Director: Frank Powell
Cast: Theda Bara, Edward José, May Allison, Mabel Frenyear
Have I Seen it Before: Never. Given the near total disappearance of much of Bara’s filmography, it might never have occurred to me to watch it. Enter Circle Cinema’s Second Saturday Silent series.
Incidentally, as I continue to attend these screenings, I keep finding more and more theater behaviors that normally annoy me, but then desperately annoy me when I’m trying to fool myself for even brief flashes that I might be enveloped in the time of the silent picture, ripped free from my own stupid decade and century. This screening was no different. Now, with a film that has resoundingly slipped into the public domain, there’s probably not going to be any real standing for me to object to the person sitting next to me pulling out their cell phone and taking a picture while the film is playing, but it is certainly not something that people of the past had to deal with.
Did I Like It: I’ve often complained that many early sound films are stiff affairs barely qualifying as a motion picture. I might have over-romanticized the silent format too much, as it turns out. This affair—pun accepted, if not intended—plays out like reels of a home movie, barely coagulating into something audiences—both modern and of that era—would barely recognize as a story.
So, the film itself inspired in me a thought that feels antithetical to my own values. Age has worn down parts of the movie. Any number of cutaways to correspondence between characters is so unreadable and clearly a still photograph of a surviving frame that I could barely stifle laughter when they came on the screen. That degradation is to be expected, ultimately. The film surrounding it is such a dismal, enervating exercise that I actually started to entertain the notion that some films might deserve to disappear due to lack of preservation. It feels wrong, doubly so when one realizes that our current trash is unlikely to disappear, regardless of whether it deserves to or not.