User Reviews

Florence Lawrence is Kate Bruce's house guest. After a losing evening at cards, Florence breaks into her host's jewel box and steals a pearl necklace. Kate finds out who did it, confronts her and orders Miss Lawrence out of her house, but later forgives her and writes a check for the poor young thing. It's not like Miss Lawrence is a housemaid who has taken leftover food, after all.

D.W. Griffith already has the basics of his screen techniques down. There are no title cards, yet the story proceeds apace. There are a variety of shots, including one extreme close-up and cameramen Billy Bitzer and Arthur Marvin have established the Biograph Right Wall.

What Griffith has not yet done is gotten his actresses to tone it down. Miss Lawrence's joy at getting the pearls is little short of St. Vitus' Dance, and when Miss Bruce orders her out of the house with a "Go and darken my door no more" gesture, she does it with such vigor I was worried she would throw her back out. That style of acting was something he would tackle over the following year.

Interesting to the southern degree but rather dead for anyone else, the background story and IMDb description is much better than anything the movie might be trying to tell us without even the slightest of explanation cards in between the slides, like some sort of critter in between the last slides... But what does it all mean??? Don't try to figure it out but read the reviews instead. Saves you the frustration.

For $25 a week, Biograph Studios hired Florence Lawrence, the future "First Movie Star," in September 1908. The high pay was $5 a week more than she was getting at Vitagraph Studios--and she didn't have to sew dresses like she did at Vitagraph. D. W. Griffith, new director at Biograph, spotted her on the screen and wanted her to act in his next film. She starred in many of the Biograph films for the next two years, with "Betrayed By A Handprint" being the first extant film of her employment at the studio. Eventually, audiences wanted to know the name of the actress who was seen repeatedly on the screen. Biograph refused to reveal her name so she wouldn't demand higher wages. Fans began calling her the "Biograph Girl."

For Griffith, "Betrayal" marked a baby step in his evolution to shape cinema's aesthetics. (Before viewing the movie, read the synopsis. Films had no explanatory or dialogue title cards back then, so watching "Betrayal" is confusing without knowing the plot.) In the film, Griffith used a couple of close-ups, a rarely-used shot back then, which explained crucial details in the plot. He also made edit cuts in the middle of the rapid action, showing the advantage of masking slight discontinuities of Lawrence's movements between interior and exterior sequences.

Betrayed By a Handprint (1908)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

A young woman loses a hand of cards and decides to get even by robbing the house. High moral drama from D.W. Griffith works in large part to the performance of Myrtle Vane who was considered the first female "movie star". She later committed suicide in 1936 so…..

Father Gets in the Game (1908)

** (out of 4)

D.W. Griffith film about an elderly father who grows tired of seeing his son bring home beautiful women so he gets a makeover and heads out on the prowl. The story seems like it would make for some good laughs but there aren't really any to be found here.

As I watched "Betrayed by a Handprint", two overwhelming problems were obvious with the film. First, and most importantly, I had no idea what was occurring in the movie...none whatsoever. If you read the IMDb summary, then it does make sense--but folks back in 1908 did not have that and really must have been baffled. Some intertitle cards (which were to soon become popular) would have solved this problem, but the film had none to explain the action. Second, the acting is just awful--with LOTS of overly exaggerated actions. The direction was a problem because the man in charge (D.W. Griffith) SHOULD have told them to stop over-emoting and making such ludicrous arm gestures. All in all, an amazingly bad film from a supposed master craftsman.

Florence Lawrence is a luckless card player who decides to recover some of her losses by stealing a necklace belonging to her hostess. Unfortunately, a palm print she made for a palmistry expert earlier in the evening proves to be her undoing. It's an unremarkable short from D. W. Griffith apart from a close-up of Lawrence's hands as she seals her swag within the hollowed-out centre of a bar of soap, then rubs the two halves of the bar to seal the join. Unfortunately, Griffith hadn't yet impressed on his actors the need for restraint, and the performances of the two female leads are somewhat distracting.

This is a real gem in that it is an early effort made by the "Father of Film", D.W. Griffith and featuring the first movie star, Florence Lawrence. Naturally it would appear very antiquated to modern audiences but it is of great historical value. Griffith was beginning to master the narrative and hone his filmmaking skills. Miss Lawrence was wonderful in the lead portraying Myrtle Vane, a society lady who turns thief after losing at cards, but is caught when she leaves a palm print at the scene of the crime. She had a strong screen presence and mastery of histrionics, it is no wonder she was dubbed the "Biograph Girl", drawing people into the theaters with her magnetism. This was at a time when actors were not being billed, lest they demand more money, and Miss Lawrence would eventually be one of the first actresses to be credited in films, creating the star system.

1908 was D. W. Griffith's first year in directing film, and he had a long way to go before he would begin revolutionizing film grammar. His films this early on generally looked no different than those of other filmmakers, with most of them including the same typical long shots with no cuts to closeups varying the structure and making the film more engaging. However, "Betrayed by a Handprint" is somehow a more advanced early piece by Griffith, which comes as a surprise due to the year in which it was made. While it's true the film does make use of long shots extensively throughout, there is one closeup that is used to clarify what is going on - a rarity that was still relatively unseen around 1908.

The plot is a simple drama which, granted, one won't understand the details of completely without reading the IMDb summary, but is still focused enough to where one can make out the basic story line. In short, the film is about a woman who is broke and manages to steal another woman's necklace, hiding it in a bar of soap. To make the latter action clear, Griffith does in fact use the aforementioned closeup to show the necklace being hidden in the soap, which is sealed up. It's not revolutionary (closeups had been done before way earlier than this) but does hint at the skill with the camera Griffith would later do with such epics as "Birth of a Nation". A decent relic of Griffith's early years at Biograph.