Suspense (1913)

While Suspense tells a complete if basic campfire story, it is as an exercise in film theory/tech that it is most interesting. Directed by Lois Weber and her husband Phillips Smalley, as this tense one-reeler opens we see a woman (Weber) and her baby. Cut to the maid in the kitchen leaving a note saying that she is quitting without notice because “no servant will stay in this lonesome place.” With just that much we realize that the wife and child are alone and cut off when the maid leaves.

As she walks away from the house, she is seen by a passing tramp (Sam Kaufman) who thinks the house is empty. He breaks in and begins helping himself in the kitchen, where he sees the note. 

Upstairs, the wife hears the tramp and goes to the telephone to call her husband to urge him to hurry home.

At this point Weber and Smalley surprise their audience, and us, with a perfectly realized split screen shot made up of three triangles, the center one with the base on the bottom and the side ones with bases at the top. We see the actions of the tramp on the left, the husband in the center, and the wife on the right.

The screen goes full as the husband (Valentine Paul) rushes from his office to the street, where he steals a car to get home as quickly as he can.

Then the tramp realizes that he isn’t alone in the house, picks up a knife, and climbs the stair, moving up and into the camera in an extreme close up.

Then the owner of the stolen car (Douglas Gerrard) flags down a cop and they charge off in pursuit. 

Then we get a series of fast, intense edits allowing us to follow all three actions as they move toward each other and finally merge. 

At this point you might also take notice of a basic logic flaw that persists in many suspense films. If the husband can drive to the house in the length of time it takes the tramp to climb the stairs, how isolated, really, can the place be? Since we watch the actions taking place sequentially, one part of our brains tends to think that the actions are actually taking place one after another, and not simultaneously. The audience becomes complicit in the storytelling process.

Lois Weber, who also wrote the scenario, gets most of the credit for the pictures with which her name is associated. Giving up her job as a street corner evangelist, she became America’s first woman director, and for a while she was the highest paid of all directors. In 1914 she and Smalley co-directed The Merchant of Venice, in which he played Shylock, thereby making Weber the first woman to direct a feature-length film in America. 

  

If you were a student in a film class and you wanted to make a one reeler that illustrated the basics of suspense film making, this is the movie you’d make. And you might want to set in 1913, which would be a good idea so you wouldn’t have to deal with cell phones and security systems.

The Love Expert (1920)

Romantic comedies were ever thus—silly puff balls. You can find a dust bunny under the bed with more substance than The Love Expert.

Constance Talmadge is Babs Hardcastle, a young woman who is so mushy on the subject of love she makes Lydia Languish look like Miss Havisham. Tossed out of boarding school due to her determination to make romance her major, she heads for home in time to accompany her father (Arnold Lucy) on a business trip to Palm Beach. But when dad realizes that Babs can’t think of anything but romance, he sends her to visit her Aunt Emily (Marion Sitgreave) in Boston instead.

The punishment becomes fun when Babs discovers that Aunt Emily is engaged to businessman Jim Winthrop (John Halliday)—and has been for six years, with no wedding date yet on the calendar. It seems that he can’t get married until his two dull sisters and his Aunt Cornelia get married, too. To make things worse, Babs falls for Winthrop herself. It is, as the titles tell us, “a domestic problem that would have made Ibsen green with envy.”

So the whole gang ends up in Palm Beach where Babs hunts for suitable mates for the sisters. And everyone else in the picture, not to mention a couple of people in the audience.

The object of Babs' affection is Jim Winthrop (John Halliday), but before they can wed, he has to find suitable mates for his two plain sisters, Dorcas (Natalie Talmadge, Constance's real-life sister and future wife of Buster Keaton, whom she would come to detest) and Matilda (Fanny Bourke) -- and Winthrop's elderly aunt (Nellie Parker Spaulding). To speed things up, Babs takes it upon herself to find them all men. Babs’ cruel exploitation of people’s emotions is softened somewhat when we see that she isn’t really stealing her aunt’s beau because he admits he never loved her and Aunt Emily realizes that she really loves her friend Professor Blecker (Edward Keppler).

