little vitality it might hope to have. Jetta Goudal and William Boyd sleepwalk through their parts. Only Lupe Velez gives any indication of having worked through her character with her director, searching for the connective tissue that would explain, however tenuously, Nanon’s growth from a heedless cabaret performer to an elegant, intelligent woman deserving of love and respect. Such a wide variety of performances can make for a lightheaded experience, and without a director’s careful consideration of how all the many and varied pieces should fit together, one can have the uncanny experience of watching several films at once. As well considered and clearly drawn as it is in terms of its art direction and photography, Lady of the Pavements is unfocussed in its characterizations. This is a terrible flaw in a film whose story so clearly depends for its success on a light and unified touch, and the fault sits squarely on the shoulders of its director. Of course, what else could one expect from a project that Griffith did not initiate, and for which he had little, if any empathy? He did attempt one bit of old-fashioned camera trickery, as a way to put some sort of personal stamp on the project. At the film’s end, when Nanon returns to the cabaret from which she was plucked, she sings a mournful song and, while looking out at the audience, sees her husband, von Arnim, in every man in the audience. This wonderful moment was accomplished by special effects expert Ned Mann, who filled the 219

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Smoking Dog café with thirteen William Boyds by exposing the camera negative thirty-six times. Reviewers of the day commented upon this, but only in passing and as a way of suggesting what the film might have been had enough care and thought been applied to it. Ultimately, Lady of the Pavements had its true success as a vehicle for Lupe Velez. It was released with a synchronized orchestral score, into which was interpolated at several key moments her rendition of an Irving Berlin song composed specially for the film, “Where Is the Song of Songs for Me?”. Velez released a Victor recording of this tune to some success, and she made a series of personal appearances at theaters around the country in support of the release. In a way this was the ultimate embarrassment for D.W. Griffith, who now found himself in the position of being an unwitting foil for Lupe Velez and her ascent up the Hollywood ladder of fame. It must have been a terrible blow to Griffith to find himself shunted to the side as Velez took center stage and received more press attention than the film itself. He had always known that to give up his independence was the one sure way to compromise his talent and power, and this project only confirmed him in his belief that the film industry had little use for filmmakers such as he. Griffith traveled to New York with Joseph M. Schenck in January of 1929 for the premiere of Lady of the Pavements, moving into the Astor Hotel for six full months. During this time, he attempted to straighten out his personal affairs and, just as importantly, he set about looking for a property with which to break into sound films. Before long, he would settle on a subject that would give him the opportunity to demonstrate both to his colleagues in the film industry and the public at large that he was still a creative talent to be reckoned with. Steven Higgins

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622 GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY

[TELEVISION BROADCAST: D.W. GRIFFITH TALKS ABOUT SUCCESS IN THE MOVIES] Broadcast date: 3 February 1929 Location: Schenectady, New York Camera: not known On camera: D.W. Griffith Archival sources: none known January 30, 1929. Mr. W.T. Meenan, News Bureau, General Electric Company, Schenectady, N.Y. Dear Mr. Meenan, I am enclosing herewith an outline of what Mr. Griffith’s talk will be Sunday night. I believe this is along the lines suggested by you, and I sincerely hope it will meet your requirements. Very truly yours, Business Manager, D.W. Griffith, Inc. RAK/CC

January 30, 1929. TALK TO BE BROADCASTED OVER RADIO AND TELEVISION BY MR. GRIFFITH ON SUNDAY, FEB. 3, 1929. All the world is interested in success. No more interesting stories have ever been told in literature, in plays or in motion pictures than those based on the story of Cinderella, in a way the story of an ugly duckling that turned into a swan. Since most of the readers of books and the audiences of plays and motion pictures are hoping and dreaming of making money, of procuring fame – in other words, getting up in the world – these kind of stories, the Cinderella stories, appeal to them very much. If there ever was a Cinderella story in real life, told in a big way, it is the story of motion pictures. In the business administration and among the executives, many men who were struggling along for a bare existence twenty years ago have become many times millionaires and are important in all that money and power mean. But of much more interest to the general public, I think, are the actors and actresses that play in these pictures. The proof of this statement is in the

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fact that there are at least fifteen magazines and newspapers, some of them with tremendous circulation, that write about nothing else but the people concerned in the making of motion pictures – the heroes and heroines of the screen. Imagine a great mass of people working in the shops and stores and offices and factories – doing the same thing day in and day out – getting to the office at the same time each day, going to lunch at the same time daily – leaving for home at the same time – doing the same thing over and over and over. Then at night they go to see a motion picture, those that are bound down each day to monotony and sameness and often to drudgery – often to poverty – often to misery – often to sorrow – they go to a motion picture and see a mimic play – shadows on a screen – stories of romance, of glamour, of life, of comedy, of tragedy. Stories that tell of life in every corner of the world. Stories that bring all this wide world to the eyes of those seated in a motion picture theatre – the mysteries of the East – the romances of Paris and London and Berlin, the romances of the prairies, the romances of the hills and mountains and the great West – romances of the sea, romances of the tropics and the idle, glamourous romances of the South Seas. And as they sit and look, these people forget for a time at least their big or little troubles and sorrows and live another life. Such is the power of the motion picture and naturally, the people come to want to know about the actors and the actresses, they come to love them, they come to want to look like them and do the things they do, and most of the young folks seem to want to go into the pictures and play a part in this story of Cinderella. Take the long list of those that have been under me, all of whom were unknown and obscure, most of whom were very poor. I remember in the very beginning, first of all, Mary Pickford. I had criticised her for something she was doing in a picture. She was getting thirty-five dollars a week. Eighteen years old, throwing her yellow curls defiantly over her shoulder and squaring her Irish body, she defied me by saying “Sometime I’ll be making a hundred dollars a week”. It wasn’t many years later that she was making $10,000 a week and now, since she is her own boss, that even seems very small. Then came the Talmadges, Norma and Constance. Then Valentino, to whom I paid ten dollars a day. I first met him at the home of a friend where he made a big hit with all the guests by cooking the finest spaghetti I have ever tasted. Looking at him there, anxious that every one should be happy, himself serving the spaghetti from a large bowl in the center of the table, who would ever have dreamed that he would become the Valentino that you know and that all the world knows. Then Douglas Fairbanks, the Gish sisters, Clara Bow around my studio in Mamaroneck, N.Y. through which she got her first chance in “Down to the Sea in Ships”. Norma Shearer as an extra girl in “WAY DOWN EAST”. Colleen Moore was brought to me by her uncle, Walter Howey, editor of a big Chicago newspaper. When I looked at her my heart dropped down because I love Walter Howey very much and I wanted to help his niece for his sake, but when I looked at her I was almost sure she wouldn’t photograph well. Later in the day, in the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago where I was staying, she told me how anxious she was to get into the movies, and she told me this with trembling hands and quivering body and with eyes so lit up with emotion that I changed my first impression and said that while she might not be beautiful under ordinary conditions, she no doubt would be very beautiful when she starting acting, and so [I] gave her her first chance in pictures. So many have gone through that school of ambition and hard work that I could not mention them here in such limited time – Bessie Love, Lionel Barrymore, Alma Rubens, the Walsh brothers, now great directors. Rouel [sic] [Walsh] produced “What Price Glory”. He played Booth in “THE BIRTH OF A NATION” for ten dollars a day. Many of them are millionaires, some of them many times over – what a Cinderella story is that of the motion pictures. Two years ago in Mexico there was a young girl working in a small vaudeville show, barely existing and trying to support her family at the same time, and also trying to save twenty dollars

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to get to Los Angeles. Some wandering press man had seen her in the act on this vaudeville circuit and had told her she should go to Los Angeles and see a certain manager who was producing a musical comedy there – a local affair, not very important, but of great importance to this little Mexican girl. The man told her he would talk to the manager and he was sure she would make good in the States. So, with childlike faith this little girl began to dream the old Cinderella dreams. She finally succeeded in saving the twenty dollars and started for Los Angeles. Twenty little dollars was all she had at the beginning. By the time she got to the station in Los Angeles she didn’t have a cent. She found herself in the big dreary railroad station penniless. She didn’t speak a word of English. In her mind she remembered the name of the hotel where the manager lived, but she couldn’t make herself understood to anyone around because they all seemed to understand only English and they didn’t know what she was talking about, so trembling and realizing what a desperate step she had taken, she sat in the station to think things over before starting out to locate the manager’s hotel. She looked up and saw three men going by, rather pleasant and kind looking chaps and as she expresses it in her broken Spanish “They winkled at her” which, translated into English, of course, means that they winked at her. She thought this was the American form of salutation, and being a friendly, good fellow sort of girl, she “winkled” back. They returned the “winkle” and kept on walking up and down, getting closer and closer. She then began to perceive that the “winkle” was not all she thought it was, but the usual form of approach made by the male to the female, whereupon she grabbed her important looking grip, which contained one change of wearing apparel, and started after them. I can easily picture this as she tells it, because when she starts after anyone she doesn’t need words – her expression tells everything. She frightened them so by her fierce attack that they beat it out of the station and she returned there in high indignation. Finally, she decided to make a search for the hotel. She asked questions of everyone but no one knew what she was talking about, so she just kept walking and walking until her feet were so tired she couldn’t go any further and she had to sit down on the curbstone. Through chance she wandered into the Mexican quarter of the city where she met someone who gave her proper directions to the hotel. As Los Angeles is a very widespread city it was six hours between the time she got to the railroad station and the time she reached the hotel, hardly able to stand. As she expresses it “Her dogs (meaning her feet) were so sor[e] she thought she would never be able to use them again”. At the hotel she learned, through an interpreter, that the manager’s show had closed, so she was no better off than when she started out. The manager, being a kindly person and no doubt feeling very sorry for her plight, got her a little part in a small vaudeville act where she made good. This is the end of that story. I sat in the United Artists Theatre in Detroit only last week and to our staff’s great glee, heard the audience rock with laughter, break out into applause, saw them shed many tears, and all of us knew that a new star had arrived, to become famous around the world, to be known in every home and in every country. Someone different than anyone seen before, and the audience just seemed to take her in their arms. The girl’s name is Velez, Lupe Velez. She doesn’t even like to be called Miss. In fact, she gets indignant when you call her Miss. She says “My name is Lupe, just plain Lupe”. She appears in my latest picture “LADY OF THE PAVEMENTS”, and I am very glad the little Mexican girl came to these great United States. In closing I consider it the most marvelous experience of all my life to witness this something, which is part of the great progress of the world. I am not allowed to speak of it, but you know what I mean. First, motion pictures. Then the talking combined with motion pictures, nothing less than a miracle. Who would have thought fifty years ago, or even twenty years ago that you, sitting in your own home, by means of just a small box without wires or connection, could hear marvelous music, human voices clear and distinct, thousands and thousands of miles away, and now this last miracle of miracles, so let us all be deeply thankful that we live in this grand and glorious age and in this grand and glorious country, these United States of America.

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To coincide with the January 1929 opening of Lady of the Pavements, the United Artists publicity department arranged for Griffith to make televised remarks on the future of the motion picture. American television was in its infancy at the time; there were fewer than two dozen “experimental” stations in the United States, none of which had yet been granted a commercial license by the Federal Radio Commission. The General Electric Company operated one of these stations, W2AXD, in Schenectady, New York, where it also broadcast from radio station WGY. The plan was for Griffith’s speech to be carried on WGY – where it could be heard by any listener with a radio receiver capable of picking up the signal – and simultaneously televised by shortwave. Gilbert Lee, a General Electric engineer, was enlisted to receive the sound and picture at his Los Angeles laboratory, since he had one of the very few television sets in the country. United Artists theaters in Chicago and Detroit were also instructed to install amplifiers to carry Griffith’s speech to their audiences that evening. The D.W. Griffith Papers do not include his delivered remarks from the 3 February broadcast, but a copy of his prepared speech indicates he spent the great portion of his fifteen minutes reminiscing about the “Cinderella” story of the motion picture, especially as it pertained to stars whom he had mentored, including Mary Pickford, the Gish and Talmadge sisters, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, and especially Lupe Velez, the star of Lady of the Pavements. It wasn’t until the last sentence that he spoke at all about television, calling it a “miracle of miracles”. Gilbert Lee dutifully reported to the Associated Press that he had picked up the audio portion of the broadcast clearly throughout, and that “during the first few minutes Mr. Griffith’s eyes, nose, and mouth were clearly identified in the reproduced television image. Later, however, fading appeared and then only the head outline was discernable”. An amateur television enthusiast in Oakland, California, also reported receiving the broadcast, but with poor picture reception. Griffith subsequently received several letters from radio listeners, including one from a blind man in Massachusetts offering to send his novels to Griffith as potential film sources, and another from R.A. Vink in Surrey, England, who, in a highly technical note, indicated that he had understood “most” of what Griffith said. Mike Mashon

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623 –

[MARY PICKFORD AND GUESTS] Filming date: ca. 1930 Location: Pickfair, Beverly Hills, California Distribution: not known Release date: not known Release length: one reel? Camera: not known On camera: D.W. Griffith, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Mary Pickford Archival sources: National Film and Television Archive [London] (BFI Collections), 35mm acetate negative

The film consists of two, similarly static group shots. Pickford responds animatedly to the more phlegmatic opera singer, while behind them poses an eager group of people who look like businessmen. The likelihood is that the occasion relates to some propaganda or fundraising event. Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861–1936), reckoned the finest contralto of her day, made her operatic début in Dresden in 1878. She sang in the Metropolitan Opera from 1898 to 1903, and returned there occasionally in Wagnerian roles. In 1909, in Dresden, she created the role of Clytemnestra in Richard Strauss’ Electra (1909). Subsequently she preferred the concert platform, and after settling in the United States, made numerous cross-country tours. She gave her last performance at the age of 70 in 1932. In 1905 she took out American citizenship and five years later settled in a 500-acre estate overlooking the El Cajon valley. Even though she had a brother in command of an Austrian warship and a son in the German navy, Schumann-Heink’s dedication to the American war effort became legendary. She threw herself tirelessly into Liberty Bond tours, fund-raising concerts and troop entertainments, and was named an honorary colonel of the 21st Infantry Division. In 1922 she moved to Coronado, and died in Hollywood from leukemia at the age of 75. David Robinson

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624 FEATURE PRODUCTIONS; ART CINEMA CORP.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN Filming date: late February–April 1930 Location: Art Cinema studio, Formosa Avenue, Los Angeles Presented by: Joseph M. Schenck Distribution: United Artists; Art Cinema Associates, Inc. (title on print) New York premiere: 25 October 1930, Central Theatre Release date: 8 November 1930 Release length: ten reels, 8,704 ft. Copyright date: 1 September 1930 (LP1585) Director: D.W. Griffith Story: John W. Considine, Jr. Adaptation: Stephen Vincent Benét Photographer: Karl Struss Art director: William Cameron Menzies; settings “executed by” Park French (title on print) Costumes: Walter J. Israel Film editor: James Smith, Hal C. Kern (according to publicity material submitted for copyright) Editing supervisor: John W. Considine, Jr. Production manager: Orville O. Dull Story and production advisor: John W. Considine, Jr. Production staff: Raymond A. Klune, Herbert Sutch Historical advisor: Hal C. Kern Sound system: Movietone Sound recording: Harold Witt Associate dialogue director: Harry Stubbs Continuity-Dialogue: Stephen Vincent Benét, Gerrit J. Lloyd Music arrangements: Hugo Riesenfeld Cast: Lucille La Verne (Mid-Wife); W.L. Thorne (Tom Lincoln); Helen Freeman (Nancy Hanks Lincoln); Otto Hoffman (Offut); Walter Huston (Abraham Lincoln); Edgar Deering (Armstrong); Una Merkel (Ann Rutledge); Russell Simpson (Lincoln’s employer); Charles Crockett (Sheriff); Kay Hammond (Mary Todd Lincoln); Helen Ware (Mrs. Edwards); E. Alyn Warren (Stephen A. Douglas); Jason Robards (Herndon); Gordon Thorpe (Tad Lincoln); Ian Keith (John Wilkes Booth); Cameron Prudhomme (John Hay, Secretary to Lincoln); James Bradbury, Sr. (General Scott); James Eagle (Young soldier); Fred Warren [title on print: E. Alyn Warren] (General Grant); Oscar Apfel (Secretary of War Stanton); Frank Campeau (General Sheridan); Hobart Bosworth (General Lee); Henry B. Walthall (Colonel Marshall); Hank Bell, Carl Stockdale, Ralph Lewis, George MacQuarrie, Robert Brower Archival sources: George Eastman House, 35mm nitrate positive (Martin Scorsese Collection); The Museum of Modern Art, a) 35mm nitrate fine grain master (silent, 8,389 ft.; received 1981); b) 35mm nitrate track print (incomplete, 5,192 ft.; received 1981); c) 35mm nitrate positive (foreign version, silent, incomplete, 4,328 ft.; received 1981); d) 35mm nitrate picture negative (silent, incomplete, 1,630 ft.; received 1981); e) 35mm nitrate track print (incomplete, 6,495 ft., received 1981 from Library of Congress); National Film and Television Archive (London), 35mm nitrate positive (printed ca. 1950) 226

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On February 12th, 1809, amidst agitation between the North and South: a boy is born to Tom and Nancy Lincoln in a corner of a one-room log cabin during a tempestuous February storm. The parents name the boy Abraham. At the age of twenty-two, young Lincoln, six feet three inches in height, “the ugliest and smartest man in New Salem, Ill.”[,] is the clerk in D. Offut’s general store where he sells calomel, warming pans, Bibles, and sometimes extracts teeth. In the spring of 1834, Abe is courting Ann Rutledge. The courtship terminates abruptly when Ann becomes ill of fever and dies. Abe is depressed and broken-hearted. Three years of intense living heal the wound somewhat. Lincoln has been to the Legislature, fought in the Indian war as Captain of Volunteers and has been certified to practice law. His horse and saddle bags, his only possessions, are taken away from him to pay a debt. At a ball in the home of former Governor Ninian Edwards, Lincoln meets Mary Todd. At first she laughs at Abe’s homeliness and awkwardness, but later falls in love with him. Two years later, at the home of Mrs. Francis, Mary and Abe meet again. Lincoln begs forgiveness, and he and Mary are married that night. Lincoln’s reputation as a debater wins him an overwhelming majority as candidate for the presidency for the Republican Party. Lincoln is elected. Shortly after, John Brown and his Abolitionists have captured the armory at Harper’s Ferry. John Wilkes Booth, a loud and fanatic exhorter[,] cries out for guns and volunteers to avenge Harper’s Ferry. Thus, the great Civil War begins. Lincoln is firm on one point: the Union must be preserved no matter what happens. The fall of Fort Sumpter [sic] marks the beginning of bloodshed. In Washington thousands of men in uniform are marching to the mournful tune of “John Brown’s Body” as the soldiers in grey mobilize at Richmond. Bull Run is lost. Washington is threatened. Mrs. Lincoln complains to Abe because their stay in the White House seems almost over and the possibility of capture seems imminent. “Mary,” he says, “I’ve hung my hat here, and here it stays until they knock it off with a bayonet. From now on I’m going to run this war.” He makes a personal and unheralded visit to one of the battlefields and wanders into an official tent where a court martial is in progress. When the defendant turns around, Lincoln in his kindly way, asks the boy to explain his actions. The boy relates how in the midst of battle the mutilated form of his dead friend loomed up in front of him and momentarily out of his head, he threw away his rifle and took to his heels. The boy is pardoned and ordered back to his regiment. The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation[,] which frees millions of slaves, intensifies the struggle and Lincoln is urged by his Congressmen and colleagues to end the war. Lincoln answers that he, too, would like to end the sorrow and bloodshed and have peace, but, “we want everlasting peace, and we can have that only by preserving the Union”. Lincoln finally selects Grant to lead the Union forces. Things look bad for the Union. While in conference with Secretary of War Stanton, Lincoln receives the news of Sheridan’s defeat. Lincoln tells Stanton of his vision of a ship with white sails before each victory, and the vision has just come to him. Out on the battlefield, Sheridan is leading his routed men in the celebrated ride that is to stem the tide of Confederate victory. Onward they charge, and in one of the most spectacular engagements of the war, Sheridan emerges triumphant. Again Lincoln is with Stanton when news of Sheridan’s great victory comes. The war is nearly ended. The last of the Confederate forces under Lee go down to defeat before Grant’s army and the war is over. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln is speaking from a box at Ford’s theatre, – “ – with malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right –

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to bind up the nation’s wounds – and cherish peace. Thank you – God bless you all.” There is a great demonstration. The play has just begun when Booth steals into Lincoln’s box, and a pistol roars. A woman screams out: “Mr. Lincoln has been shot.” The uproar in the theatre gives way to the tremendous sobbing of an unseen multitude. Then a grave voice calls out: “Now he belongs to the ages.” Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, September 1, 1930, LP1585 [stamped with date September 23, 1930]

The film opens with a prologue illustrating the Middle Passage, as well as the growing sectional divisions within America at the time of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. The film then jumps from 1809 to the early 1830s, when Lincoln was a young man in New Salem and pursuing his courtship of Ann Rutledge. Her sudden death devastates him and he withdraws into the law, at which he becomes successful. Several years later Lincoln meets and marries Mary Todd, an ambitious woman who sees the possibility of greatness in him. He is selected to run for the U.S. Senate from Illinois against Mary’s former beau, Stephen A. Douglas, and the two engage in their famous debates. Having lost the election, Lincoln believes himself a failure, but two years later he is suddenly thrust on to the national stage when he is elected the sixteenth president. The rest of the film illustrates the war years from the perspective of Lincoln’s White House. Among the incidents shown are: his adversarial relationship with his Cabinet; his growing disenchantment with the course of the war and his eventual appointment of Ulysses S. Grant as Lieutenant General of the Army; the drafting and promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation over the objections of his advisors; his pardon of a young soldier about to be shot for desertion; his love for his young son Tad; his bemused tolerance of Mary’s growing preoccupation with the running of the household; and finally, the assassination at Ford’s Theatre. The film ends with a tracking shot through a dark wood, ending on the cabin where Lincoln was born, which then dissolves into a miniature of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

In 1929, D.W. Griffith was at a crossroads in his career. He had long ago lost his status as an independent producer when he gave up his Mamaroneck studio in 1925 and agreed to work under contract for Adolph Zukor and Famous Players-Lasky. None of the three films he made at their Astoria facility (Sally of the Sawdust, That Royle Girl, and The Sorrows of Satan) had found favor with movie audiences of the time, and he subsequently signed with Joseph M. Schenck and United Artists in 1927 to make five films, the first three of which (The Drums of Love, The Battle of the Sexes, and Lady of the Pavements) proved to be the lowest point of his career, both critically and commercially. The fact that he was a contractual employee at the studio he had co-founded only ten years before simply added insult to injury. Griffith now found himself in the position of having to prove himself, yet again, while also facing the challenge of having to make his first sound film. Unlike many filmmakers of his generation, D.W. Griffith viewed the advent of sound films as an opportunity, not a crisis in the making. He was quoted in The Exhibitors HeraldWorld of 21 January 1929 as calling for an amalgam of the best of silent film technique with the expressive possibilities of sound: The dialogue picture can only succeed…when [it] is essentially a silent picture with the addition of dialogue. When this is done successfully you will see the greatest entertainment the world has ever witnessed. […] We must preserve all the speed, action, swirl, life and tempo of the motion picture today. Add dialogue to that and, boy, you will have people standing in their seats cheering.

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Of course, this enthusiasm was expressed in conjunction with the release of Lady of the Pavements, and so might be seen as a simple attempt to drum up some publicity, but it must also be noted that Griffith had experimented with sound as far back as 1921 when he presented Dream Street in New York City with a spoken prologue, recorded on an early sound-on-disc system. In addition, The Battle of the Sexes and Lady of the Pavements were presented in their major city runs with synchronized musical tracks, the latter film interpolating as well several sequences of Lupe Velez singing the Irving Berlin composition, “Where Is the Song of Songs for Me?”. Griffith was never one to dismiss a technical innovation out of hand, something to which his many Biograph films will attest; even allowing for a bit of hyperbole, we may assume that he meant it when he declared in the New York Sunday World of 24 March 1929: “I am nutty over talking pictures …”. It was his boss, Joseph M. Schenck, who doubted the wisdom of sound films, but by 1929 he had no choice but to follow the industry into the unknown. Schenck was dissatisfied enough with Griffith’s recent poor showings at the box office to consider firing him, but Griffith campaigned vigorously for a chance to prove himself in sound. Abandoning contemporary subject matter, he returned to first principles, sure in his conviction that his greatest strength lay in his ability to make the American past come alive on film. Griffith approached Schenck with several historical subjects, among them a history the Confederate States of America, a subject dear to his heart, and a history of Texas. Schenck turned down these and other proposals as the losses from Lady of the Pavements mounted. Finally, Griffith returned to California from his extended stay in New York, stopping off in Texas to “take the cure” in Mineral Wells, and brought with him an idea to film the life of Abraham Lincoln. Schenck approved the project. The producer saw immediately that such a film was a prestige production and budgeted it accordingly; however, negotiations between Griffith and United Artists were contentious, with the studio actually insisting that the director take a cut in salary. Matters were resolved only after significant concessions were made on both sides, not the least of which was Schenck’s agreement to let the last film in Griffith’s five-film contract lapse if both sides found it convenient to do so. With this possibility of regaining his independence now in reach, Griffith plunged into the Lincoln project. The popular authority on Lincoln at that time was Carl Sandburg, the Chicago-based poet and journalist whose The Prairie Years, the first two in a series of biographical volumes on the sixteenth president, were published to great acclaim three years before. Griffith approached Sandburg to write a script for the film and the poet did eventually offer some ideas, but his fee was too high and Griffith looked elsewhere for a writer. He found one in Stephen Vincent Benét, a young poet whose epic-length work, John Brown’s Body, had just won the Pulitzer Prize. Benét eventually wrote many drafts of a script, all of which were severely altered or rejected by Schenck’s studio representative, John W. Considine, Jr., who took final credit as “Story and Production Advisor”. Benét came to believe that, publicity releases to the contrary, United Artists did not have much faith in the project, or in Griffith, and he left California convinced that his final submission would be heavily rewritten to make it more appealing to the movie-going public. In this he was not mistaken, but it turned out that Griffith meddled with Benét’s drafts as much as the studio executives did. One can only guess at why Griffith would have sought out so high profile a writer, only to reject most of what he offered. Perhaps it was his need to be acknowledged as the primary creative force behind all of his films, a trait he had exhibited since his earliest days in the business and something which his most recent work as a contract employee had shown to be long in the past; or perhaps he was simply unsure of himself, knowing how little support he had gotten from Schenck in the previous few months. Whatever the reason, Griffith’s and the studio’s constant reworking of Benét’s draft scripts resulted in a film lacking narrative cohesion, showing all the signs of being patched together by committee. Griffith had 229

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greater success in the casting of the film, as well as in the technical crew that he assembled. The title role was given to Walter Huston, a veteran stage actor who had only recently begun to work in film and whose commanding physical and vocal presence added a muchneeded integrity and unifying force to the episodic unfolding of Lincoln’s life. Mary Todd Lincoln was played with engaging comic flair by Kay Hammond, while Ian Keith portrayed John Wilkes Booth as the self-dramatizing egotist described so vividly by his contemporaries. Smaller roles were cast with equal care; most notably, famed silent film actor Hobart Bosworth played Robert E. Lee with tragic sadness, and Frank Campeau brought a convincing grit and energy to the pivotal role of Phil Sheridan. Henry B. Walthall, whose greatest fame derived from his role as the Little Colonel in The Birth of a Nation (1915), lent quiet dignity to the minor role of Colonel Marshall, Lee’s aide-de-camp. The only role for which Griffith showed an inexplicable blind spot was that of Ann Rutledge, played with what must be described as simpering absurdity by Una Merkel, a brilliant comic actress woefully miscast as Lincoln’s mythical first and only true love. The sets were designed by William Cameron Menzies and photographed by Karl Struss. The music, most of it sourced with great subtlety to action in the film, was arranged by Hugo Riesenfeld. When Carl Sandburg had first written to Griffith about his possible involvement in the film, he strongly recommended that it be conceived of as “a series of personality sketches” illustrating the high points of Lincoln’s life, the better to reveal his political acumen and human empathy. Subplots, especially fictional ones, were deemed intrusive and unnecessary. Consciously or not, Griffith followed this early advice with great fidelity. The film opens with a darkly foreboding sequence on a slave ship, in which the impersonal brutality of the Middle Passage is made clear. This is followed by a sharply edited series of short vignettes set in various public gathering places, where men argue politics and declare their sectional loyalties. Then, a tracking shot through a miniature backwoods set settles on a log cabin and the story of the film properly begins with the announced birth of Abraham Lincoln. With this elliptical opening, the American world of 1809 into which Lincoln was born is revealed in all its contentious reality, and the basic arguments that would lead to the Civil War a half century later are shown to be deeply embedded in America’s history. It is, without doubt, one of the most considered and beautifully realized prologues to a film that Griffith ever conceived or executed, demonstrating that the sound film need not abandon the fluid visual style of the silent cinema. From there, Abraham Lincoln follows a fairly straightforward chronology, illustrating Lincoln’s early manhood experiences in New Salem, particularly his courtship of Ann Rutledge and the horrible mark her early death left upon his psyche. These awkward scenes of rustic lovemaking between Lincoln and Rutledge mar the film due to the stilted dialogue and tentative acting uncharacteristically displayed by Huston and Merkel, but they are necessary if Griffith is to explain in any convincing manner Lincoln’s inability to commit to a relationship with Mary Todd later in life. The Ann Rutledge myth was first propagated through the memoirs of William Herndon, Lincoln’s early law partner and a man who found his only true rival for Lincoln’s time and affection in Mary Todd. Herndon’s eyewitness testimony convinced Griffith, like Sandburg and many other writers before and since, that Lincoln’s essentially dark and pessimistic view of life was formed by Rutledge’s sudden death. Thus, the powerfully moving scene in which Lincoln dashes one night from his cabin into a raging storm, only to collapse in uncontrollable grief on Rutledge’s grave, becomes the central event in the film’s treatment of Lincoln’s early development. The blind intensity with which Huston plays this scene is matched by Griffith’s striking use of light and dark to mirror Lincoln’s troubled soul. The sound to this sequence is lost, but at least one of the several surviving shooting scripts describes the sound as “a moan of wind in the pine boughs, rising and falling like a great organ sobbing”, as Lincoln cries out “OH, Ann – Ann – my Ann – Oh – why can’t I hold on 230

