You may have noticed a large gap in years between our last film, The Great Train Robbery (1903) and this one. There's a reason. Although a key point in our project was to watch cinema through time, slowly noticing how things changed around us, it is also important to win your family's trust by not unduly trying their patience with the earliest, choppiest, least developed silents. You don't want to poison them against the amazing silents that are coming up in the 1920s! In any case, for my family it was time to advance a few years.
This film was chosen to see Mary Pickford -- perhaps the most famous and beloved of all silent actors -- in an early role (credited only as 'one of the children') and because it was directed by D.W. Griffith who is the most acclaimed director of this very early era.
Specs:Short - just 8 minutes; black and white, silent and easily available online in the public domain.
Our family's average rating (on a scale of 1-10):
5.5
Like The Great Train Robbery, this one is tense and involves pretty scary bad guys. A family is barricaded inside their home when robbers start to menace them after dad has left the house for the day. Luckily, phones had been invented at this time! (yay) and the family is able to call up dad and tell him to get his sorry self home. Which he does, before any serious mayhem can ensue.
This is a good film. It is entertaining and even rather tense, but don't expect it to blow you or your kids away. On the other hand, its only 8 minutes long! A pretty small investment of energy. How much your family enjoys films like this will depend heavily on how much they're willing to throw themselves in to the experience. We noticed that, already, the "art" of film-making had advanced considerably since 1902, with stiller cameras, better sets, and more coherent acting and plot-lines. Even so, the house set is very basic, just a couple of walls thrown together. Location shots are better and really quite pretty.
This is a good film. It is entertaining and even rather tense, but don't expect it to blow you or your kids away. On the other hand, its only 8 minutes long! A pretty small investment of energy. How much your family enjoys films like this will depend heavily on how much they're willing to throw themselves in to the experience. We noticed that, already, the "art" of film-making had advanced considerably since 1902, with stiller cameras, better sets, and more coherent acting and plot-lines. Even so, the house set is very basic, just a couple of walls thrown together. Location shots are better and really quite pretty.
As with other old films, it is compelling to note the technology and conveniences that people lived with. Its fun to notice whether the people -had phones? were driving cars? riding horses? Or to notice what their clothes and hairstyles looked like. We look for things like sidewalks, radios, stores, iceboxes, anything that helps place the film in its period context is fun. One way to keep interest strong in this unfamiliar territory is to think of the film as a living time capsule. The power of seeing a movie that is so old is, for some odd reason, heady. This seems especially true when you see young children in a movie from 1909 and imagine that everyone on screen is almost certainly dead now.
Iconic shot:
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