One source thinks the film is based on a story by Mary Roberts Rinehart, but I haven’t been able to find support for this claim. It may come from the fact that a three-film series featuring a character named “Babs” was released in 1917, although it had nothing to do with Rinehart or Talmadge. Another says The Love Expert was based on a story by scenarist Anita Loos. Anyway, the picture was produced and written by Loos and her husband John Emerson. It was directed by David Kirkland and shot by Oliver T. Marsh for Paramount.

Loos said about Constance Talmadge that she was "one of the few genuine femme fatales I have ever known" and Irving Berlin said she was “a virtuous tramp.” Constance Talmadge, or as she was known in the family, “Dutch,” gave up the movies when talkies came in. Thirty years later, theatrical producer Leonard Stillman asked her to appear in a Broadway show and her response is priceless: “Are you kidding? I couldn't act even when I was a movie star.”

Bronco Bill and the Schoolmistress (1912)

Maxwell Henry Aronson was born in 1880 or thereabouts (there is some doubt) and kicked around with various jobs before going into vaudeville as Gilbert M. Anderson. In 1903, he played several roles in The Great Train Robbery, including the passenger who is shot in the back as he tries to escape. You’ve seen the clip.

Then came the creation of the amiable, just-bright-enough cowboy, Bronco Billy, and Anderson became the first star of western movies.

Bronco Billy and the Schoolmistress is one of Anderson’s Snakeville Comedies, Snakeville, Rattlesnake County, being the setting. When the cheerful new schoolmarm arrives on the stage, she’s met by the town layabouts, led by Alkali Ike (Augustus Carney), who would headline a series of his own. The men follow her to the hotel, flirting and just generally acting like idiots. She doesn’t mind. After all, men are but grown up boys—some are just goofier than others. (I haven't been able to find the name of the actress who played the schoolmistress. So much for immorality in the movies.)

Then a card comes up telling us that the real plot is about to begin—“The Rivals.” One of them, played by Brinsley Shaw, hangs around the school to chat her up, but she happily goes off with Bronco Billy when he comes to call. Later, back at the hotel, she shows the group of her admirers a small pistol she carries in her pocket for protection. No one believes she’d ever use it.

This gets the nameless Rival to thinking. He suggests that, as a joke, they stage “a fake hold-up to try the school ma’am’s nerve.” The entourage loves this idea and responds to it by rolling their eyes, laughing, winking, nudging and nodding. It sounds silly but the men don’t overplay it and come across as a bunch of child-men with a chance to do something idiotic, but fun.

Anderson directed these little films as well as acted in them, and his use of this inane chorus is well crafted. Their reactions keep the image active even when they’re just standing there.

The gang finds Billy and tells him of the gag. Anderson is a delight as the plot slowly works its way into his imagination. His face goes blank. His jaw drops open. Then he gets it. Afraid that someone in the gang might actually frighten his lady love, Billy volunteers to play the bandit, a trick to which the Rival readily agrees. As the joke plays out, Billy pops up with a mask on, the Schoolmistress pulls her gun, and the Rival, after stepping away from the rest of the boys, shoots Bill for real.

Walter Kerr pointed out that a silent movie convention modern audiences have to get used to is the selective use of sound. Sometimes, because we can’t hear a thing, the characters can’t hear it, either. The men react to the sound of the lady’s gun, but not to the Rival’s, which goes off right behind them.

Anyway, the Schoolmistress, easily the smartest person in the picture, proves that the bullet that wounded Bill couldn’t have come from her gun. She accuses the Rival and Ike discovers that his is the guilty weapon. When Billy starts to recover, the Rival is driven out of the county (and into Coyote County) with the warning “If you ever cross that line again, you’ll eat lead.”

The film ends with a shot of Snakeville’s children in celebration as they cavort in front of a sign that reads: “School closed. Teacher married Bronco Billy.”

Watching the film I was reminded of an anecdote I once read about occasional hijinks in Dodge City, KS. Some of the locals used to put on Indian garb and ride out of town to frighten visitors in the stage on its way to town. They were referred to as “Dodgers.” You can find hints of real history in the strangest places.

Welcome to Snakeville.