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to anything…..?”. In this one line of dialogue we find the root of his psychological obsession with preserving, or holding on to the Union, while at the same time holding people at a distance with self-deprecating humor, a tactic that will allow him to avoid forming close personal relationships, even with his wife, Mary. Much of the rest of the film consists of a series of short scenes held together by the audience’s assumed foreknowledge of the general outlines of Lincoln’s life and the events of the Civil War; indeed, parts of this film and certain characters in it would be incomprehensible without a basic background in American history. But Griffith is not concerned with telling a story in any conventional sense; rather, he is interested in the presentation of anecdotes, in the form of tableaux, designed to illustrate particular political or social points. More than this, he wants to enshrine Abraham Lincoln as an American saint, a common man who came from the people, yet who understood his destiny and the destiny of the American nation in uncommon ways. Unlike Griffith’s other historical films, there are no fictionalized personal stories woven into Abraham Lincoln, subplots designed to comment on or provide for the audience a roadmap into the heart of the story. The person of Lincoln is all that Griffith needs to tell Lincoln’s story. He is, after all, the Great Commoner. Although clearly a big budget film for 1930, Abraham Lincoln certainly does not approach the epic sweep of films like The Birth of a Nation or Orphans of the Storm when it comes to masses of extras and battle scenes composed across a broad canvas. With the exception of Sheridan’s ride, which actually implies its epic scale through judicious camera angles and a strikingly sophisticated use of sound, there are no great battles scenes in Abraham Lincoln. This is as it should be, for the point of Griffith’s film is not to recreate battles, but to show the effect the war had on Lincoln and, by extension, the American people. As a result, it is actually one of the most intimate and non-violent war films ever made in America. Principal photography on Abraham Lincoln began in late February of 1930 and continued for about two months. For the reasons suggested above – his insecurities, his drinking, frontoffice meddling, the “make or break” expectations of others – Griffith found this shoot to be among the most difficult of his career. Not long after filming ended, Griffith was back in Mineral Wells recuperating from the experience. The final cut of the film fell to Schenck’s man, John Considine, who did offer Griffith the opportunity to review his version and then make suggestions or changes as he saw fit. It is possible that Griffith did shoot some extra scenes, but by and large the film editing and sound dubbing was left for others to complete, while the director himself returned to New York City. Griffith did not see a final version of his film until late August, and by that time California was not inclined to accommodate him in any of his suggested alterations. As he had, to all intents and purposes, abdicated his responsibility for giving the film its final shape once he had walked away from Abraham Lincoln earlier in the spring, Griffith did not complain openly and even participated in the film’s promotion leading up to and during its premiere run at New York’s Central Theatre on 25 October 1930. Reviews were good, and audiences in the major cities were substantial in size. Once it got out into general distribution around the country, however, Abraham Lincoln showed signs of trouble at the box office; still, its early success and the recognition and accolades Griffith received from both critics and industry insiders as a result of having made his “comeback” led him to believe that his professional worries were just about over. He and Joseph M. Schenck parted on amicable terms, Griffith being released from his obligation to make a fifth film for the producer (although United Artists would distribute it). Griffith was no longer under the thumb of Hollywood’s front-office men, and with his next film he would finally make a decisive break from the studio system and its dehumanizing assembly line processes. At least, that was the plan. Steven Higgins 231

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625 –

[D.W. GRIFFITH AT PREMIERE OF THE FLORODORA GIRL] Filming date: May 1930 Location: not known Release date: not known Camera: not known On camera: D.W. Griffith Archival sources: Kevin Brownlow Collection (from Seymour Burns Collection), 16mm acetate positive

D.W. Griffith stands in front of a microphone by the entrance of a movie theatre at night. The Florodora Girl was released on 30 May 1930 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The film (with Movietone soundtrack and Technicolor sequences) was directed by Harry Beaumont, starring Marion Davies, Lawrence Gray and Walter Catlett. This segment, used in the documentary for television D.W. Griffith, Father of Film (Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, 1993), comes from a film made in 1929 to publicize silent-era musician Seymour Burns. Kevin Brownlow

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626 D.W. GRIFFITH, INC.

[PROLOGUES TO THE BIRTH OF A NATION REISSUE] Alternate archival title: [Conversation between D.W.Griffith and Walter Huston on The Birth of a Nation] Filming date: Spring (June?) 1930 Location: Art Cinema studio, Formosa Avenue, Los Angeles Producer: D.W. Griffith Release date: not released? Release length: two reels (Part I: 713 ft.; Part II: 204 ft.) Copyright date: not copyrighted Director: D.W. Griffith Assistant director: Herbert Sutch Script: Gerrit J. Lloyd Photographer: Karl Struss Assistant cameraman: Stanley Cortez? Head electrician: Edward Seward Sound recording system: Western Electric Cast: D.W. Griffith; Walter Huston; Byron Sagee, Betsy Heisler, Dawn O’Day [Anne Shirley] (Children) Archival sources: George Eastman House, 16mm acetate positive (Part I); Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate picture positive (Part I); 35mm nitrate track positive (Part I, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Collection); 35mm nitrate negatives (Part II, picture and sound); National Film and Television Archive (London), 16mm fine grain master (Part I) NOTE: In the prologue to the second half of the film, Griffith reads intertitles from the silent version and quotations from Woodrow Wilson’s A History of the American People (1902); see Robert Lang (ed.), The Birth of a Nation (1994), p. 94. GRIFFITH–HUSTON OPENING To “BIRTH OF A NATION” There is a dimly lit room. Two men are seated. The first man speaks: FIRST MAN: You call yourself David Wark Griffith, don’t you? SECOND MAN: Well, Mr. Huston, I did when I was younger and wore a high hat, but now I am satisfied just to be called D.W. FIRST MAN: You know, I rather liked your “Birth of a Nation”. Do you think it was entirely true? SECOND MAN: Well, perhaps it was one-sided quite a bit. FIRST MAN: Then why did you make it one-sided? SECOND MAN: Well, I am a Southerner and I wanted to tell our side of the story; better men than I have told the other side and I wanted to tell our side as well as I could; I wanted to tell both sides.

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FIRST MAN: Still I think you rather avoid the question. Do you think it is true? SECOND MAN: There is a scene I remember quite vividly… Pardon me, will you have a cigar?… It was when the son of man was brought before Pontius Pil[ate] and the rabble was crying for his life: “Crucify him… crucify him”… I don’t remember the exact words… And the learned, aristocractic old Roman leaned down with contempt and said: “Truth… What is the truth?” Strangely enough, there was no answer. FIRST MAN: Well, it was rather good entertainment, I thought. Perhaps it served a purpose… if anything serves a purpose. SECOND MAN: You are quite cynical this evening. FIRST MAN: Well, it might prove the futility of war. It did that in a way, I think. I don’t suppose you meant to do that… you were just making a motion picture. SECOND MAN: I’m afraid you are right. FIRST MAN: But it did in a way serve that purpose of the slavery question; all the issues between the North and the South could have been settled without all that blood shed and hatred. I think you had something in your picture about war being the breeder of hatred. SECOND MAN: Perhaps I did; I didn’t write all the sub-titles; then, of course, it showed in a way, perhaps, the glorification of a people battling for what they thought was right, however fruitless it may be ended. It’s hot this evening, isn’t it?… It showed the nobility of Lincoln. – By the way, in my last picture I thought you were simply marvelous as Lincoln. I know that is the oldfashioned way to express it, but I still hold to it. FIRST MAN: Oh, I’ve done… you know how those things go… Good bit of acting now and then… quite nice to be talking about ourselves, isn’t it? Man is never so happy as when talking about himself. SECOND MAN: I’ve been reminded of that by quite a number of ladies in my life… and, after all, was the Civil War fruitless?… It did bind together the territories and make then into states… brought about prohibition… and… all sorts of things. FIRST MAN: Well, let’s go and see the old play again; I suppose it’s quite old-fashioned now. SECOND MAN: I rather imagine so; I have seen it about 300 times and I hope I never have to see it again. This will be my last night… quite sure you won’t have a cigar? FIRST MAN: Pardon me, I’ve told you three times I don’t want one. SECOND MAN: Pardon me, I’m sorry. PART TWO Same room. A young boy and girl of 12 or 14 are present. The two men in different attitudes. BOY: Sis and I just saw the “Birth of a Nation”… It is an old picture made about fifty years ago. GIRL: Oh, it wasn’t that long. BOY: Well it was about that long… What difference do a few years make? (Turns to Huston) Do you think it was true that anything like that ever happened… Klu [sic] Klux Klan and all that stuff? SECOND MAN: Well, here’s what Mr. Woodrow Wilson says about it, and he knew a thing or two. BOY: Oh, yes, he was President once, wasn’t he? SECOND MAN: Yes, I think you are right. (taking up book) I’ll read it to you. BOY (or GIRL, the one best suited): Well, if it isn’t long, go ahead… But if it’s long, cut it out. SECOND MAN: On second thought… while I like the sound of my own voice… I think I will let Mr. Huston read it, because I know if he reads it it will be well did [sic]. How about it, Walter? FIRST MAN: Well, I’ve taken chances before so I’ll try it again. (He reads an excerpt from Woodrow Wilson’s history.)

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BOY (after he finished): Well, I guess he knew as much about it as anybody. I suppose we will have to see the second part. FIRST SCENE OF THE BURNING OF PIEDMONT. Many voices are heard. They are screaming, – Terrible. ONE VOICE: Burn the houses… Burn them all down. ANOTHER VOICE: They’ve walked on us long enough. ANOTHER VOICE: Yes, we’ll do a little walking now. ANOTHER VOICE: Break in those doors. ANOTHER VOICE: Kill ’em… kill ’em all. ANOTHER VOICE: We got ’em now. ANOTHER VOICE: Stamp on ’em… Knock ’em down… Stamp on ’em. This goes on thru the rifle fire and general excitement. NEXT SCENE. SCENE OF THE CONFEDERATES MARCHING ACROSS THE BRIDGE Voices shouting. VOICE: They will burn Piedmont down. ANOTHER VOICE: They are tearing the place to pieces. ANOTHER VOICE: Double quick… double quick. ARRIVAL IN PIEDMONT VOICE: You thought you would, would you? ANOTHER VOICE: You’re going to get yours. ANOTHER VOICE: Just in time… Run ’em out… Run ’em out. BATTLE SCENE Little Colonel receiving orders. “CHARGE… CHARGE.” ANOTHER VOICE: One to five, but we’ll break ’em. CHARGE. CHARGE… Indiscriminate voices during the charge: During the last charge, one voice: VOICE: Once more, boys, once more. ANOTHER VOICE: We’ll break ’em yet… We’ll break ’em yet… charge. SCENE OF CONFEDERATES LEAVING STREET VOICE: Run ’em into the ocean… run ’em into the ocean. ANOTHER VOICE: One Southerner is worth ten yanks. ANOTHER VOICE: Good-bye… Good-bye. ANOTHER VOICE: Let us know when you get to Washington.

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All this is simultaneous. THE LITTLE COLONEL ON HORSEBACK: “Forward… March.” VOICES IN THE THEATRE: “There he is now… Mrs. Lincoln… Doesn’t she look sweet? OTHER VOICES: LINCOLN… LINCOLN… LINCOLN!!!! MOB SCENE IN THE STREET WHERE NEGROES ARE GATHERING. VOICE: Burn down the jail. ANOTHER: Take ’em out. We’ve got ’em now. ANOTHER: White folks… take ’em out… string ’em up. ANOTHER: They’ve strung us enough, haven’t they? ANOTHER: Burn the town… burn the town. VOICES FOR STONEMANN’S [sic] ENTRANCE ON THE STREET DURING THE RIDE. VOICES: Stonemann… Stonemann… OTHERS: He’s our friend… he’s our friend. ANOTHER: He’ll give us what we want. ANOTHER: STONEMANN… STONEMANN… VOICES IN RIDE OF KLAN INTO TOWN. VOICES: KLU [sic] KLUXES… KLU [sic] KLUXES… ANOTHER: Aim at the horses… bring ’em down. OTHERS: We’ll Klu [sic] Klux them… WHITE VOICES: For the Southland… ride… ride… OTHER VOICES: Ride over ’em… ride over ’em… ride… ride… OTHERS: The Southland… forever… the Southland… the Southland. All this simultaneously. VOICE: You’re fighting for your homes, boys! THE PROCESSION IN THE STREET AFTER THE TRIUMPH Voices heard over the music and thru the music. VOICES: Here they come… look at ’em – they saved us… all Creation can’t whip us… They did it… they did it… the Southland forever. OTHERS: Here you are Carolina… OTHERS: We’ll barbecue you tonight. END OF PLAY FIRST SPEAKER: Well, it’s not worthwhile talking about the past… it’s over. SECOND SPEAKER: It’s over. FIRST SPEAKER: And well worth the struggle… with all its faults, it’s a pretty good country that came out of all that trouble… the United States of America.… Well, let’s go to bed. Pre-production script, June 19, 1930

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GRIFFITH–HUSTON Prologue to BIRTH OF A NATION EXT… LIKE A PORCH SHOWING THE WINDOW & DOOR OF A LIGHTED ROOM… EVENING MEDIUM SHOT: Out of the shadows into the camera come tip-toeing a boy and girl, the boy ahead. They move stealthily towards the window. THE BOY[:] Sh!… Sh! THE GIRL[:] (whispering) Are they in there? CLOSE SHOT The camera moves up to look over the shoulders of the boy and girl into the lighted room where sit D.W. Griffith and Walter Huston, talking. The girl’s head is in the foreground, until she whispers: THE GIRL [:] Get over! I can see better. She elbows the boy over so the camera shows the two men clearly. THE GIRL[:] (whispering) Is that D.W. Griffith? THE BOY[:] (whispering) Yes. THE GIRL[:] He’s just a man… isn’t he? BOY[:] Of course! Stupid! GIRL[:] He looks alright, doesn’t he? BOY[:] Sure he’s alright! He made the “Birth of a Nation.” GIRL[:] Oh… that’s Walter Huston! I wish we could hear better. I saw him in a picture and he’s pretty good. BOY[:] We could open the door… a little. The camera draws back as they move over to the door, and open it slightly. The two draw back into the shadows as the camera moves into the room, picking up the sound of the two men talking. INTERIOR… LIVING ROOM… EVENING Walter Huston rises, goes back of his chair and picks up a cavalry sword which he now offers to Mr. Griffith. HUSTON: I brought along an old cavalry sword I want you to have, D.W…. It was worn by a Confederate officer. GRIFFITH: (Rising and taking sword) Thank you, Walter… This means a lot to me. You know, my father carried one like this. HUSTON: Don’t forget to give me a penny, D.W…. a sharp gift. Griffith hands over a coin, which Huston takes with thanks, and then Griffith draws out the old saber, flashing it while Huston looks on for a moment. HUSTON: I often wondered… did you make “The Birth of a Nation” so you could tell your father’s story?

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GRIFFITH: (Decisively) No… (Less decisively) No… oh… (Now doubtfully) Possibly I did. HUSTON: A man can’t make a masterpiece like that without having his heart in it. GRIFFITH: Masterpiece. HUSTON: Now… Now… It’s considered so all over the world… even in Russia… and no one knows Civil War like a Russian. GRIFFITH: I didn’t have to MAKE that picture… it SPRANG out of me. HUSTON: Did it take you long? GRIFFITH: Well, I began on the picture when I was five years old… hearing my father and his friends tell of their struggles, and their battles. I SAW those battles then… just as I filmed them years later. HUSTON: The story was all true… to you! GRIFFITH: True… why it’s as true as this old cavalry blade. You can’t hear your father tell of fighting day after day with nothing to eat but parched corn… and your mother sitting up all night making robes for the Klan… and not feel it is true. I certainly thought it was truth, but, as Pontius Pilate asked: “Truth… what is truth?” HUSTON: Must make you feel proud! GRIFFITH: I don’t know… they told it so much better than I could ever get it into the film. HUSTON: Somehow you put the fury of life into that picture… it makes your blood tingle. GRIFFITH: They were a brave people… fighting for what they believed was right… Girls wearing their Southern ermine with a laugh… boys taking up the guns fallen from their fathers’ hands… As this speech continues the camera withdraws and the voices slowly fade as the camera moves again out the door, and the door closes so there is only the crack again and we see the listening figures of the boy and the girl. BOY[:] (whispering) Come on! Let’s see that picture. GIRL[:] (whispering) Have we got money enough! BOY[:] Dad will take care of that. FADE OUT Pre-production script, June 19, 1930 I suppose it began when I was a child. I used to get under the table and listen to my father and his friends talk about the battles and what they’d been through and their struggles. Those things impress you deeply – and I suppose that got into The Birth. Excerpt from the dialogue of the film (Part I)

This interview between Walter Huston and Griffith was planned as the prologue to the 1930 reissue (with soundtrack) of The Birth of a Nation, but it was probably not used. Huston and the crew had come off Abraham Lincoln. It was photographed by Karl Struss, Griffith’s regular cameraman at this period. The assistant director was the veteran Herbert Sutch, head electrician was Edward Seward and the children were Byron Sagee, Betsy Heisler (the daughter of Stuart Heisler?) and Dawn O’Day, a child actress who grew up to be Anne Shirley (see Anthony Slide in Films in Review, November 1979, p. 173). Since the crew came from Abraham Lincoln, one can safely assume that Griffith directed it and that the assistant cameraman was Stanley Cortez. Kevin Brownlow 238

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627 D.W. GRIFFITH, INC.

