User Reviews

In the half-reel version that survives, we wind up with the mother, abandoned by her hard-hearted family, washing clothes at the poorhouse in this melodrama version of KING LEAR.

In researching this movie, I did my usual Google search and checked the IMDb listing -- after all, I would be posting this review there. Imagine when I found a January 8 release date, Stanner Taylor directing (three years before his next directorial credit) and such stalwarts of D.W. Griffith's company as Edward Dillon, Mack Sennett and Anthony O'Sullivan credited with major roles, six months before Mr. Griffith assumed control!

Dillon I might accept; he seems to have been with Biograph since 1905. The rest, in their first screen roles, I am calling nonsense on. This is one of those cases when someone just stuck in names and, if challenged, will likely respond with the idiocy that there's no proof they're not there.

I've looked at the short. It's not them. Aux armes, ye lovers of truth!

To establish the truth about something requires a little more than a process of assumption and counter-assumption, assertion and counter-assertion. It sometimes requires a careful sifting of the evidence.

Begin at the beginning. It is rather improbable that Stanner Taylor was directing at this date. In fact the film is usually credited to Wallace McCutcheon. McCutcheon was however on the point of retiring and wanted to hand over the reins to his son, Wally Junior. The likeliest possibility is that this was a co-directeion by father and son (whch helps to explain the presence of both mother - her only known role - and son in the cast list). Stanner Taylor was already working as a scenarist for Biograph and is presumably responsbile for the adaptation of the 1874 poem. It is in fact only vaguely inspired by the poem.

Florence Auer was a new member of the stock-company but an actress much favoured by McCutcheon. She appeared in ten other films in 1908. Although a young woman with a long career ahead of her, she tended to specialise in playing the parts of older women, the mother in Griffith's The Tavern-Keeper's Daughter (1908) and the aunt in Eradicating Aunty (1909). She seems to have abandoned films altogether between 1912 to 1922, probably to concentrate on a stage career, but then continued to have a career as a film and television character actress that extended into the 1950s. There are relatively few opportunities to see Auer in her early films (1908-1909) but there is nothing in the least bit improbable about her playing the role of the old mother in this film.

Edward Dillon had been acting with McCutcheon since 1905. There is, I think, litlle doubt, that it is he who plays the role of the younger son here. Robert Vignola, who had been acting for McCutcheon since 1906 may posibly play the elder brother. Anthony O'Sullivan had also been with McCutcheon since 1906 (he and Vignola play together as two gangsters in The Black Hand). A stocky fellow, he was often cast as heavies. He would seem a perfect choice here for the bailiff.

As for Mack Sennett, those with better eyesight than myself assure me he is perfectly recognizable among the bar room patrons.

This is therefore an entirely typical cast for a McCutcheon film of 1908.

The film does not seem quite complete (at least in the version I have seen from the LoC paper print collection) and the story is a little incoherently told. Alas, McCutcheon junior did not prove a very worthy successor to his father and would seem be replaced by his assistant, an ambitious young man called Griffith who may, for all we know, also appear in this film (the blind beggar?)