User Reviews

In his day, director D.W. Griffith was a hot commodity...making films the public loved. When you see most of them today, however, they seem old fashioned and highly moralistic...often with obvious messages about proper behavior. "The Primal Call" is no exception, as it drives home the director's message that it's better to marry for love than money.

The story begins with a young lady being pressured by her family to marry a rich guy who's interested in her. However, he's a real nasty piece of work ad is a serious womanizer...and yet the family wants this marriage to occur. In the meantime, she meets a sailor and she is instantly smitten by him. So what's she to do...marry for love or money?

The film is reasonably well made for 1911. Today, it just seems a bit obvious and simple.

Claire MacDowell gets engaged to Joseph Graybill because he is a millionaire and her parents have been living well beyond their means. However, on a summer trip to the shore, she meets and falls in love with Wilfred Lucas, a common sailor who walks around in his undershirt. Will she marry Graybill, or throw her parents to the creditors?

D.W. Griffith knew his audience. He had spent most of his career touring in melodrama until he chanced upon the movies, and he knew that the people who saw his flicks, who paid for his career, were poor people, not rich folk. He gave them what they wanted in the way of stories like this one.

Technically, Griffith uses the sea as a metaphor for reality. He liked to shoot the waves rippling across the background, and he does it here. There is also a long sequence at a party in which Griffith showed his skill -- in 1911, still a mystery to most movie makers -- in group dynamics on screen. The result is a competent picture with a bit of an unlikely plot -- albeit a popular one.

The daughter of socially ambitious parents who have promised her to a wealthy womaniser falls for a rough sailor. An outdated romance from D. W. Griffith in which a man who always seems just one step away from violence is considered a suitable catch for a woman

Once again the Biograph Company has found inspiration in Moody's "The Great Divide," and one feels that the result is not so fortunate as in "The White Rose of the Wilds." The great fault is that the real primal man is not truthfully pictured. He exists, but he is neither soft nor tough. If the ill-bred million-heir had been contrasted with a Walt Whitman, the picture would truly have got somewhere, but this primal man sneers at the rich girl's party. The scenes showing the courtship of the ill-bred man of wealth surely makes a sharp contrast with the beach scenes and the mate's courtship. With the exception of one or two scenes, the acting of the picture is commendable. There are some fine sea pictures in it. - The Moving Picture World, July 8, 1911