THE STRUGGLE Alternate title: Ten Nights in a Barroom (according to New York State Archives) Filming date: 6 July–9 or 14 August 1931 Location: Audio Cinema studios, 198th and Decatur Avenue, The Bronx, New York; exteriors: 175th Street, The Bronx; Stamford Rolling Mills, Springdale, Connecticut Distribution: United Artists Corp. Connecticut preview: late November 1931 New York premiere: 10 December 1931, Rivoli Theatre Release date: 6 February 1932 Release length: nine reels, 77 or 87 minutes Copyright date: 25 November 1931 (LP2843) Director: D.W. Griffith Assistant director: Richard A. Blaydon Second assistant director: Jack Aichele Production manager: Raymond A. Clune Production advisor: A. Griffith Grey Script: Anita Loos, John Emerson, (uncredited:) D.W. Griffith Story: Anita Loos, John Emerson Source: loosely based on L’Assommoir, the novel (1877) by Emile Zola; The Demon Drink, the play by Augustin Daly; L’assommoire, the play by William Busrach Cinematographer: Joseph Ruttenberg; G.W. Bitzer?; Larry Williams? Camera crew: Nick Rogalli, Richard Hertel, Ben Wetzler, Paul Rogalli Sets: Clement Williams Electrician: Johnny Murphy Supervisor to makeup: Edward Scanlon Film editor: Barney Rogan Sound system: Western Electric Recording Sound recording: Joe W. Coffman Music arranger/effects: Philip Scheib, D.W. Griffith Script girl: Alice Hunter Still photographer: Frank Kirby Cast: Hal Skelly (Jimmie Wilson); Zita Johann (Florrie Wilson); Charlotte Wynters (Nina); Evelyn Baldwin (Nan Wilson); Jackson Halliday (Johnny Marshall); Edna Hagan (Mary Wilson); Claude Cooper (Sam); Arthur Lipson (Cohen); Charles Richman (Mr. Craig); Helen Mack (A catty girl); Scott Moore (Al, a gigolo); Dave Manley (Tony, a mill worker) NOTE: A Production Code Administration certificate was submitted by United Artists for a 1935 reissue; however, documentation in the Motion Picture Association of America/Production Code Administration bears the annotation “cancelled – withdrawn from circulation” (AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 1931–40, pp. 2083–84). According to Eileen Bowser, the film “was revived briefly as a ‘laugh’ movie under the title Ten Nights in a Barroom” (Barry, D.W. Griffith, American Film Master, 1985 reprint of 1965 edition, p. 85).

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Archival sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate positive; Národní Filmovy´ Arhiv, 35mm nitrate positive (received from the Museum of Modern Art in 1976); the Museum of Modern Art, 35mm acetate negative (derived from 35mm nitrate positive at Národní Filmovy´ Arhiv) Jimmie Wilson, young steel mill foreman, was beloved of everyone who knew him, particularly the boys with whom he “stepped out” Saturday nights, and he believed implicitly in his boast that he could take his liquor or leave it alone. But one night, at a social club dance, he was startled to learn that his slightly inebriated clowning was painful to Florrie, his fiancee, and that she felt he was playing the fool. He was so deeply moved by this information that he vowed never again to touch liquor, and so, with her last doubts brushed aside, Florrie agreed to their marriage. For five years happiness reigned over their little home, particularly after the arrival of little Mary, the pride of the household and her daddy’s playfellow. Shortly before her fourth birthday, though, Mary was stricken gravely ill, and for days she laid at death’s door. Life became a nightmare to Jimmie. While Florrie and Jimmie’s sister, Nan, watched at the bedside, he went through the motions of carrying out his duties as foreman at the mill, but fear gripped his heart. Finally he came to the breaking point, his nerves on edge and his brain dulled. It was Sam, his old friend, who led him to the speakeasy, feebly protesting there to “throw a shot into you, before you pass out on me”. The drink bolstered up his racked body, and when he arrived at home he found that the crisis had passed. Mary was better, – she would recover. That drink was a happy augury. Nan got the odor of whiskey upon his breath and recognized an evil omen. Florrie’s eyes widened with wonder and sorrow, but she said nothing. Nan was ready to give her answer to importunate Johnnie Marshall and go with him to the altar, but that odor of whiskey made her hesitate, a nameless fear holding her back. The next day was Saturday, and it took little urging to get Jimmie to the speakeasy to celebrate Mary’s recovery, and he arrived home in a hilarious condition. There were recriminations, but when he promised never to let it happen again all was forgiven. He meant his promise at the time, but other visits soon followed, and, after forgiveness, he counted his victory won with each new resolution. But the damage had been done. And the day came, all too soon, when he could no longer hide his cravings for drink from the bosom of his family. The climax came upon the occasion of Florrie’s party to announce the engagement of Nan and Johnnie. Even the great Mr. Craig, owner of the steel mills, was a guest. Jimmie arrived riotously intoxicated, and in an ugly mood. The party broke up, and Nan put off her marriage. “He’s my brother,” she explained, “and he needs me.” It was only a matter of time, of course, when Jimmie lost his job at the mills, and soon Florrie was forced to leave her little home for humbler quarters. Nan, unable longer to face Johnnie, went to a nearby city for a job with which to bolster the uncertain income. Jimmie disintegrated rapidly. Remorse at the plight of Florrie and little Mary only made matters worse for him, for it sent him back each time to sodden forgetfulness. He found occasional jobs, but each was lost because of his drinking. One night, flushed with liquor, he boasted that he had a good-sized insurance policy, and Nina, a blonde who lived by her wits, set about getting it. With the aid of accomplices, she let Jimmie in on a deal in which a large consignment of liquor was to be “run down from Canada,” and Jimmie, converting his $4,000 policy into cash, contributed his share to the investment. Two days later he learned that he had been tricked. Blindly now he reeled downward. He could not go home, for there was no home. Florrie and Mary had been dispossessed, and he was unable to find them. Now he was a vagrant, a furtive,

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slinking tramp that haunted alleys and doorways. It was thus that Mary found him, slinking into a deserted hallway for shelter. She called to him, but reason had deserted him. His mind was beset by fearful shapes, and he turned upon the girl, not recognizing her. Mary rushed to the tenement house where she now lived with her mother, but Florrie was out. So she left a note and rushed back to Jimmie. Delirium tremens had taken possession of him, and he believed Mary to be one of the demons torturing him. He picked up a handy weapon and struck at her. Florrie arrived just as Jimmie collapsed. Ages long, she watched by his bedside while the wreck that was once Jimmie fought for life. Love was thrown into the balance, and won. When Jimmie’s eyes opened to reason and to Florrie, it was for Mary that he pleaded. “I killed her”, he wailed. Mary came into the room. God was good. Jimmie’s craving for drink had burned itself out, and again he became a man. He fought his way back, even to winning back the confidence of the owner of the steel mill. Jimmie’s eyes were shiny as he recounted to his little family group the good fortune which had befallen him, and Florrie’s were wide with love. Press book synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, November 25, 1931, LP2843 [stamped with date February 12, 1932]

Jimmie Wilson, a mill worker, promises his bride that he will drink no more. They live a happy family life until he turns to bootleg liquor during Prohibition. He ruins his sister’s engagement party when he turns up drunk. His alcohol addiction results in the loss of his job, his friends, his family. When he finds he has sunk so low that he terrorizes his little daughter, he tries again to reform.

In 1929, the D.W. Griffith Company was awarded a big tax refund for a 1920 overpayment. The company treasurer invested the money in stocks without telling Griffith, and, while the market crashed in the fall of 1929, these investments proved to be good in the short term. The company got a small bank loan as well, and The Struggle went into production in a rented studio in the Bronx. The need to keep costs down contributed a documentary-like quality to this melodramatic tale: scenes were shot in the Bronx streets, others at the Stamford Rolling Mills in Springdale, Connecticut. The film was previewed in Connecticut in late November. Sadly, Griffith’s hopes for this film were doomed. He was sure that if he could manage to produce a film on his own again, he could make a success. He believed that his years of failure were the result of working for others with insufficient control of his own product. It is painful for anyone who has closely followed the career of D.W. Griffith to have to say that the results were laughed off the screen by its first audience. When audiences laugh at a presentation not intended to be funny, it is usually because it makes them uncomfortable and embarrassed. It is a common phenomenon when viewing films made in the youth of the spectators to be embarrassed by what moved them in their innocence. Now we can discover that The Struggle was not the least of Griffith’s films, even if it is far from the great ones. When talking pictures became the normal way to see movies, audiences tended to giggle at silent films: 1931 is too early for that reaction. Mary Pickford, hearing her own popular silent films producing laughter in the audience years later, decided to buy up and destroy her old films. Fortunately, she was dissuaded. This is not the case of The Struggle, of course, since it was not a silent film. But the film did resemble the old Biograph silent one-reel melodramas in plot and tone: the best of the Biograph films had had a strong emotional effect on their audiences, and the embarrassment factor could have played a role for the 1931 audience. In 1931, of course, the audiences felt the cynicism and “sophistication” of the intervening years of the 241

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Jazz Age. The reaction could also be attributed to the addition of dialogue to Griffith’s typically melodramatic scenes, perhaps the same shock experienced by audiences when they first heard John Gilbert make florid declarations of passion aloud. In Broken Blossoms (1919), a drunken brute abusing a cowering Lillian Gish was chilling and terrifying. The same scene in The Struggle, a drunken Jimmie Wilson abusing his little daughter, with the addition of sound effects and dialogue, was received as comedy. Griffith’s reaction to hearing laughter at the premiere of The Struggle was to hide out in his hotel room and refuse to see anyone. One of the trade papers declined to review The Struggle out of respect for Griffith’s former greatness; other reviews were devastating. United Artists, which had advanced some of the costs in exchange for distribution rights, withdrew the film and cut it hastily to try to distribute it before word of its failure spread. It never got more than a few showings in Philadelphia. Some years later it was revived briefly as a “laugh” movie under the title Ten Nights in a Barroom. The scenario for The Struggle could have come from one of many of the Biograph onereelers that dealt with alcohol problems, such as The Drunkard’s Reformation (1909), The Expiation (1909), or Drink’s Lure (1913). The Drunkard’s Reformation was especially close to the plot of The Struggle. The documents in The D.W. Griffith Papers at the Museum of Modern Art record an inquiry during the preparation of The Struggle into the copyright situation of Charles Reade’s play Drink and its predecessor, Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir, showing that this old temperance drama was in Griffith’s mind. These documents also record Griffith himself as the author of the continuity, in May 1931, although as often before, he is not credited on the film: he and Anita Loos and John Emerson were all three paid for the script by the Griffith company, David Wark Griffith, Inc. Anita Loos and John Emerson were by then highly successful writers of film and stage comedy. Why they were selected or why they agreed to write for this project is a mystery. Like most people who had ever been associated with Griffith, they would have been moved by old friendship and loyalty, but they were surely the wrong choice for this film. The only place one might recognize their touch is the prologue, set in the prewar period before Prohibition, in a beer garden. Here lighthearted people sit and gossip happily over their draught beers about movies and movie stars. A product of the progressive era, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors, had been in existence since 1919. The unpopular Prohibition amendment was often disregarded, especially among people who thought themselves sophisticated, and provoked the rise of a new criminal class providing bootleg liquor. For many, breaking the law of the land became a joke, until Prohibition was brought to an end in 1933. The Struggle starts out as a criticism of Prohibition: people drank less and more healthily in the days before it was passed. Bootleg liquor was poisonous. But in the progress of the film, the theme changes emphasis to the horrors of alcohol addiction and its destructiveness to the family. The theme of family and the threats to its security weaves through Griffith’s films from beginning to end. By 1931, the talking film had taken over the industry. Much of sound film technology had been stabilized, most theaters had become equipped to show it and small theaters unable to modernize were being forced to close or to change purpose. Various changes independent of the arrival of sound film but occurring simultaneously changed the look of the photography: studio lighting changed from arc lights to incandescence; panchromatic film stock replaced orthochromatic. Griffith, always wanting to be in the forefront of technological change, used the new dynamic coil microphone to pick up the dialogue of The Struggle, a microphone which was not to be in widespread use until the late 1930s (Donald Crafton, in The Talkies, p. 227, quoting Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology). This gave more freedom to the placement and movement of the mike. 242

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The production of The Struggle sought to capture everyday casual speech, in keeping with the added element of realism that talkies gave to film. Griffith seems to have been determined to avoid the artificial and stilted dialogue that plagued some of the early talkies. The sharp-tongued wit of Anita Loos disappears in this text. The characters were more apt to fling off a “Yeah?” than engage in clever repartee. The stage-trained actors were on the whole not up to the demands of this casual speech, certainly not Zita Johann, recruited from Broadway for her first film role. Hal Skelly, on the other hand, in a highly dramatic role as a man struggling with addiction, gave a remarkably natural performance of human weakness and anguish. A seemingly silly but entirely realistic note is struck when he uses the excuse of his wife’s insistence that he wear a flowered lavender tie to the party as a reason to return to drink after having sworn it off. In the climactic scenes, his shattered face expresses the horror in closeups as he suffers the effects of delirium tremens. The Struggle contains one of the most moving scenes ever staged by Griffith. To his countless images of the happy family, he has added a haunting image of a broken home. When Hal Skelly as Jimmie Wilson returns to his apartment, he finds it empty of furniture and people. His wife has gone, the furniture is on the sidewalk, and his daughter has been sent across the way to stay temporarily with a neighbor. Skelly looks out the window, where we can see his daughter with the neighbor’s children, listening to a radio. A sermon is being broadcast, followed by organ music, the hymn “Abide With Me”. The sound comes from another space than the one we are in, and is an imaginative use of the new possibilities of sound in film. The children do not see or hear Skelly. He slumps against a wall, his family lost to him, a picture of despair. The camera holds him there, at a distance, and the entire empty space of the room underlines his emotion, stripping him bare of all defenses. If the opening-night audience laughed at such an intimate scene, one can understand what drove Griffith to hide out in his hotel room. Eileen Bowser

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628 HEARST METROTONE NEWS CORP.

