Brad Sutton sends for his friend, Edward Earle. Sutton has been ruined by Augustus Phillips in that way that Wall Street operators do, and now he is dying. Will Earle look after his daughter, Viola Dana? She moves into his house and has a grand old time. When Earle's friends mock him for living on his ward's money, he says nothing, because passion is blossoming.
However, what goes around comes around, and Phillips feels the Wall Street wolves closing in on him. He devises a plan to drive a wedge between the lovers and make Miss Dana his, by telling her she is living on Earle's charity.
It's one of the movies by the forgotten power couple of 1910s films, director John H. Collins and his wife, Miss Dana. It's far more conventional and less flashy than many of their movies of the period, like the high melodrama BLUE JEANS, but it certainly shows a stronger and surer hand in the editing than would become common for several years. Collins is not afraid to cut rapidly between individuals to increase tension, nor hold the camera on a performer doing an act with a pantomime horse, or Miss Dana dancing to a contemporary song. If a couple of plot points remain obscure to me -- how did Earle know to arrive at Phillips' home at that exact moment? -- it's washed away in the vivacity of Miss Dana's performance, and that final freeze frame that ends the movie. That's a technique I don't recall seeing again in films until more than forty years later.
The copy I looked at was made available from the Library of Congress by Ed Lorusso. Ed has now rescued a baker's dozen of silent features from just this side of lost. He has been running Kickstarter programs, and rewarding his backers with dvds of the films; often, they've shown up on TCM, or been made available through other, slightly more commercial publishers. Donald Drazin has provided a score that you rarely notice while the film is running, that sounds just right for a film released in 1916, with Joplin-style rags, Fox Trots, and quotes from contemporary songs.
This is not a great movie, but it is a solid and entertaining one for the year it was made, and reveals a little more of poorly understood era of film making. I look forward to Ed's next project: you mailed them all out by Monday, and here it is, Tuesday evening, and no announcement. What are you waiting for?
However, what goes around comes around, and Phillips feels the Wall Street wolves closing in on him. He devises a plan to drive a wedge between the lovers and make Miss Dana his, by telling her she is living on Earle's charity.
It's one of the movies by the forgotten power couple of 1910s films, director John H. Collins and his wife, Miss Dana. It's far more conventional and less flashy than many of their movies of the period, like the high melodrama BLUE JEANS, but it certainly shows a stronger and surer hand in the editing than would become common for several years. Collins is not afraid to cut rapidly between individuals to increase tension, nor hold the camera on a performer doing an act with a pantomime horse, or Miss Dana dancing to a contemporary song. If a couple of plot points remain obscure to me -- how did Earle know to arrive at Phillips' home at that exact moment? -- it's washed away in the vivacity of Miss Dana's performance, and that final freeze frame that ends the movie. That's a technique I don't recall seeing again in films until more than forty years later.
The copy I looked at was made available from the Library of Congress by Ed Lorusso. Ed has now rescued a baker's dozen of silent features from just this side of lost. He has been running Kickstarter programs, and rewarding his backers with dvds of the films; often, they've shown up on TCM, or been made available through other, slightly more commercial publishers. Donald Drazin has provided a score that you rarely notice while the film is running, that sounds just right for a film released in 1916, with Joplin-style rags, Fox Trots, and quotes from contemporary songs.
This is not a great movie, but it is a solid and entertaining one for the year it was made, and reveals a little more of poorly understood era of film making. I look forward to Ed's next project: you mailed them all out by Monday, and here it is, Tuesday evening, and no announcement. What are you waiting for?
