Movies from 1912: The Girl and Her Trust and The Life and Death of King Richard III

Originally posted to Facebook on 2/24/2016

This week we watched our first two movies from 1912. They were:

The Girl and Her Trust
The Life and Death of King Richard III

The Girl and Her Trust was another film by D.W. Griffith, and was, I think, the best film of his we've seen to date. It was something of a western, and had some similarities to The Great Train Robbery from a decade earlier, but was superior in almost every way. As with almost all of Griffith's films that we've seen, the plot points are clearly communicated. Probably the most interesting shots in this film were of a moving hand car, and later a train, shot from the side, with the camera moving alongside. These were presumably shot from another train or vehicle running in parallel. This may have precedent in some other film, but it was the first time we'd seen it. There was also some crosscutting between simultaneous events, and a pan or two -- which I believe we've seen before, but rarely.

The Life and Death of King Richard III was, at 55 minutes long, by far the longest film we've seen -- a five-reeler -- more than doubling the previous longest film, which happened to be the British version of Richard III we saw last week. This film was an American version, and was more ambitious and better made. While the former was almost entirely on stage sets, this film was shot on real locations -- sometimes indoors, but with few or no painted sets, but also outdoors, including shots of an actual ship carrying troops. The only scene that seemed more memorable in the former film was during Richard's dream, where his various victims appeared to accuse him. The former film accomplished this with substitution splices for each victim in turn. The current film had them all appear en masse in a double exposure or overlay.

I expect that someone who hadn't seen or read the play would still have had some trouble understanding all of the plot points in this one, but it's a lot clearer than the 1911 version. The lead, Frederick Warde, was a professional actor who was born in 1851, and had been apparently playing Shakespearian roles throughout the late nineteenth century. Interestingly he is credited with discovering Douglas Fairbanks Sr., whom we may be seeing a few months down the road.

Next week we'll watch the second two films from 1912, including possibly our last George Méliès film. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT