This short film could have benefited from a treatment and outline before it even reached a script stage. It was terrible to watch. There is absolutely no poetry or melodic qualities to the 34 year old D.W. Griffith's films. Instead of recreating life in moving pictures, he advances his own ideas and fantasies on screen. I learned absolutely nothing about the characters in this offering (mainly because they were one-dimensional), but I did learn a lot about the director. He fuses his own unfulfilled ambitions on the stage in his work, and the fact that he churns out two films a week is just not feasible in the real world. This installment is nothing more than a cartoon strip that moves.
2 Reviews
They really make an interesting picture of it
deickemeyer24 January 2015
Warning: Spoilers
The effects of novels which weave romantic sentences around every object, no matter how commonplace, are variously estimated, but perhaps there is a general feeling that they are more or less injurious. The Biograph Company has based an interesting and lively picture upon this belief. Mercedes reads a novel which depicts lovers as knightly individuals who are always performing gallant tasks for their ladies. When commonplace Frank arrives she insists that he show his love for her by undertaking some adventure, and suggests in a rather menacing way that he go to a neighboring house and steal one of her own photographs from a friend's table. Frank does as bidden, falls into the police net and is on his way to prison when a friend succeeds in getting him freed. He carries the photo to his lady, but waves her a fond goodbye and when she wakes up and follows him finds him vigorously embracing the friend from whom the picture was stolen. The knightly scheme of courtship scarcely met the young woman's expectations in this instance. The story is not complicated, but its working out by the Biograph Company is satisfactory and they really make an interesting picture of it. Perhaps much more so than might reasonably be expected. - The Moving Picture World, December 4, 1909
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