"What Drink Did" is a temperance melodrama loosely based on the play, "Ten Nights in a Bar-room" which was familiar to anyone who set foot into a theater in 1909. Griffith had probably played in it somewhere along the line; if you were an actor in American stock companies in the late nineteenth century, you could hardly avoid this property. Even at the time, the story was considered a little dated and ludicrous, and the play itself was over fifty years old in 1909. So Griffith attempts to find ways to bring it into the realm of the believable; "the fatal glass of beer" is drank, not the tavern, but at work, with Mr. Lucas' (David Miles) co-workers egging him on. A bullet stands in for what was an empty beer stein thrown in the original play. There is some elementary crosscutting between Lucas, raising h-e-double-toothpicks in the tavern, and his worried spouse (Florence Lawrence) and her children (Gladys Egan, Adele De Garde). It is the plucky, courageous De Garde who gives the most memorable performance in the film; her eyes project genuine sadness and disappointment, and she gamely places her arm over her face to simulate crying in a gesture familiar to audiences of that day. The grown ups, however, are handled as cardboard caricatures, and while the plan to transmit what was an hour-long affair on the stage into 13 minutes on film works, one senses a thinly veiled contempt for its source; even in 1909, Griffith handled actors with more sensitivity, and here just going through the motions.
By virtue of the crosscutting employed, Billy Bitzer's crisp, well composed photography and De Garde's performance, "What Drink Did" is still better than average for an American, dramatic 1909 one-reeler. But it is far from being in the class of the best Griffith Biographs of that year, as it is mainly a prosaic attempt by Griffith to knock his way through a familiar property, keep it to one reel, and to have it out on schedule. I saw it with a Pic-tur-music score that matched the film okay in the first half, but fit it hardly at all in the second. So that element didn't do it any favors.