HEARST METROTONE NEWS [VOL. 7, NO. 250] Alternate title: Annual awards of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for 1935 (according to Hearst index card) Filming date: 5? 6? or (according to Hearst index card) 11 March 1936 Location: Hollywood, California Distribution: Hearst Metrotone News Corp. Release date: March 1936 Release length: one reel Copyright date: undetermined Camera: Sanford Greenwald, Carl H. Jones On camera: D.W. Griffith, Bette Davis, Victor McLaglen Archival sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate positive (Ken Smith Collection; archival title: [Ken Smith Trailers no. 01]); UCLA Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate negative (composite); 35mm nitrate negative (picture only) NOTE: The UCLA Film and Television Archive holds unedited footage from this title ([Academy Awards, 8th. Annual awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for 1935, Los Angeles, Calif. – Hearst production footage, HCOc614r1, X9899, HNRv7n250]), with outtakes of D.W. Griffith prior to presenting the award to Bette Davis, presenting the award to Victor McLaglen (with retake), and presenting the award to Davis. A “reconstructed version” was also made by UCLA, following the edge key number order. [Voiceover] – D.W. Griffith presents the screen’s highest honor to the outstanding star of 1935, Victor McLaglen, for his role in the RKO picture, The Informer. [D.W. Griffith] – Mr. McLaglen, it really does give me great pleasure to present you this award for the Best Performance of 1935 in The Informer. [Victor McLaglen] – Thank you, Mr Griffith. I can hardly find words to express my gratitude, and thanks for this. Actually, I want to thank everybody responsible for making this possible. All I can say is I’m exceedingly happy. [Transcript from the unedited footage]

The Eighth Annual Academy Awards were held at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 March 1936. Griffith was honored with a Special Award for “his distinguished creative achievements as director and producer and his invaluable initiative and lasting contributions to the progress of the motion picture arts”. As there was no official host, Griffith also presented the acting awards, to Victor McLaglen for The Informer (John Ford, 1935) and Bette Davis for Dangerous (Alfred E. Green, 1935). An image of Griffith posing with an Oscar alongside Henry B. Walthall is in The D.W. Griffith Papers, and this may have been at the same ceremony (Walthall died on 17 June of that year). When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded in 1927, an Awards of Merit committee was established, of which Griffith was a charter member. However, by the time the first Awards were presented on 16 May 1929, he was no longer serving. Mike Mashon 244

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The Academy Awards, intended to honor excellence in filmmaking, were instituted – and with more than a touch of irony – only after Griffith had created some of the formal masterpieces of cinema. To add insult to bad timing, the early years of the Academy Awards coincided with the sharp decline of Griffith’s career, a time when he was not only without honor in Hollywood but unable even to find a job there. As if to atone for this offense, the Academy voted in 1935 to present Griffith with a special award to recognize his achievements. This tribute did serve to reaffirm Griffith’s prestige in the film industry, and his return to Hollywood to accept the award in March 1936 was marked by fanfare and special attention from the new filmmaking establishment (including his token involvement in shooting MGM’s San Francisco, q.v.). Unfortunately the presentation was not filmed for posterity; but Griffith also presented the evening’s Best Acting awards, and this part of the proceedings was recorded on film – not during the ceremony itself, but in a reenactment for the newsreel cameras. J.B. Kaufman

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629 METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER

SAN FRANCISCO Filming date: 14 February–14 May 1936 Location: MGM studios, Culver City, California Producers: John Emerson, Bernard W. Hyman, W.S. Van Dyke Distribution: Loew’s, Inc. Release date: 26 June 1936 Release length: twelve reels; 111 or 115 minutes Copyright date: 22 June 1936 (LP6457); material submitted for copyright stamped with date 10 July 1936 Director: W.S. Van Dyke Second unit director: John Hoffman Third unit director: Earl Taggart Script: Anita Loos Story: Robert Hopkins Photographer: Oliver T. Marsh Montage of effects: John Hoffman Earthquake sequence: James Basevi Assistant director: Joseph Newman Art director: Cedric Gibbons Associate art directors: Arnold Gillespie, Harry McAfee, Edwin B. Willis Costumes: Western Costume Co. Gowns: Adrian Film editor: Tom Held Sound system: Western Electric Music: Selections from the opera Faust, music by Charles Gounod, libretto by Michel Carré and Jules Barbier; songs: “San Francisco”, music and lyrics by Gus Kahn, Bronislau Kaper and Walter Jurman [Jurmann]; “Would You”, music and lyrics by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed; “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, music, under the title “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah”, ascribed to William Steffe, lyrics by Julia Ward Howe; “Nearer My God to Thee”, music by Lowell Mason, lyrics by Sarah F. Adams; “Jerusalem”, music by Henry Parker, lyrics by Nella Music director: Herbert Stothart Operatic sequence staged by: William von Wymetal Dances staged by: Val Raset Recording engineer: Douglas Shearer Unit manager: Joe Cooke Press agent: Howard Dietz Vocal instructor: Paul Lamkoff French diction instructor: Harold Salemsen Cast: Clark Gable (Blackie Norton); Jeanette MacDonald (Mary Blake); Spencer Tracy (Father Tim Mullin); Jack Holt (Jack Burley); Ted Healy (Mat); Jessie Ralph (Mrs. [Maisie] Burley); Shirley Ross (Trixie); Margaret Irving (Della Bailey); Harold Huber (“Babe”); Edgar Kennedy (Sheriff); Al Shean (Professor); William Ricciardi [Riccardi] (Señor [Signor] Baldini); Kenneth Harlan (“Chick”); Roger Imhof (“Alaska”); Charles Judels [Judells] (Tony); Russell Simpson (“Red” Kelly); Bert Roach (Freddie Duane); Warren B. Hymer (Hazeltine) 246

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Archival sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate composite positive (Turner Entertainment Company Collection); National Film and Television Archive (London), 35mm nitrate negative; 35mm nitrate positive […] [Blackie Norton] is ‘king’ of the Barbary Coast, and, like his predecessors, his reformation is the essence of the plot. Only this guy is tougher; it takes the earthquake to cure him. […] Blackie Norton […] operates a prosperous gambling joint and beer garden. The closest friend of this godless soul is a priest, who doesn’t try to reform Blackie but always hopes for the best. [Mary Blake is] a Denver choir singer who’s in Frisco looking for work. From the [s]how at Blackie Norton’s she graduates to grand opera under the sponsorship of Blackie’s political rival. But she loves Blackie, and when he insists that she marry him, gives up her operatic aspirations, and returns to the wicked Coast, the priest intercedes. Blackie tells the priest to ‘stick to your racket and I’ll stick to mine’ and socks him on the chin. But the girl walks out. And Blackie spends the whole earthquake […] looking for her. […] Variety, July 1, 1936

Mary Blake, an out-of-work singer, comes to the Barbary Coast in 1906 and attracts the attention of both Blackie Norton, the unscrupulous owner of the Paradise Cafe, and Jack Burley, a wealthy and socially respectable landowner. Their rivalry for her hand is interrupted by the San Francisco earthquake, which levels the city, marks the beginning of a new era, and incidentally inspires Blackie to change his ways.

Taking advantage of Griffith’s presence in Hollywood to accept an honorary Academy Award in the spring of 1936, an enterprising MGM publicist arranged for Griffith to visit the set of San Francisco and to “direct” a single token scene. The rationale for his visit was a reunion with the film’s director, W.S. Van Dyke, once a Griffith assistant and now a successful MGM house director. Exactly which scene Griffith “directed” has become a matter for speculation. One story has him directing the closing shot of a group of earthquake victims marching over the crest of a hill, fired with determination to build a new San Francisco. Another story, that he directed the orchestra accompanying Jeanette MacDonald in one of her song numbers, seems less plausible but is supported by production stills and a florid story in the film’s press book (special thanks to Barbara Hall, of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for facilitating my access to these materials). In any case, it’s a moot point. Whatever the exact nature of Griffith’s contribution to San Francisco, it wasn’t an actual directing assignment – it was a photo op, engineered for the sake of the film’s publicity. It’s easy to read this gesture as a patronizing insult, but the simple fact is that MGM was the most successful studio in 1936 Hollywood, and San Francisco was one of its most prestigious current productions. There really does seem to have been an element of sincere tribute in this invitation. Moreover, the film was created primarily by Griffith graduates: directed by Van Dyke, co-produced by John Emerson, written by Anita Loos (not to mention the cast, whose extras included Ralph Lewis and Carl Stockdale). Whatever Hollywood had become by 1936, San Francisco reminds us that Griffith had played a major role in shaping it. J.B. Kaufman

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630 —

[D.W. GRIFFITH MEETS HAL ROACH] Filming date: Summer 1939? Location: Los Angeles Camera: not known Length: one reel On camera: D.W. Griffith, Hal Roach Archival sources: Producers Library Service, Los Angeles, format and generation undetermined NOTE: Approximately 10 feet of footage from this material are included in The Movies March On!, produced by RKO for its March of Time series (No. 4, 5th Year, 1939); 35mm nitrate duplicate negative at the National Film and Television Archive (BFI Collections), 1,935 ft.; Griffith and Roach appear at 1,623 to 1,633 feet. In the print viewed by David Robinson at the NFTVA, “the film opens with an enthusiastic exploration of the then recently established Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The camera shows the vaults, collection items such as the music scores for Broken Blossoms and Orphans of the Storm and an exquisitely groomed, cropped-haired Iris Barry conferring with her museum associates. This provides the introduction for a shrewd if conventional anthology of highlights of almost half a century of American cinema. Gone With the Wind and Chaplin’s The [Great] Dictator are mentioned as films currently in production. In a sequence showing old-timers who are still active in films, D.W.Griffith is glimpsed for two or three seconds, described as currently working with Hal Roach. Griffith does not look in good form in this single shot: his face appears somewhat puffy and pallid and his eyes (he does not look at the camera) are expressionless” (David Robinson to the Editor, June 27, 2003).

In the summer of 1939, Griffith was called out of retirement by producer Hal Roach to assist in production at the latter’s studio (see the entry on One Million B.C.). These shots constitute a filmed record of the meeting of Griffith and Roach. The filming date is suggested by the setting: Griffith and Roach are seen standing before a low stage, with the legs of chorus girls visible behind them. This suggests the set of Roach’s The Housekeeper’s Daughter (Hal Roach, 1939), which was in production in June 1939 when Griffith first arrived at the studio (as Griffith turns to look at the girls behind him, the cameraman discreetly stops filming – then resumes a few seconds later). As it turned out, the Griffith-Roach collaboration was illfated, but the two men apparently retained the cordial relationship we see here. J. B. Kaufman

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631 HAL ROACH, INC.

ONE MILLION B.C. Filming date: 6 November–26 December 1939 (added scenes filmed as late as 2 March 1940; process department working from November 1939 through January 1940) Location: Hal Roach studios; exteriors, prehistoric landscapes: Logandale, Nevada Presented by: Hal Roach Producer (story, casting, other unspecified capacity): D.W. Griffith (uncredited) Distribution: United Artists Corp. Release date: 5 April 1940 Release length: nine reels, 80 minutes Copyright date: 12 April 1940 (LP 9549) Directors: Hal Roach, Hal Roach, Jr. Production Script: Mickell Novak, George Baker, Joseph Frickert Photographer: Norbert Brodine Assistant director: Barnard Carr Art director: Charles D. Hall Associate art director: Nicolai Remisoff Set decoration: W.L. Stevens Wardrobe supervisor: Harry Black Film editor: Ray Snyder Sound system: Western Electric Mirrophonic Recording Sound recording: William Randall Narration: Conrad Nagel Descriptive narration: Grover Jones Musical score: Werner R. Heymann Music conducted by: Irving Talbot Photographic effects: Roy Seawright Cast: Victor Mature (Tumak); Carole Landis (Loana); Lon Chaney, Jr. (Akhoba); John Hubbard (Ohtao); Mamo Clark (Nupondi); Nigel De Brulier (Peytow); Mary Gale Fisher (Wandi); Edgar Edwards (Skakana); Inez Palange (Tohana); Jacqueline Dalya (Ataf); Ed Coxen, Adda Gleason, Ricca Allen, Harold Howard, Lorraine Rivero, Norman Budd, Harry Wilson, John Northpole (Rock people); Ben Hall, Creighton Hale, Audrey Manners, Rosemary Thebe, Patricia Pope, Chuck Stubbs (Shell people) Archival sources: Library of Congress, 35mm nitrate negative; 35mm nitrate positive (Hal Roach Collection); National Film and Television Archive (London), 35mm nitrate negative A party of mountain climbers seek [sic] refuge in a cave during a storm. In that cave is an elderly scientist who tells them the story depicted by the prehistoric carvings on a wall of the cave. The story, a saga of cave men: Tumak, a young hunter of the Rock Tribe, gets into a fight with his father, Akhoba leader o[f] the tribe. Tumak is knocked off a cliff, and while bruised and stun[ned] is attacked by a Woolly Mammoth. Recovering his wits, he seeks refu[ge] in a tree which the huge beast uproots. Tumak and the tree are precipitated into a river, and he is carried away to safety. He drifts into the land of the Shell People, is spotted by lovely Loana, a young woman who rescues him and has taken him into her tribe. There Tumak is nursed back to health. During his stay with the Shell People he learns something about kindliness, consideration and ethics. The

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Shell People are more advanced than Tumak’s savage kin-folks. He also learns that the spear is a more effective weapon than the staffs used by the Rock Tribe. Tumak goes back to his people, taking Loana with him. He finds that a change in government has occurred. Akhoba has fallen victim of a musk ox which has gored him, and left him for dead. During this battle, Skakana who has aspired to leade[r]ship of the tribe, not only refused to aid but attempted to finish Akhoba with his staff. Akhoba survived, however, and returned to his tribe a hopeless cripple, merely tolerated by the people he once ruled and under the reign of Skakana. Tumak fights with Skakana. His spear proved deadlier than Skakana’s staff, and Tumak, by his victory, takes over the tribal leadership. Tumak seeks to teach his people what he has learned from the Shell Clan. A volcano erupts and an earthquake strikes the land of the Rock Tribe. Loana escapes death and flees to her own people. Tumak follows and finds her. A huge dinosaur attacks the cave of the Shell People. Tumak’s tribe is summoned, and the two hitherto hostile clans unite in the face of common danger. They vanquish the monster by rolling large boulders on it. Following the victory, members of both tribes dine together in harmony and understanding. Synopsis from Copyright Material submitted to the Library of Congress, April 12, 1940, LP 9549 [stamped with date April 13, 1940]

In prehistoric times, a romance between Tumak, of the brutal, warlike Rock people, and Loana, of the gentle, peace-loving Shell people, leads to a new understanding between the two tribes. They are united during a combined earthquake and volcanic eruption, joining forces to fight both the elements and fierce prehistoric beasts.

