As the US economy became increasingly predicated on high. risky borrowing (involving frequent bankruptcy), so it became increasingly important to invent the mythical figure of the community bank manager who was anything but a hard-nose businessman and whose social role was positively philanthropic.
Despite the importance of the theme to the "American Dream" genre and despite its popularity in the US (to this day the egregious It's a Wonderful Life is regularly revisited), the theme makes for rather dull and sentimental films.
What, however, one notes in this film is not so much the rather maudlin and predictable story but the very interesting cinematography (especially at the beginning of the film). 1915 was a time in US cinema when the fashion for the close-up was encouraging a distinctly retrograde tendency to revive the "facial" and stage-performers were often employed and stage performances reconstructed with this in mind (The Italian is the most flagrant example in the year), so it is interesting to note that Dwan here adopts a much more imaginative strategy. Much of the film is filmed close but Dwan and cinematographer Harold Rosson carefully avoid the "facial" style of close-up to be found in so many films of the time even though the subject would easily allow it. The film opens on a sustained close-up not of a face but of hands as we see someone (Harum in fact of course) eating and drinking tea - an imaginative and effective us of close-up which also serves to underline the fact that we are watching a film and not a play.
What follows is more interesting still because we cut to a scene in the street where the camera moves through the street towards the bank itself. Although the travelling shot presented very little technical difficulty (the use of a dolly was no more than an extension of what cinematographers had been doing "laterally" to create panoramic effects since 1896) but, in practice, film-makers had fought shy of using "vertical" camera movement, towards or away from the object in view, perhaps because they feared this would be disorienting for the audience. Although there are one or two earlier examples, the first systematic use of such travelling shots was in the great Italian epic Cabiria in 1914 (just the year before this film). A travelling shot was known in the US as "a Cabiria shot".
Although this development would be highly important in European film (where camera movement was often preferred to cross-cutting because it matched the more naturalistic an d more contextual style of filming), it never did (never would and never has) become a very significant element in US, entirely wedded to the cross-cut (which suited its "realistic" - in fact wholly theatrical - style of filming).
So the fact that Dwan and Harold Rosson (later famous for The Wizard of Oz and for Gone with the Wind where he filmed the "burning of Atlanta" sequences) make use of the travelling shot and to use it quite audaciously (even in Cabiria the travelling shots are kept very discrete) is surprising and interesting. There are two later examples of the reverse effect, with the camera retreating) as well as one or two noticeable deep-focus long-shots, another effect rare in US films.
Although the cinematography in most of the film is rather conventional and uninteresting, these moments are indicative of an alternative style of filming that, at this stage, might have developed in US film and avoided the over-dependence on cross-cutting. It is a shame that Dwan and Rosson do not have a less dull subject to work on. It i a shame that this seems to be the only Dwan film to survive from his time at Famous Payers and that the 1916 Oliver Twist (directed by Young and Van Dyke but filmed by Rosson) is not known to survive. It would also have been nice to have seen Tully Marshall as Fagin!
Despite the importance of the theme to the "American Dream" genre and despite its popularity in the US (to this day the egregious It's a Wonderful Life is regularly revisited), the theme makes for rather dull and sentimental films.
What, however, one notes in this film is not so much the rather maudlin and predictable story but the very interesting cinematography (especially at the beginning of the film). 1915 was a time in US cinema when the fashion for the close-up was encouraging a distinctly retrograde tendency to revive the "facial" and stage-performers were often employed and stage performances reconstructed with this in mind (The Italian is the most flagrant example in the year), so it is interesting to note that Dwan here adopts a much more imaginative strategy. Much of the film is filmed close but Dwan and cinematographer Harold Rosson carefully avoid the "facial" style of close-up to be found in so many films of the time even though the subject would easily allow it. The film opens on a sustained close-up not of a face but of hands as we see someone (Harum in fact of course) eating and drinking tea - an imaginative and effective us of close-up which also serves to underline the fact that we are watching a film and not a play.
What follows is more interesting still because we cut to a scene in the street where the camera moves through the street towards the bank itself. Although the travelling shot presented very little technical difficulty (the use of a dolly was no more than an extension of what cinematographers had been doing "laterally" to create panoramic effects since 1896) but, in practice, film-makers had fought shy of using "vertical" camera movement, towards or away from the object in view, perhaps because they feared this would be disorienting for the audience. Although there are one or two earlier examples, the first systematic use of such travelling shots was in the great Italian epic Cabiria in 1914 (just the year before this film). A travelling shot was known in the US as "a Cabiria shot".
Although this development would be highly important in European film (where camera movement was often preferred to cross-cutting because it matched the more naturalistic an d more contextual style of filming), it never did (never would and never has) become a very significant element in US, entirely wedded to the cross-cut (which suited its "realistic" - in fact wholly theatrical - style of filming).
So the fact that Dwan and Harold Rosson (later famous for The Wizard of Oz and for Gone with the Wind where he filmed the "burning of Atlanta" sequences) make use of the travelling shot and to use it quite audaciously (even in Cabiria the travelling shots are kept very discrete) is surprising and interesting. There are two later examples of the reverse effect, with the camera retreating) as well as one or two noticeable deep-focus long-shots, another effect rare in US films.
Although the cinematography in most of the film is rather conventional and uninteresting, these moments are indicative of an alternative style of filming that, at this stage, might have developed in US film and avoided the over-dependence on cross-cutting. It is a shame that Dwan and Rosson do not have a less dull subject to work on. It i a shame that this seems to be the only Dwan film to survive from his time at Famous Payers and that the 1916 Oliver Twist (directed by Young and Van Dyke but filmed by Rosson) is not known to survive. It would also have been nice to have seen Tully Marshall as Fagin!