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.