The House of Darkness (1913)

                                            This one-reel “shocker” was directed by D.W. Griffith from a scenario by Jere F. Looney and filmed by G.W. “Billy” Bitzer for the Biograph Company. Pretty good credentials, yes? Add to that the names of Lionel Barrymore and Lillian Gish in the cast and, even at its abbreviated running time, you’d expect to have a solid if unpretentious entertainment. And you do.

But there’s a sadness that underlies the film’s suspenseful little story. It’s the sadness that is the lives of the “unfortunate” patients who exist in mental hospitals.

We meet two such. A woman has lost a child in infancy. When the attendants come to take her away, she is holding an empty blanket as if it were a baby and swaying it in her arms. 

At the hospital, Griffith show us two scenes that will have meaning as the movie progresses. In one, an aggressive patient hears a nurse playing the piano (Lillian Gish) and the music hath charms to sooth the savage breast. We also see a nicely realistic moment as one of the doctors flirts with and then proposes to one of the nurses.

Soon the aggressive patient (Charles Hill Mailes) gets into another fight with a fellow unfortunate. As the guards try to return him to his room, he somehow locates a gun and escapes, moving toward the doctor’s house. How does he know where the doctor lives? This is no explained, but when he arrives there we see him hiding behind a tree on the left side of the screen. He then carefully slips toward us, moving carefully around the tree’s trunk. First we see part of his face peering around the wood, then half of his face, and then he moves toward the camera and glides past it, as if he were sneaking past our left shoulder. The moment will be familiar to anyone who has seen Griffith’s 1912 gangster picture, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, in which this shot was first used.

The Unfortunate peers through the window for a few moments watching the doctor’s wife (Claire McDowell) before he steps into the room and threatens her with the gun. Suspense builds as we’ve seen evidence of his violent temper and fear the worst. 

But before anything bad can happen, the wife piano plays the piano, the man calms down, the doctor (Lionel Barrymore) and the guards arrive, and the Unfortunate is returned to the hospital where, despite his violent escape, he is left free to roam the grounds and, supposedly, get into another fight.

Just a few years later and Barrymore would have played the Unfortunate and Gish the wife. Of course, a few years later and Griffith was no longer directing trifles like this. What we see is like a rehearsal for things to come.