Yes, move over, John Barrymore! With his antics in Dream Street (1921), Edward Peil has stolen your crown as the hammiest actor in Hollywood. In fact, all the acting in this D.W. Griffith film is chew-the-scenery bad, but Mr. Peil's villain even manages to out-perform Ralph Graves as the "singing" hero and Charles Emmett Mack as his totally uncharismatic brother.
I expected that Griffith's return to Limehouse - courtesy of Thomas Burke's "Limehouse Nights" (1916) - would give us a movie on a par with "The Chink and the Child" which Griffith filmed so memorably as Broken Blossoms (1919) with Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess and Donald Crisp giving the performances of their lives.
For Dream Street, however, Griffith made drastic alterations to both "Gina and the Chinatown" and "The Sign of the Lamp" by not only introducing new characters (the brothers played by Graves and Mack, as well as the subsidiary Power and Wallace figures are totally Griffith inventions), but by reversing the roles of those he did retain. Sway Lim (sic) is actually the hero of "The Sign of the Lamp" while the girl played by Carol Dempster is the heavy whom Lim beings to justice when he alerts the police by twitching the shade from her lamp with "a stiff, straight wire as is used for fishing on the Great Yellow River."
Try as she may, Carol Dempster is no hoyden - no anything in fact - but at least she's nowhere near as insufferable as Graves, Mack, Peil and Power. (DVD available from Grapevine. A bit dark but 7/10 watchable).
I expected that Griffith's return to Limehouse - courtesy of Thomas Burke's "Limehouse Nights" (1916) - would give us a movie on a par with "The Chink and the Child" which Griffith filmed so memorably as Broken Blossoms (1919) with Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess and Donald Crisp giving the performances of their lives.
For Dream Street, however, Griffith made drastic alterations to both "Gina and the Chinatown" and "The Sign of the Lamp" by not only introducing new characters (the brothers played by Graves and Mack, as well as the subsidiary Power and Wallace figures are totally Griffith inventions), but by reversing the roles of those he did retain. Sway Lim (sic) is actually the hero of "The Sign of the Lamp" while the girl played by Carol Dempster is the heavy whom Lim beings to justice when he alerts the police by twitching the shade from her lamp with "a stiff, straight wire as is used for fishing on the Great Yellow River."
Try as she may, Carol Dempster is no hoyden - no anything in fact - but at least she's nowhere near as insufferable as Graves, Mack, Peil and Power. (DVD available from Grapevine. A bit dark but 7/10 watchable).