I saw DW Griffith's 'Scarlet Days' in October 2006 at the Cinema Muto film festival in Sacile, Italy. The festival screened a print supplied by the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City. Some words of caution are in order, however. 'Scarlet Days' was never one of Griffith's more important nor more profitable productions. After Griffith's production company failed, no American archive attempted to preserve a print of this movie, and it soon became 'lost'. As so often happens with 'lost' American films, a print turned up in the Gosfilmofond archive in Russia. (This one in 1972, I think.) Since the Soviet Union never honoured U.S. copyrights; Russian film exhibitors seldom bothered to return the prints of American films distributed to Soviet cinemas.
The Gosfilmofond print of 'Scarlet Days' contained Russian intertitles rather than the English-language originals. The Museum of Modern Art possess a transcript of Griffith's title sheets for this film, but it's not clear whether these titles are the ones which accompanied its original U.S. release. (Griffith was notorious for constantly revising his own films, even years after their original release.) At any rate, the MoMA print which I saw in Italy contains crude reconstructions of the MoMA titles, difficult to read and unattractive to the eye. If the following review contains any inaccuracies, please note that I saw a print with the 'wrong' titles.
Eugenie Besserer plays Rosie Nell, a dance-hall matron in the southwestern U.S. in the 19th century. The film manages to imply that Rosie Nell is more than merely a dance-hall girl -- i.e., she's either a madam or a prostitute, or both -- but is evasive about this. Rosie Nell's business rival is one Spasm Sal, and here we have a female version of the old 'good crook/bad crook' cliché. Even though Nell and Sal are in the same line of work, we're meant to sympathise with Nell while dismissing Sal as just cheap baggage.
Like Mrs Warren in George Bernard Shaw's play, Rosie Nell does what she does in order to buy a finer life for her daughter, whom she is careful to keep at a distance so as to protect her purity. Played by Griffith's perpetual ingenue Carol Dempster, the daughter (with a maidenhead of corrugated steel) is lumbered with the ridiculous name Lady Fair. Lady Fair has been raised by a kindly aunt, on the money sent to her by Rosie Nell. This set-up topples into bathos when we see that the gaudy bawdy Rosie Nell keeps a small trove of 'respectable' frocks buried deep in her closet for her visits with her daughter.
Meanwhile, Richard Barthelmess -- the DIY Chinese in 'Broken Blossoms' -- is cast here as a DIY Mexican named Alvarez, a local bandito. We're meant to accept that Alvarez -- like Zorro and the Cisco Kid, or like Robin Hood -- is a 'good' crook who only robs those who deserve to be robbed, and who supposedly distributes his largess to the poor. Here again, on the male side of the cast list, we have the 'good crook/bad crook' contrast. Whilst Alvarez is ostensibly a 'good' crook, he is contrasted with King Bagley (played by sack-faced Walter Long), who's just a crook full stop.
Naturally, Long lusts for Lady Fair. Offscreen, actor Carol Dempster was rumoured to be DW Griffith's mistress: in his films, Griffith often cast the flat-chested Dempster as the vehicle for his rather peculiar notions about virginal maidenhood. In a few of their films, Griffith arranged to have Dempster's ingenue characters threatened with rape ... never successfully, of course. We get an early hint of this in 'Scarlet Days' when Walter Long (who also played the would-be rapist in Griffith's 'Birth of a Nation') brutally inserts his knee between the ruffles of Dempster's skirt. For Griffith's original audience, this must have been very shocking indeed. Later, Long's villain attempts to rape her ... and the rape scene here is far more detailed and explicit than the rape scene in Griffith's and Dempster's 'Sally of the Sawdust'. Long pulls the bodice of Dempster's dress off her shoulders, then lifts her skirt and petticoats. In a 21st-century movie, this would merely be business as usual (rated PG). For a film made in 1919, and especially one made by the sexually reticent Griffith, I found this scene to be shockingly explicit.
Allegedly, the character played by Barthelmess in this movie is based on one or more genuine historic figures of the Old West. I have my doubts about that part. There are plenty of alleged 'gentlemen highwaymen' -- Jesse James in the States, Dick Turpin in England -- who, upon closer inspection, turn out to have been just thieving brutes after all. 'Scarlet Days' is atypical of DW Griffith's work, and manages to avoid some of his more annoying excesses. There are a few credibility problems in the script, but perhaps these would have been cleared up if I'd viewed a print with the original title cards. 'Billy' Bitzer's cinematography is up to his usual high standard here. My rating for this one: 8 out of 10.
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