What has come to be regarded as the tawdry final chapter of Griffith’s career began with good intentions. In May 1939 Hal Roach wrote Griffith a letter, offering him a job. Roach was directing most of his own films by this time, but he was short on producers, and he offered Griffith an unspecified job in production. Griffith accepted the offer, and became particularly embroiled in the production of One Million B.C. Roach was designated as the film’s director from the beginning, but Griffith assisted in casting, developing the story, and other matters. Studio records reveal that Griffith directed no part of the actual film, but did supervise some preproduction tests (a function he also performed for Roach’s concurrent production of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men). As the story took shape, however, Roach and Griffith began to differ sharply over their approach to it. Roach’s original letter had promised that the film would be “something like The Lost World, only with an authentic period”, but the end product emerged as sheer fantasy, with no hope of any claim to authenticity. Griffith did exercise some input into the story – the device of opening each sequence with shots of a cloud-filled sky was reportedly his suggestion – but the overall film was so at odds with his ideas that he publicly disowned it, letting it be known (The New York Times, April 21, 1940) that he had asked to have his name removed from the credits. Few viewers would blame him; most contemporary critics dismissed the film as suitable only for kiddie matinées. Scott Simmon has already noted (see DWG Project, #419) the similarities, in both setting and theme, between this film and the Griffith Biographs Man’s Genesis and Brute Force. However, as Simmon also pointed out, most filmmakers were playing such material for laughs long before One Million B.C. (Note: Special thanks to Karen L. Everson and to Ned Comstock of Special Collections, University of Southern California, for their assistance.) J.B. Kaufman 250

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632 –

[HOME MOVIES OF D.W. GRIFFITH AND EVELYN BALDWIN GRIFFITH] Filming dates: (I) 1936; (II) ca. 1941; (III) ca. 1941; (IV) 1936; (V) ca. 1941; (VI) 1936 Location: see text below Original length: (16mm, black and white/color) (I) 468 ft.; (II) 188 ft.; (III) 457 ft.; (IV) 385 ft.; (V) 430 ft.; (VI) 380 ft. Camera: Evelyn Baldwin Griffith/not known On camera: D.W. Griffith, Evelyn Baldwin Griffith, Dell Henderson, Mrs. Dell Henderson, Mr. (Raymond A.?) Klune, Mr. (James?) Smith, Mrs. (Rose?) Smith, Donald Crisp Archival sources: The Museum of Modern Art, 16mm diacetate reversal positive (donated by Evelyn Baldwin Griffith; partially in color; shrunken; faded color segments) In 1976, Evelyn Baldwin, former wife of D.W. Griffith, donated to the Museum of Modern Art approximately 2,300 feet of silent 16mm color and black-and-white reversal film, representing all of the surviving home movies photographed by her and Griffith during their marriage. The majority of this footage was preserved in acetate negative in 1991, and polyester prints were made from those negatives in 2000, with funding provided by the Lillian Gish Trust. As of this writing, 450 feet have yet to be copied. The films were duplicated as they were received, randomly mounted on six reels, and reflect the way in which Evelyn Baldwin had kept them for over thirty years. It is impossible to say who exactly was behind the camera at any given moment, but it appears that most of the footage was shot by Evelyn. Roll number one has been edited together and contains prepared intertitles that identify the film’s various locations; rolls two through six do not have titles, nor do they show evidence of having been assembled in any specific manner. The identifications listed below have been derived from penciled notations on the original boxes in which the films were received, as well as from internal evidence, such as license plates, and the edge codes on the films themselves. While it has been difficult to determine the exact time and place of each segment, the above sources indicate that the collection was photographed between 1936, the year the Griffiths were married, and 1941. Undoubtedly, further research will more accurately identify the time and place of each sequence; for now, the Museum offers the following data as a guide to future study. # 1 – Featured onscreen: D.W. Griffith, Evelyn Baldwin Griffith, Dell Henderson, Mrs. Dell Henderson, Mr. Klune, Mr. Smith, and Mrs. Smith; Format: 16mm, black and white/color, silent; Contents: (uppercase notations are the texts of intertitles that appear in film): THE GRIFFITHS AT SANTA ANNA [sic]. D.W. Griffith and Evelyn Baldwin Griffith playing with children in front of a house. Other adults look on. THE HEARST RANCH. Animals in cages (ducks, dogs, etc.). Griffith looking at monkeys. SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK. Snow, trees, mountains photographed from window of moving car; the Griffiths in snowshoes and with deer. AT THE RANCH – HONEYBUNCH. Honeybunch, the goat, eats a metallic object. People on horses. The Griffiths and friends having a cookout, feeding and playing with animals, walking through gardens (another intertitle in this sequence indicates: THE SMITHS, HENDERSONS, MR. KLUNE AND D.W.). SANTA BARBARA. Views of the countryside. REDWOODS AT SEQUOIA. Deer, the Griffith observatory, a park. This film was photographed in 1936 according to a penciled notation on the can – “Santa

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Ana, Calif., 1936 arrival, party at Ranch, Hearst Ranch.” – but when the film was placed on deposit at the Museum, intertitles were shot and inserted into the film, which is edited together. # 2 – Featured onscreen: D.W. Griffith, Evelyn Baldwin Griffith; Format: 16mm, black and white/color, silent; Contents: shots of the Nevada countryside and a small town, photographed mostly from a car window (color). Winter mountain scenes, shot from a car window (color). Cats. A cabin by the river. Griffith standing in front of a bell in a town. Shots of the town. Griffith in the car. A store in El Dorado county. Shots of the countryside (black and white). Griffith in front of his car. Fort Marion National Monument. Mountains. Kittens (black and white). The car Griffith is driving has a 1941 Nevada license plate. The segments may represent a cross-country trip the Griffiths took in 1941. The roll is comprised of four reels of film, each 47 feet in length. The order of the segments is arbitrary, and not necessarily chronological. The following handwritten notations were found on each film carton: “Chrysler/Saratoga/Trip East through Nevada and Mid West” “Winter Mt. Scenes West” “Ruffern and Moses (the cats), Nevada Mtns, Silver Mem (?)” “Griffith/St. Augustine/Smoky Mtns near E. Fishy at Asheville/Kitten Lalsrange (?)” # 3 – Featured onscreen: D.W. Griffith, Evelyn Baldwin Griffith; Format: 16mm, color, silent; Contents: shots of Evelyn Baldwin Griffith; mountains, birds, cats, trees, a hotel; scenes by a beach; the inside of a park or fairground; the countryside, from a car window; the coastline and ocean; D.W. Griffith; a river and canal; a racetrack; cats; a town, probably in the Southwest; trees; a small girl with a dog. The segment has not yet been preserved at the time of this writing. The footage appears to have been photographed at the same time as that in Home Movies #2, ca. 1941. Handwritten notations on the can: “Baby in the [illegible] / [illegible] Ranch / Mt. Wilson [illegible] / San Gabriel / Nevada / [illegible] / Silver Mtns / [illegible]”. # 4 – Featured onscreen: D.W. Griffith, Evelyn Baldwin Griffith, Donald Crisp; Format: 16mm, black and white, silent; Contents: D.W. Griffith and Evelyn Baldwin Griffith with their cats on a boardwalk; on the grounds of an estate, under large trees; paddle game, horses, croquet, catch, dogs, a picnic, D.W. Griffith, Evelyn, and others; mountains, shot from inside a car; deer, an observatory, a town in the Southwest; mountains, a boat, Enchanted Island (D.W. Griffith, animals); ocean; Seal Rock restaurant (Oregon?); countryside; a town; mountains, cats; hills, snow, trains, and cars. This footage appears to have been photographed at the same time as Home Movies #1, ca. 1936. The various segments were spliced together before being deposited with the Museum. # 5 – Featured onscreen: D.W. Griffith and Evelyn Baldwin Griffith; Format: 16mm, black and white/color, silent; Contents: Southern United States: a mansion, horse race, horse and carriage, Griffith and old man ploughing, people in yard; kittens, little girl in an amusement park; grounds surrounding house, animals on farm, croquet; kittens; mountains, trees, streams, D.W. Griffith; a town, horses and ponies; streets, St. Martin Catholic Church; post office in St. Martinville, Louisiana; countryside, birds. This footage appears to have been photographed on the same crosscountry trip as seen in Home Movies #2, ca. 1941. Handwritten notations found on the can when it was deposited with the Museum – “New Mexico, Silver Mining Nevada, San Francisco, Santa Ana, etc.” – are incorrect. Handwritten notations on a piece of paper inside the can are correct, and indicate the locations where this film was shot: “New Orleans, St. Martinville, Ashville [sic], Barboaville (?), Morton State (?) Farm, Buchner Main (?), Kittens. Film made on cross-country trip, 1941, this reel shot in SE United States”.

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# 6 – Featured onscreen: D.W. Griffith, Evelyn Baldwin Griffith; Format: 16mm, black and white/color, silent; Contents: redwood trees from a car; people fishing and riding in a boat on a river; a Mexican town with signs in Spanish (Banco Popular de Mexico, etc.); countryside; monkeys in cages; Griffith drinking beer inside a building; a town; a city; a park; an amateur play showing a mock marriage; a boardwalk and beach, cats, dog, a little girl, D.W. Griffith and Evelyn Baldwin Griffith. This footage appears to have been photographed at the same time as Home Movies #1, ca. 1936. Handwritten notations on can: “mock marriage, Lenox; fishing Royal River; Chicago; Mexico; Redwoods Cal.; Baby in (?); Newark (?) and Asbury”.

Steven Higgins

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633 HEARST METROTONE NEWS CORP.

[ACADEMY AWARDS, 18TH] Alternate archival title: [Academy Awards, 18th. Ray Milland and Joan Crawford receive film Oscars, Hollywood, Calif. – Hearst vault material, HVMc2226r1, 62488] (based on Hearst index card description) Filming date: 7 March 1946 Location: Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, California Distribution: Hearst Metrotone News Corp. Release date: March 1946 Release length: two reels Copyright date: undetermined Camera: Norman Alley On camera: D.W. Griffith, Leon Shamroy, Harry Stradling Archival sources: UCLA Film and Television Archive, 35mm nitrate negative (picture and sound); 35mm nitrate negative (picture only) Note: Unedited newsreel footage

At the Academy Awards ceremony honoring the films of 1945, D.W. Griffith presents the cinematography awards to Harry Stradling (best black-and-white cinematography) and Leon Shamroy (best color cinematography).

Ten years (almost to the day) after his first appearance at an Academy Awards ceremony, Griffith made another appearance as a presenter. As before, the ceremony itself was not filmed but the presentations were restaged afterward for news cameras. This time Griffith presented the award for black-and-white cinematography to Harry Stradling (for The Picture of Dorian Gray) and the award for color cinematography to Leon Shamroy (for Leave Her to Heaven). Appropriately, both cameramen had started their careers in the silent period (and Harry Stradling was the nephew of another cameraman, Walter Stradling, who had enjoyed a fruitful partnership with Marshall Neilan in the 1910s). Two years away from the end of his life, Griffith is as dignified as ever – but, as ever, warm and jovial. Presenting Shamroy’s award, he adds in an almost apologetic aside: “They call it Oscar.” Then, clasping both recipients around the shoulders, he wishes “you boys” well with their future careers and begins: “You know, if I were ten years younger...”. The take ends, and the rest of this observation is lost to us. J.B. Kaufman

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ALLEN, Michael. Family Secrets: The Feature Films of D.W. Griffith (London: BFI Publishing, 1999) The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States. Volume F1: Feature Films, 1911–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States. Volume F2: Feature Films, 1921–1930 (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1971) The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States. Volume F3: Feature Films, 1931–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) ANDERSON, Gillian (ed.), Music for Silent Films, 1894–1929: A Guide (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1988) 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 Americain: Analyses de films, vol. 1, (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), pp. 51–67 BARRY, Iris. Let’s Go to the Movies (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1926) BARRY, Iris. D.W. Griffith, American Film Master (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1940; reprint, New York: The Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1965) BELTON, John, “True Heart Susie”, in Cinema Stylists (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983, p. 161) BOOTH, Michael. Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910 (London: Routledge, 1981) BROOKS, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976) BROWN, Karl. Adventures with D.W. Griffith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1976) BROWNLOW, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By… (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968) CHERCHI USAI, Paolo (ed.) The Griffith Project: Volumes 1–9 (London: BFI Publishing, 1999–2005) Cinema Pressbooks from the Original Studio Collections (Reading, PA: Research Publications, 1988) COURTNEY, Susan. Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004)

CRAFTON, Donald. The Talkies (New York: Scribner’s, 1993) The D.W. Griffith Papers, 1897–1954 (Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1982) [originals held at the Museum of Modern Art] EISENSTEIN, Sergei. “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today”, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and translated by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949), pp. 195–255; also translated as “Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves”, in Richard Taylor (ed.), S.M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. III: Writings, 1934–47, trans. William Powell (London: BFI Publishing, 1996), pp. 193–238 ELLENBERGER, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970) EYMAN, Scott. The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) FOUCAULT, Michel. The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1980–1988), 3 volumes GISH, Lillian (with Ann Pinchot). The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969) GISH, Lillian (James E. Frasher, ed.). Dorothy and Lillian Gish (New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1973) GRIERSON, John. Grierson on Documentary (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1947) GUNNING, Tom. D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Films: The Early Years at Biograph (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991) HENDERSON, Robert. D.W. Griffith: His Life and Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) JUDAH, J. STILLSON. The History and Philosophy of the Metaphysical Movements in America (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967) KAUFMAN, J.B. “‘It Was Always Funny Working With Fields’: Producing Sally of the Sawdust and That Royle Girl”, Griffithiana, vol. 21, nos. 62–63, May 1998, pp. 39–79 KAUFMANN, Stanley. “Griffith’s ‘Way Down East’”, Horizon, vol. 14, no. 2, Spring 1972, pp. 50–57 KOSZARSKI, Richard. The Astoria Studio and Its Fabulous Films (New York: Dover, 1983) KOZLOFF, Sarah. “Where Wessex Meets New England: Griffith’s Way Down East and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, Literature/ Film Quarterly 13, no. 1 (1985), pp. 35–41

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LANG, Robert. American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) LANG, Robert (ed.). The Birth of a Nation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994) LANKFORD, John. “Methodism ‘Over the Top’: The Joint Centenary Movement, 1917–1925”, Methodist History (October 1963), pp. 27–37 LINDVALL, Terry. The Silents of God: Selected Issues and Documents in Silent American Film and Religion, 1908–1925 (Lanham, MD and London: The Scarecrow Press, 2001) LOTT, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) MacMAHON, Henry. Orphans of the Storm: A Complete Novel from D.W. Griffith’s Motion Picture Epic (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1922) MUNSTERBERG, Hugo. The Film: A Psychological Study (New York: Dover, 1970; originally published in 1916) NATHAN, George Jean. The Popular Theatre (New York: Knopf, 1918) NAREMORE, James, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) The New York Times Film Reviews 1913–1968 (New York: The New York Times/Arno Press, 1970) PRATT, George C. Spellbound in Darkness (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1973)

ROTHMAN, William, “True Heart Griffith”, in The “I” of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 31 SCHICKEL, Richard. D.W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984; London: Pavilion Books, 1984) SINGER, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) SMITH, James. Melodrama (London: Methuen, 1973) VAN BRUNT, Nancye. “Pageantry at the Methodist Centenary”, Methodist History, vol. 35, no. 2 (January 1997), pp. 106–118 VINCINUS, Martha. “Helpless and Unfriended: Nineteenth Century Domestic Melodrama”, New Literary History, vol. 13, no. 1, Autumn 1981, pp. 129–143 WAGENKNECHT, Edward and Antony Slide. The Films of D.W. Griffith (reprint, New York: Crown Publishers, 1975) WAGENKNECHT, Edward. Movies in the Age of Innocence [1962] (reprint, New York: Ballantine Books, 1971) WILLIAMS, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)

256

INDEX OF TITLES: 1919–46 Note: Release or (if the film was not released) filming dates are given after each title. Numbers refer to program sequence.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

(8 November 1930) . . . . . . . . . . . .624

HEARST METROTONE NEWS [VOL. 7, NO. 250]

(March 1936) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .628

[ACADEMY AWARDS, 18TH]

(March 1946) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .633

HIS DARKER SELF

(16 March 1924) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .608

AMERICA

(15 August 1924) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .609 BATTLE OF THE SEXES, THE

[HOME MOVIES OF D.W. GRIFFITH AND EVELYN

BALDWIN GRIFFITH] (1936–1941) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .632

(13 October 1928) . . . . . . . . . . . . .619 BIG FOUR, THE – MARY PICKFORD, DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, CHARLIE CHAPLIN AND W.S. HART

(20 March 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .579

IDOL DANCER, THE

(21 March 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .592 I’LL GET HIM YET

(25 May 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .582

BOOTS

(16 February 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . .577

ISN’T LIFE WONDERFUL

(1 December 1924) . . . . . . . . . . . . .610

COUNTRY FLAPPER, THE

(29 July 1922) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .596

LADY OF THE PAVEMENTS

(16 February 1929) . . . . . . . . . . . . .621

DREAM STREET

(25 April 1921) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .601

LITTLE MISS REBELLION

(26 September 1920) . . . . . . . . . . .597

DRUMS OF LOVE, THE

(31 March 1928) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .618

LOVE FLOWER, THE

(5 September 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . .591

[D.W. GRIFFITH AT PREMIERE OF

THE FLORODORA GIRL] (May 1930) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .625

MARY ELLEN COMES TO TOWN

(14 March 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .590

[D.W. GRIFFITH MEETS HAL ROACH]

[MARY PICKFORD AND GUESTS]

(1939?) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .630 [D.W. GRIFFITH ON THE SET OF THE KING OF KINGS] (early 1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .616

NOBODY HOME

[D.W. GRIFFITH RETURNS TO LOS ANGELES]

ONE EXCITING NIGHT

(1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .615

(ca. 1930) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .623 (24 August 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .586 NUGGET NELL

(27 July 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .584 (24 December 1922) . . . . . . . . . . . .605 ONE MILLION B.C.

