"The Stain" will come as a surprise even to viewers who know classic silents like "Birth of a Nation and "Sunrise". This is not a work from a great artist film maker. It represents the production line entertainments which greeted audiences in the first years of features. "Queen Elizabeth" the first film to be widely promoted as a single attraction had been released only a few years before, in 1912. The surprise is that, like the entertainments of our own time, it holds our attention and still gives us enjoyment.
Director Frank Powell had been production manager and actor for David Wark Griffith whose "Birth of a Nation" would revolutionise the movies in the same year that "The Stain" was released. Powell was the star of Griffith short film dramas like "The Country Doctor" and his filmography runs to some eighty titles including the first filming of Hedda Gabler. Though he was one of the busiest film makers of his day, he is now remembered only for his 1916 Kipling subject "A Fool There Was" which gave the word vamp to the language and launched the career of Theda Bara, the greatest star of the early twenties on whose success the Fox Film Company was built.
Powell used "The Stain" to screen test her, then the unknown Theodosia de Coffert billed as Goodman, for the upcoming Vamp movie.
Filming around Lake Ronkonkoma in Long Island, he demonstrates a state of the art skill with his crowd scenes. The underworld dive dance and the department store, with its mesh of canister wires, bring his world to life strikingly. Though Powell has been forgotten by film history, he demonstrates an understanding of film form many more famous names could envy. Notice the use of back focus in the scene where the heroine is thrown into soft focus at the store counter to draw attention to the store detective sharp in the background.
It's subject is the then trendy notion of heredity, here worked out as inherited criminal tendencies, bad blood, "the stain," in a plot not too far removed from the barn-stormer hit "Madam X". The incident packed, two generation story line would flesh out a Joan Collins mini-series - embezzlement, eviction, separation at the hands of nuns who wear lipstick, abduction, corruption at high levels and last minute confrontation. The team get through it in seventy five minutes.
Almost all of the forty odd major films which Theda Bara made, her Carmen, her Juliet, her Cleopatra, have been allowed to vanish. "The Stain" was also thought lost. The actress denied its existence. However for decades a projectionist admirer hoarded one of the original 231 copies made on the early Diacetate safety stock, passing it to a friend who would keep it under his spare bed for another forty years.
Sydney archivist Barrie Pattison, in collaboration with George Eastman House, prepared new materials for which Haghefilm captured its original sharp, five toned images and wet gated out much of the old wear.
Few early films exist in copies which do them this justice and "The Stain" remains a window into the viewing pleasures of a generation now long distant from our own.
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