Director: Herbert Brenon
Cast: Betty Bronson, Ernest Torrence, Mary Brian, George Ali
Have I Seen It Before: Never. Here’s a little tip for the uninitiated. This was the film featured for this month’s Second Saturday Silents at Circle Cinema. I’ve been going to those for the last several months and enjoying them quite a bit. Thus, with Mother’s Day weekend upon us a confluence of scheduling snafus led me to walk out of the film (a thing I have not done since my second view of The Scorpion King (2001), for reasons I won’t go into here. I figured I would be fine, as the film has long since lapsed into the public domain, and I could easily find it only to pick up the last twenty minutes.
I do not recommend seeing the first three-fourths of a silent movie with a good, friendly crowd and live organ accompaniment, only to pick up the last half an hour watching a print any old person bothered to upload on YouTube. The experiences are starkly different.
Did I Like It: There’s more than enough charm in this, the only cinematic adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s story upon which Barrie himself had a creative influence, that it’s not hard to imagine this becoming a foundational movie for a young Walt Disney. You can see the influences for his eventual animated adaptation.
Even now, I’m left surprised by a few things. I was consistently surprised at how much Ali could manage to be in a dog suit for his entire role and not make a violent mockery of the uncanny valley the entire time. As film technology advances, we keep missing that mark somehow.
What’s more? The first introduction of Tinker Bell (x) left me sitting in the theater (as indeed, this was still the part where I was in the theater) what I would imagine was just a light on a pole flew through an open window, a window of which I can clearly see all four edges. How did they do that? How can a movie leave me wondering “how did they do that?” when it is nearly 100 years old?