(5 April 1940) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .631

FLYING PAT

(5 December 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . .599

ORPHANS OF THE STORM

(30 April 1922) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .603

GHOST IN THE GARRET, THE

(February 1921) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .600

PADDY – THE NEXT-BEST-THING

(January 1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .606

GIRL WHO STAYED AT HOME, THE

(23 March 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .580

PEPPY POLLY

(30 March 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .581

GREATEST QUESTION, THE

(28 December 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . .588 GREAT FEATURE IN THE MAKING, A

[PERSONALITIES OF THE TWENTIES]

(1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .595

(1921–1922) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .604 257

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

[PROLOGUE TO DREAM STREET]

STRUGGLE, THE

(1921) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .602 [PROLOGUES TO THE BIRTH OF A NATION REISSUE]

(Spring [June?] 1930) . . . . . . . . . . .626

(6 February 1932) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .627 [TELEVISION BROADCAST: D.W. GRIFFITH TALKS ABOUT SUCCESS IN THE MOVIES]

(3 February 1929) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .622

REMODELING HER HUSBAND

(13 June 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .593

THAT ROYLE GIRL

(7 December 1925) . . . . . . . . . . . . .612

ROMANCE

(30 May 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .594

TOPSY AND EVA

(August 1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .617

SALLY OF THE SAWDUST

(2 August 1925) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .611

TRUE HEART SUSIE

(1 June 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .583

SAN FRANCISCO

(26 June 1936) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .629

TURNING THE TABLES

(2 November 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . .587

SCARLET DAYS

(30 November 1919) . . . . . . . . . . .589 [SCREEN SNAPSHOTS]

[UNIDENTIFIED NEWSREEL EXCERPT: BEAUTY CONTEST?]

(1928?) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .620

(1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .614 [SIGNING OF UNITED ARTISTS

CONTRACT OF INCORPORATION] (1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .578

WAY DOWN EAST

(21 August 1921 to ca. 25 September 1921) . . . . . . . . .598 WHITE ROSE, THE

(19 August 1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .607

SORROWS OF SATAN, THE

(5 February 1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .613

WORLD AT COLUMBUS, THE

(June–July 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .585

258

CUMULATIVE INDEX OF TITLES: 1907–46 Note: Release dates are given after each title. Numbers refer to program sequence: 1–90: Vol. 1, 1907–08. 91–168: Vol. 2, January–June 1909. 169–233: Vol. 3, July–December 1909. 234–319: Vol. 4, 1910. 320–392: Vol. 5, 1911. 393–457: Vol. 6, 1912. 458–501: Vol. 7, 1913. 502–533: Vol. 8, 1914–15. 534-576: Vol. 9, 1916–18. 577-633: Vol. 10, 1919–46.

“1776” or, THE HESSIAN

RENEGADES (6 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .181

AT THE FRENCH BALL

(30 June 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 AVENGING CONSCIENCE, THE

(24 August 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .510

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

(8 November 1930) . . . . . . . . . . . .624

AWAKENING, THE

[ACADEMY AWARDS, 18TH]

(March 1946) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .633

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

(18 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

ADOPTED BROTHER, THE

(30 August 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .493 ADVENTURE IN THE AUTUMN WOODS, AN

BABY AND THE STORK, THE

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

(16 January 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .449 ADVENTURES OF BILLY, THE

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

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

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

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

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

(3 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 AMERICA

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

(15 August 1924) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .609 AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY

(13 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 BATTLE, THE

(12 November 1916) . . . . . . . . . . .558 AMERICANO, THE

(28 January 1917) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .561 “AND A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM”

(6 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .370 BATTLE AT ELDERBUSH GULCH, THE

(28 March 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .483 BATTLE OF THE SEXES, THE

(22 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115 ARCADIAN MAID, AN

(by 25 April 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .503 BATTLE OF THE SEXES, THE

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

(13 October 1928) . . . . . . . . . . . . .619 BATTLING JANE

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

(6 October 1918) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .571 BEAST AT BAY, A

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

(27 May 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .409 BEHIND THE SCENES

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

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

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

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

(3 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

(12 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .173 259

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

BETTY OF GREYSTONE

CALL TO ARMS, THE

(20 February 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . .535

(25 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .274

BIG FOUR, THE – MARY PICKFORD,

CARDINAL’S CONSPIRACY, THE

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, CHARLIE CHAPLIN AND W.S. HART (20 March 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .579 BILLY’S STRATAGEM

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

(21 March 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 CHANCE DECEPTION, A

(12 February 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .388 BIRTH OF A NATION, THE

(24 February 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . .451 CHANGE OF HEART, A

(1915) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .513 BLACK VIPER, THE

(14 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .194 CHANGE OF SPIRIT, A

(21 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 BLIND PRINCESS AND THE POET, THE

(22 August 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .425 CHIEF’S DAUGHTER, THE

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

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

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

(6 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .260 CHILD’S FAITH, A

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

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

(16 February 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . .577 BRAHMA DIAMOND, THE

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

(4 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 BROKEN BLOSSOMS

(8 August 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .423 CHILD’S STRATAGEM, A

(20 October 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . .576 BROKEN CROSS, THE

(5 December 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .303 CHILDREN’S FRIEND, THE

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

(13 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .186 CHOOSING A HUSBAND

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

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

(16 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .187 BROKEN WAYS

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

(8 March 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .459 BROTHERS

(1 February 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 CLASSMATES

(3 February 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .455 BRUTALITY

(14 February 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . .494 CLOISTER’S TOUCH, THE

(2 December 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .439 BRUTE FORCE

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

(25 April 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .488 BURGLAR’S DILEMMA, THE

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

(16 December 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . .443 BURGLAR’S MISTAKE, A

(9 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 COMING OF ANGELO, THE

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

(26 July 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 486 CONCEALING A BURGLAR

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

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

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

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

(27 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

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

260

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

CONVERTS, THE

DEVIL, THE

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

(2 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 DEVIL’S NEEDLE, THE

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

(13 August 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .552 DIAMOND STAR, THE

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

(20 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .315 DIANE OF THE FOLLIES

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

(24 September 1916) . . . . . . . . . . .555 DISHONORED MEDAL, THE

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

(by 25 April 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . .507 DON QUIXOTE

(8 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .158 COUNTRY FLAPPER, THE

(27 February 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . .528 DOUBLE TROUBLE

(29 July 1922) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .596 CRICKET ON THE HEARTH, THE

(5 December 1915) . . . . . . . . . . . .522 DREAM STREET

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

(25 April 1921) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .601 DRINK’S LURE

(18 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 CROOKED ROAD, THE

(17 February 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . .456 DRIVE FOR A LIFE, THE

(22 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .341 CROSS CURRENTS

(2 January 1916)

(22 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .133 DRUMS OF LOVE, THE

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .525

CRY FOR HELP, A

(31 March 1928) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .618 DRUNKARD’S REFORMATION, A

(23 December 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . .444 CUPID’S PRANKS

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

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

(15 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

(10 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .232 [D.W. GRIFFITH AT PREMIERE OF THE FLORODORA GIRL]

(May 1930) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .625

DAN, THE DANDY

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

[D.W. GRIFFITH MEETS HAL ROACH]

(6 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .224 DAPHNE AND THE PIRATE

(20 February 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . .532

(1939?) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .630 [D.W. GRIFFITH ON THE SET OF THE KING OF KINGS]

(early 1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .616

DAY AFTER, THE

(30 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .220 DAY WITH GOVERNOR WHITMAN, A

[D.W. GRIFFITH RETURNS TO LOS ANGELES]

(distr. 1916 – no official release) . . .559 DEATH DISC, THE

(1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .615 EAVESDROPPER, THE

(2 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .212 DEATH’S MARATHON

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

(14 June 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .477 DECEIVED SLUMMING PARTY

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

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

(24 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .139 ENEMY’S BABY, THE

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

(10 July 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .484 ENGLISHMAN AND THE GIRL, THE

(6 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .317

(17 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .234

261

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

ENOCH ARDEN

FEMALE OF THE SPECIES, THE

(8 April 1915) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .514 ENOCH ARDEN – PART ONE

(15 April 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .401 FEUD AND THE TURKEY, THE

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

(8 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69 FEUD IN THEKENTUCKY HILLS, A

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

(3 October 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .430 FIFTY FIFTY

(31 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .143 ESCAPE, THE

(22 October 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . .554 FIGHT FOR FREEDOM, THE

(June 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .505 ETERNAL MOTHER, THE

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

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

(29 June 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .349 [FILM POUR LES AMÉRICAINS, I, II, III]

(29 September 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .290 EXPIATION, THE

(1917 – not released) . . . . . . . . . . .562 FINAL SETTLEMENT, THE

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

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

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

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

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

(18 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .272 FLIRTING WITH FATE

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

(9 July 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .548 FLOOR ABOVE, THE

(23 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .190 FAIR REBEL, A

(by 18 April 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . .506 FLYING PAT

(not known) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .500 FAITHFUL

(5 December 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . .599 FLYING TORPEDO, THE

(21 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .243 FALL OF BABYLON, THE

(12 March 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .533 FOOL’S REVENGE, A

(21 July 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .574 FALSELY ACCUSED!

(4 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .108 FOOLS OF FATE

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

(7 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .192 FOR A WIFE’S HONOR

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

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

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

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

(18 August 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 FATE

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

(22 March 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .452 FATE’S INTERCEPTION

(10 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125 FRIEND OF THE FAMILY, THE

(8 April 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .400 FATE’S TURNING

(15 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .152 FRIENDS

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

(23 September 1912) . . . . . . . . . . .428 FUGITIVE, THE

(10 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51 FATHER’S LESSON, A

(7 November 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .298 GANGSTERS, THE

(13 February 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . .453

(by 18 April 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .504

262

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

GAUMONT NEWS, VOL. XVI, NO. 2-L

GREATEST THING IN LIFE, THE

(1918) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .567 GETTING EVEN

(8 December 1918) . . . . . . . . . . . . .572 GRIFFITH AT THE FRONT

(13 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .185 GHOST IN THE GARRET, THE

(February 1921) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .600

(1917 – not released) . . . . . . . . . . .563 [GRIFFITH MEETS SOCIETY LADIES]

(shooting date in 1917) . . . . . . . . . .564

GHOSTS

(1? June 1915) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .515

GUERRILLA, THE

(13 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .64

GIBSON GODDESS, THE

(1 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .198

HABIT OF HAPPINESS, THE

(12 March 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .538

GIRL AND HER TRUST, THE

(28 March 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .398

HALF-BREED, THE

(30 July 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .550

GIRL AND THE OUTLAW, THE

(8 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 GIRL WHO STAYED AT HOME, THE

HEARST METROTONE NEWS [VOL. 7, NO. 250]

(23 March 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .580 GIRL’S STRATAGEM, A

(March 1936) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .628 HEART BEATS OF LONG AGO

(10 March 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .460 GIRLS AND DADDY, THE

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

(1 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97 GOD WITHIN, THE

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

(26 December 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . .445 GODDESS OF SAGEBRUSH GULCH, THE

(25 March 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .397

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

(18 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .45 HEARTS OF THE WORLD

(April 1918) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .565

GOLD AND GLITTER

(11 November 1912) . . . . . . . . . . .436

HEAVEN AVENGES

(18 July 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .417

GOLD IS NOT ALL

(28 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .246

HELPING HAND, THE

(29 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .77

GOLDEN LOUIS, THE

(22 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .102

HER AWAKENING

(28 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .366

GOLDEN SUPPER, THE

(12 December 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .304

HER FATHER’S PRIDE

(4 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .276

GOLD-SEEKERS, THE

(2 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

HER FIRST ADVENTURE

(18 March 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8

GOOD BAD MAN, THE

(7 May 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .540

HER FIRST BISCUITS

(17 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .138

GREASER’S GAUNTLET, THE

(11 August 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 GREAT FEATURE IN THE MAKING, A

HER MOTHER’S OATH

(28 June 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .481 HER SACRIFICE

(1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .595 GREAT LEAP, THE

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

(by 18 April 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . .502 GREAT LOVE, THE

(10 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .225 HEREDITY

(12 August 1918) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .568 GREATEST QUESTION, THE

(4 November 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . .435 HERO OF LITTLE ITALY, THE

(28 December 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . .588

(3 April 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .464

263

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

HINDOO DAGGER, THE

HOUSE WITH CLOSED

SHUTTERS, THE (8 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .277

(18 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .90 HIS DARKER SELF

(16 March 1924) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .608

HOW SHE TRIUMPHED

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

HIS DAUGHTER

(23 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .321

HULDA’S LOVERS

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

HIS DUTY

(31 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .149

HUN WITHIN, THE

(8 September 1918) . . . . . . . . . . . .566

HIS LAST BURGLARY

(21 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .235

I DID IT, MAMMA

(15 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .109

HIS LESSON

(16 May 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .407

ICONOCLAST, THE

(3 October 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .289

HIS LOST LOVE

(18 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .196

IDOL DANCER, THE

(21 March 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .592

HIS MOTHER’S SCARF

(24 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .332

IF WE ONLY KNEW

(1 May 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .470

HIS MOTHER’S SON

(31 May 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .475

I’LL GET HIM YET

(25 May 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .582

HIS PICTURE IN THE PAPERS

(13 February 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . .530

IMPALEMENT, THE

(30 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .258

HIS SISTER-IN-LAW

(15 December 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .302

IN A HEMPEN BAG

(16 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .215

HIS TRUST

(16 January 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .310

IN LIFE’S CYCLE

(15 September 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .286

HIS TRUST FULFILLED

(19 January 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .311

IN LITTLE ITALY

(23 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .219

HIS WARD’S LOVE

(15 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .103

IN OLD CALIFORNIA

(10 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .240

HIS WIFE’S MOTHER

(1 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101

IN OLD KENTUCKY

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

HIS WIFE’S VISITOR

(19 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .174

IN THE AISLES OF THE WILD

(14 October 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .431

HOME FOLKS

(6 June 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .410

IN THE BORDER STATES

(13 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .262

[HOME MOVIES OF D.W. GRIFFITH AND

EVELYN BALDWIN GRIFFITH] (1936–1941) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .632 HOME, SWEET HOME

IN THE DAYS OF ’49

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

(late May 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .509 HONOR OF HIS FAMILY, THE

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

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

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

(11 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81 HOODOO ANN

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

(26 March 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .534 HOPE CHEST, THE

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

(29 December 1918) . . . . . . . . . . . .573 HOUSE OF DARKNESS, THE

(23 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .171 INDIAN SUMMER, AN

(10 May 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .472

(8 July 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .416 264

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

INFORMER, THE

KING’S MESSENGER, THE

(21 November 1912) . . . . . . . . . . .438 INGRATE, THE

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

(20 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .68 INNER CIRCLE, THE

(20 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .330 LADY AND THE MOUSE, THE

(12 August 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .424 INNOCENT MAGDALENE, AN

(26 April 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .469 LADY HELEN’S ESCAPADE

(18 June 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .546 INTOLERANCE

(19 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .107 LADY OF THE PAVEMENTS

(5 September 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . .543 INVISIBLE FLUID, THE

(16 February 1929) . . . . . . . . . . . . .621 LAMB, THE

(16 June 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20 IOLA’S PROMISE

(early October 1915) . . . . . . . . . . .518 LAST DEAL, THE

(14 March 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .396 ISN’T LIFE WONDERFUL

(27 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .228 LAST DROP OF WATER, THE

(1 December 1924) . . . . . . . . . . . . .610 ITALIAN BARBER, THE

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

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

(27 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .191 LEFT-HANDED MAN, THE

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

(21 April 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .467 LENA AND THE GEESE

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

(17 June 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .412 LESSER EVIL, THE

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

(29 April 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .404 LESSON, THE

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

(19 December 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .306 LET KATIE DO IT

(29 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .116 JONES AND THE LADY BOOK AGENT

(9 January 1916)

