User Reviews

One of the most popular films today's movie goers flock to are romantic comedies. The proven model is especially popular when regular stars are paired up multiple times involving hilarious lovelorn situations. Tom Hanks and Megan Ryan, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are just a few of the pairings throughout history that have proven box office hits.

Cinema's very first romantic pair was May Allison and Harold Lockwood. The natural chemistry between the two was accidently brought to the screen when they were assigned roles in the February 1915 romantic comedy "David Harum." Flying love arrows seemed to appear between the two in their initial scene, meeting at her front gate. The scenes in "David Harum" of the pair together were so talked about that movie producers created scenarios where the two could interact with one another. All told, they were in 25 movies together, playing the romantic roles first introduced in "David Harum." As one commentator noted, "there was nothing better to fuel the collective need for escapism than to go to that democratic medium of the movies to watch a couple bicker, laugh and love."

Allison was a Broadway actress before turning to film in 1914. She was seen as the wife's friend in Theda Bara's "A Fool There Was." Slotted to be one of the main principals in "David Harum," Allison attracted viewers to her charming innocence in the Allan Dwan-directed film.

Actor Harold Lockwood was a perfect movie mate for the Georgia-born Allison. Lockwood, who had been knocking around film playing mostly Westerns, was hired by the Famous Players Film Company after being with several other studios. He seemed to enjoy the cuddling play with Allison on screen. Off the set, however, the two were never romantically involved, each leading separate love interests.

The pair's popularity was the high bar in romantic comedies other studios could only envy during the late 1910's. But tragedy struck Lockwood, when, at 31, he contracted the Spanish influenza while in production of a movie, and died in New York City in 1918.

Director Allan Dwan, who helmed "David Harum," had a long and successful movie career, directing Mary Pickford and her husband Douglas Fairbanks in several successful films. He helped launch the career of Victor Fleming and directed child star Shirley Temple in two of her most famous films, "Heidi" and "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm." Dwan directed 125 motion pictures, including John Wayne's "Sands of Iwo Jima." His last film was in 1961, for the sci-fi film "Most Dangerous Man Alive."

1915 was a big year for director Allan Dwan. He jumped from Flying A, where he had directed many a short western since 1911, to Famous Players, where he made one of their trademarked "Famous Players in Famous Plays." Although these almost invariably turned out to be stodgy, Dwan and star William H. Crane, who had played the eponymous David Harum since its Broadway debut in 1901, breathe some life into it.

A lot of the problems with these "Famous Plays" is they were meant for people familiar with the book or the play they were based on, as if the movie goer were there to see what he remembered: the horse trading scene, this scene, that scene and so forth. To make a movie from a play be cinematic, it needs to be "opened up" and Dwan accomplishes this with a lovely traveling shot in which Harum puts on his New York City evening clothes and walks down the muddy main street of Homeville. The camera trundles in front of him as he leaves a wake of stunned rubes behind him.

The other strength is star William H. Crane. Despite the fact you can see the seam in his bald wig, he plays Harum not only skillfully, but joyously. That joy of performance, in which you can see the actor having a good time, is a rare phenomenon in the movies, and utterly engaging. Dwan would go on to a long and productive association with another performer who clearly enjoyed his work: Douglas Fairbanks Sr.

Although this version clearly has issues for the modern viewer, it was very much a winner for 1915 and still looks interesting almost a century later.

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!