An honest copper is faced with a dilemma when he discovers that his brother is guilty of the crime he is investigating. This is the sort of moral dilemma EastEnders would make last for 10 weeks, but this movie is over in 6 minutes. And it's better than EastEnders.
4 Reviews
Will He Or Won't He?
boblipton4 November 2018
Neighborhood beat cop Frank Powell and Kate Bruce have just given their son, Owen Moore, a new cap. Because of that, when he finds the cap at the site of a safecracking, he realizes who the thief is. Will he do his duty?
It's a split-reel drama from D.W. Griffith, based on a short story by O. Henry. In fact, it is the third; the first had been THE SACRIFICE, based on "The Gift of the Magi"; the second TRYING TO GET ARRESTED. Clearly his bosses, finished with fighting the Patents Trust (since they were now part of it), could and did spend money on their productions. 1909 had opened with them paying big for new costumes, and now they were the first to buy stories from the hottest short-story writer around.
Contemporary reviews raved about the facial expressions of the players, part of Griffith's new pantomime. Interestingly, it's all shot at medium length, using the Biograph Right Wall to give the frame a proscenium-arch-like composition. It also added depth to the frame, permitting the actor, whose reactions tell the title-free story at the moment, to "hold the stage" by moving slightly forward. Clearly close-ups were not yet part of Griffith's standard vocabulary.
It's a split-reel drama from D.W. Griffith, based on a short story by O. Henry. In fact, it is the third; the first had been THE SACRIFICE, based on "The Gift of the Magi"; the second TRYING TO GET ARRESTED. Clearly his bosses, finished with fighting the Patents Trust (since they were now part of it), could and did spend money on their productions. 1909 had opened with them paying big for new costumes, and now they were the first to buy stories from the hottest short-story writer around.
Contemporary reviews raved about the facial expressions of the players, part of Griffith's new pantomime. Interestingly, it's all shot at medium length, using the Biograph Right Wall to give the frame a proscenium-arch-like composition. It also added depth to the frame, permitting the actor, whose reactions tell the title-free story at the moment, to "hold the stage" by moving slightly forward. Clearly close-ups were not yet part of Griffith's standard vocabulary.
It is well worth studying
deickemeyer27 September 2014
Warning: Spoilers
The Biograph people have produced a film which has intense dramatic interest and holds the attention closely from the beginning of the plot until the last. The story is dramatic in the development, which forces a policeman to arrest his brother for theft while the brother is celebrating his birthday. The facial expression when the officer finds his brother's cap by the opened safe and, again, when he confronts the brother with the evidence of his crime and declares that he must make the arrest, is well worth studying. It is intensely dramatic. One can scarcely realize that the face can be made to say so much. The picture has all the characteristics for which the Biograph films are popular and the close brings a round of applause for the officer who did his duty regardless of who was affected by his doing it. - The Moving Picture World, June 5, 1909
Reworking O'Henry
Single-Black-Male2 March 2004
This reconstruction of O'Henry's work is an attempt to sketch the 34 year old D.W. Griffith's own ambitious project which will be fully realised in 'The Birth of a Nation'. He rearranges O'Henry's source of information to fit his own programme. It is an argumentative self-defence of the continuity of the settling community in America, told from Griffith's point of view rather than O'Henry's. He defines the national boundaries of the nation, demonising the marginalized in the process. He even has characters dressed up in minstrelsy just because he couldn't be bothered to hire an ethnic actor.
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