(10 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .100 JONES’ BURGLAR

(not known) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .499 LIGHT THAT CAME, THE

(9 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .169 JONESES HAVE AMATEUR

THEATRICALS, THE (18 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83 JORDAN IS A HARD ROAD

(11 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .203 LILLIAN GISH IN A LIBERTY LOAN APPEAL

(September–October 1918) . . . . . .569 LILY AND THE ROSE, THE

(19 December 1915) . . . . . . . . . . .523 JUDITH OF BETHULIA

(12 December 1915) . . . . . . . . . . .521 LILY OF THE TENEMENTS, THE

(8 March 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .492 [JUDITH OF BETHULIA

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

(OUTTAKES)] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .491 JUST GOLD

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

(24 May 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .474 JUST LIKE A WOMAN

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

(18 April 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .402 KENTUCKIAN, THE

(2 September 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .182 LITTLE MEENA’S ROMANCE

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

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .526

LIBERTY BELLES

(9 April 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .536 LITTLE MISS REBELLION

(15 April 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

(26 September 1920) . . . . . . . . . . .597 265

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

LITTLE SCHOOL MA’AM, THE

MAN’S GENESIS

(16 July 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .549 LITTLE TEACHER, THE

(11 July 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .419 MAN’S LUST FOR GOLD

(11 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .195 LITTLE TEASE, THE

(1 July 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .415 MARKED TIME-TABLE, THE

(12 April 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .468 LODGING FOR THE NIGHT, A

(23 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .264 MARRIAGE OF MOLLY-O, THE

(9 May 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .406 LONEDALE OPERATOR, THE

(6 August 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .551 MARTHA’S VINDICATION

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

(19 March 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .531 MARTYRS OF THE ALAMO, THE

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

(24? October 1915) . . . . . . . . . . . .517 MARY ELLEN COMES TO TOWN

(26 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .369 LORD CHUMLEY

(27 June 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .496

(14 March 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .590 [MARY PICKFORD AND DAVID BELASCO ON THE SET

OF A GOOD LITTLE DEVIL] . . .487

LOVE AMONG THE ROSES

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

[MARY PICKFORD AND GUESTS]

(ca. 1930) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .623

LOVE FINDS A WAY

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

MASSACRE, THE

(7 November 1912, Europe; 26 February 1914, US) . . . . . . . . . .418

LOVE FLOWER, THE

(5 September 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . .591 LOVE IN AN APARTMENT HOTEL

MATRIMANIAC, THE

(27 February 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . .458 LOVE IN THE HILLS

(16 December 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . .560 MEDICINE BOTTLE, THE

(30 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .371 LUCKY JIM

(29 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110 MEN AND WOMEN

(26 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .128 LURE OF THE GOWN, THE

(? August 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .497 MENDED LUTE, THE

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

(5 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .170 MENDER OF NETS, THE

(4 June 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .542 MADAME REX

(15 February 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .393 MESSAGE, THE

(17 April 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .331 MAKING OF A MAN, THE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(19 June 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 MAN’S ENEMY

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

(30 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .176

(1 August 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .498 MANHATTAN MADNESS

MISAPPROPRIATED TURKEY, A

(1 October 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .556 MANIAC COOK, THE

(27 January 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .454 MISER’S HEART, THE

(4 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

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

266

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

MISSING LINKS, THE

(16 January 1916)

NEAR TO EARTH

. . . . . . . . . . . . .527

MISTAKE, THE

(20 March 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .461 NECKLACE, THE

(12 July 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .485 MISUNDERSTOOD BOY, A

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

(19 April 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .466 MIXED BABIES

(15 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .338 NEW TRICK, A

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

(10 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .148 NEW YORK HAT, THE

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

(5 December 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .441 NEWLYWEDS, THE

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

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

(3 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .238 NOBODY HOME

(24 August 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .586 NOTE IN THE SHOE, THE

(6 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .127

MONEY MAD

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

NUGGET NELL

(27 July 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .584

MOTHER AND THE LAW, THE

(August 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .575

NURSING A VIPER

(4 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .202

MOTHERING HEART, THE

(21 June 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .478

OATH AND THE MAN, THE

(22 September 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .287

MOUNTAIN RAT, THE

(May? 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .508

“OH, UNCLE”

(26 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .177

MOUNTAINEER’S HONOR, THE

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

OIL AND WATER

(6 February 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .448

MR. JONES AT THE BALL

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

OLD ACTOR, THE

(6 May 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .405

MR. JONES HAS A CARD PARTY

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

OLD BOOKKEEPER, THE

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

MRS. JONES ENTERTAINS

(7 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67 MRS. JONES’ LOVER; OR, “I WANT MY HAT”

(19 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .165

OLD CONFECTIONER’S MISTAKE, THE

(7 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .364 OLD FOLKS AT HOME, THE

(15 October 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . .557

MUGGSY’S FIRST SWEETHEART

(30 June 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .267

OLD HEIDELBERG

(October?–mid-November 1915) . .519

MUSIC MASTER, THE

(6 May 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13

OLD ISAACS, THE PAWNBROKER

(28 March 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10

MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY, THE

(31 October 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .434

ON THE REEF

(17 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .227

MY BABY

(14 November 1912) . . . . . . . . . . .437

ONE BUSY HOUR

(6 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .134

MY HERO

(12 December 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . .442 MYSTERY OF THE LEAPING FISH, THE

ONE EXCITING NIGHT

(24 December 1922) . . . . . . . . . . . .605 ONE IS BUSINESS; THE OTHER CRIME

(11 June 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .545 NARROW ROAD, THE

(25 April 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .403 ONE MILLION B.C.

(1 August 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .422

(5 April 1940) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .631 267

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

ONE NIGHT, AND THEN–

PRANKS

(14 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .233 ONE SHE LOVED, THE

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

(21 October 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .432 ONE TOUCH OF NATURE

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

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

(27 February 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 [PRODUCTION FOOTAGE OF THE

(22 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .207 ORPHANS OF THE STORM

BIRTH OF A NATION] . . . . . . . .512 [PROLOGUE TO DREAM STREET]

(30 April 1922) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .603 ’OSTLER JOE

(9 June 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19

(1921) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .602 [PROLOGUES TO THE BIRTH OF A NATION REISSUE]

(Spring [June?] 1930) . . . . . . . . . . .626

OUT FROM THE SHADOW

(3 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .353

PROFESSIONAL JEALOUSY

(4 January 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

OUTLAW, THE

(23 June 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22

PRUSSIAN SPY, THE

(1 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .104

OVER SILENT PATHS

(16 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .257

PUEBLO LEGEND, A

(29 August 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .421

PADDY – THE NEXT-BEST-THING

(January 1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .606

PUNISHMENT, THE

(4 April 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .399

PAINTED LADY, THE

(24 October 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .433

PURGATION, THE

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

PAINTED LADY, THE

(19 July 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .511

RAMONA

(23 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .255

PEACHBASKET HAT, THE

(24 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .146

RANCHERO’S REVENGE, THE

(2 June 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .480

PENITENTES, THE

(25 or 26 December 1915)

. . . . . .524

RECKONING, THE

(11 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .70

PEPPY POLLY

(30 March 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .581

RED GIRL, THE

(15 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .43

PERFIDY OF MARY, THE

(5 April 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .465 [PERSONALITIES OF THE TWENTIES]

REDMAN AND THE CHILD, THE

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

(1921–1922) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .604 PILLARS OF SOCIETY

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

(27 August 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .516 PIPPA PASSES or, THE SONG OF CONSCIENCE

(4 October 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .189

(9 August 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .490 REGGIE MIXES IN

(11 June 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .544 REMODELING HER HUSBAND

(13 June 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .593

PIRATE’S GOLD, THE

(6 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .63

RENUNCIATION, THE

(19 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .166

PLAIN SONG, A

(28 November 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .301

RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE’S NEST

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

PLANTER’S WIFE, THE

(20 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53

RESTORATION, THE

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

POLITICIAN’S LOVE STORY

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

RESURRECTION

(20 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .140 268

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

REVENUE MAN AND THE GIRL, THE

(25 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .361

SAVED FROM HIMSELF

(11 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .379 SCARLET DAYS

(30 November 1919) . . . . . . . . . . .589

RICH REVENGE, A

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

SCHNEIDER’S ANTI-NOISE CRUSADE

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

(8 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .124 SCHOOL TEACHER AND THE

WAIF, THE (27 June 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .414

(3 January 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .223 ROMANCE

(30 May 1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .594

[SCREEN SNAPSHOTS]

(1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .614

ROMANCE OF A JEWESS

(23 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57

SCULPTOR’S NIGHTMARE, THE

(6 May 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16

ROMANCE OF HAPPY VALLEY, A

(29 January 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .570 ROMANCE OF THE WESTERN HILLS, A (11 April 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .249

SEALED ROOM, THE

ROMANY TRAGEDY, A

SEVENTH DAY, THE

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

(21 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .271

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

(26 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .159 SHERIFF’S BABY, THE

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

(29 March 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .463 [SIGNING OF UNITED ARTISTS

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

CONTRACT OF INCORPORATION] (1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .578

ROSE OF KENTUCKY, THE

(24 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .356 ROUE’S HART, THE

SIMPLE CHARITY

(8 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88 RUDE HOSTESS, A

(10 November 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .297 SIREN OF IMPULSE, A

(8 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .120 RULING PASSION, THE

(4 March 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .395 SISTER’S LOVE, A

(7 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .355 RURAL ELOPEMENT, A

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

(14 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .82 SABLE LORCHA, THE

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

(29 November 1915) . . . . . . . . . . .520 SACRIFICE, THE

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

(14 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .84 SALLY OF THE SAWDUST

(25 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .48 SO NEAR, YET SO FAR

(2 August 1925) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .611 SALUTARY LESSON, A

(30 September 1912) . . . . . . . . . . .429 SOCIAL SECRETARY, THE

(11 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .278 SALVATION ARMY LASS, THE

(17 September 1916) . . . . . . . . . . .553 SOLD FOR MARRIAGE

(11 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111 SANDS OF DEE, THE

(16 April 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .537 SON’S RETURN, THE

(22 July 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .420 SAN FRANCISCO

(14 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .147 SONG OF THE SHIRT, THE

(26 June 1936) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .629

(17 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .65

269

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

SONG OF THE WILDWOOD FLUTE, THE

(21 November 1910) . . . . . . . . . . .300

SUSAN ROCKS THE BOAT

(14 May 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .541 SWEET AND TWENTY

(22 July 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .167

SORROWFUL EXAMPLE, THE

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

SWEET REVENGE

(18 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . .208

SORROWFUL SHORE, THE

(5 July 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .482

SWORDS AND HEARTS

(28 August 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .358

SORROWS OF SATAN, THE

(5 February 1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .613 SORROWS OF THE UNFAITHFUL, THE

TALE OF THE WILDERNESS, A

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

(22 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .279 SOUND SLEEPER, A

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

(12 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .129 SPANISH GYPSY, THE

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

(30 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .327 SPIRIT AWAKENED, THE

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

(20 June 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .413 SQUAW’S LOVE, THE

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

(20 March 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .325 TELEPHONE GIRL AND THE LADY, THE

(6 January 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .447

STAGE RUSTLER, THE

(10 July 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26 STOLEN JEWELS, THE

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

[TELEVISION BROADCAST: D.W. GRIFFITH TALKS ABOUT SUCCESS IN THE MOVIES]

(3 February 1929) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .622

STOLEN LOAF, THE

(15 May 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .473

TEMPORARY TRUCE, A

(10 June 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .411

STRANGE MEETING, A

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

TENDER HEARTED BOY, THE

(23 January 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .450

STRING OF PEARLS, A

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

TENDER HEARTS

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

STRONGHEART

(9 March 1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .495

TERRIBLE DISCOVERY, A

(21 December 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .380

STRUGGLE, THE

(6 February 1932) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .627 STUFF HEROES ARE MADE OF, THE (4 September 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . .357

TEST, THE

SUICIDE CLUB, THE

THAT CHINK AT GOLDEN GULCH

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

(15 December 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . .76

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

(10 October 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .291 THAT ROYLE GIRL

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

(7 December 1925) . . . . . . . . . . . . .612 THEY WOULD ELOPE

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

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

(23 April 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .539 SUNSHINE SUE

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

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

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

(27 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .377

(18 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92 270

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

THOU SHALT NOT

TWO MEMORIES

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

(24 May 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .145 TWO MEN OF THE DESERT

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

(23 August 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .489 TWO PATHS, THE

(2 January 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .446 THREE SISTERS

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

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

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

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

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

(6 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . .213 TIMELY INTERCEPTION, A

(5 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .252 UNDER BURNING SKIES

(7 June 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .476 ’TIS AN ILL WIND THAT BLOWS

NO GOOD (29 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .135 TO SAVE HER SOUL

(22 February 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . .394 UNEXPECTED HELP

(28 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .248 [UNIDENTIFIED NEWSREEL EXCERPT: BEAUTY CONTEST?]

(1928?) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .620

(27 December 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .221 TOPSY AND EVA

UNSEEN ENEMY, AN

(August 1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .617 TRAGIC LOVE

(9 September 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . .426 UNVEILING, THE

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

(16 October 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .367 UNWELCOME GUEST, THE

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

(15 March 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .440 USURER, THE

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

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

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

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

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

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

(19 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130 TRUE HEART SUSIE

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

(1 June 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .583 TRYING TO GET ARRESTED

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

(5 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .117 TURNING THE TABLES

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

(2 November 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . .587 TWIN BROTHERS

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

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

(3 November 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .296 WANDERER, THE

(24 March 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .244 TWO BROTHERS, THE

(3 May 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .471 WANTED, A CHILD

(12 May 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .256 TWO DAUGHTERS OF EVE

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

(19 September 1912) . . . . . . . . . . .427 TWO LITTLE WAIFS

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

(31 October 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . .295

(21 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .154 271

T H E G R I F F I T H P R O J E C T : V O L U M E 10

WAY DOWN EAST

(21 August 1921 to ca. 25 September 1921) . . . . . . . . .598

WIFE, THE

(no official release) . . . . . . . . . . . . .501 WILD GIRL OF THE SIERRAS, THE

(25 June 1916) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .547

WAY OF MAN, THE

(28 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .153

WILFUL PEGGY

(25 August 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .281

WAY OF THE WORLD, THE

(25 April 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .251

WINNING BACK HIS LOVE

(26 December 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . .307

WELCOME BURGLAR, THE

(25 January 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89

WINNING COAT, THE

(12 April 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119

WELCOME INTRUDER, A

(24 March 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .462

WITH HER CARD

(16 August 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .172

WHAT DRINK DID

(3 June 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .144 WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR OLD

WOMAN FROM MELLON’S, THE

(3 February 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .231 WOMAN SCORNED, A

(13 February 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . .316 WHAT THE DAISY SAID

(30 November 1911) . . . . . . . . . . .374 WOMAN’S WAY, A

(11 July 1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .269 WHAT’S YOUR HURRY?

(24 November 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .60 WOODEN LEG, THE

(1 November 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . .201 WHEN A MAN LOVES

(8 March 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113 WOOD NYMPH, THE

(5 January 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .305 WHEN KINGS WERE THE LAW

(23 January 1916)

(20 May 1912) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .408 WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD

(June–July 1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .585 WREATH IN TIME, A

(20 May 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 WHEN LOVE FORGIVES

(8 February 1909) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 WREATH OF ORANGE BLOSSOMS, A

(2 August 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .457 WHERE THE BREAKERS ROAR

(30 January 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .308 YAQUI CUR, THE

(22 September 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . .47 WHITE ROSE, THE

(17 May 1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .479 YELLOW PERIL, THE

(19 August 1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .607 WHITE ROSE OF THE WILDS, THE

. . . . . . . . . . . . .529

WORLD AT COLUMBUS, THE

(7 March 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 ZULU’S HEART, THE

(25 May 1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .339

(6 October 1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49

272