The Biograph people have the happy faculty of doing this sort of thing extremely well
26 March 2016
Excellent photography of daisy meadows, which sets the time as May, with country dooryards and the homely, little district school, give perfect backgrounds to this idyllic picture of the pretty school teacher's love story. The Biograph people have the happy faculty of doing this sort of thing extremely well. By a few skillfully selected sketches, the children coming to school, the little teacher on her way, the half-witted youth, shown as being strangely affected by flowers, and the school teacher's big beau, the producer has made the elements of the situation clear and made everything ready for an intensely dramatic picture. After the preliminary statement, a scene shows the idiot with a revolver and from that point the situation develops quickly, occupying not very much more time than it takes to picture it. We know instinctively that the shaft of tragedy, as it were, is aimed at the heroine; but we don't know yet whether the idiot will attack her directly and she will be saved by the hero, or whether the idiot will get the hero at a disadvantage and she will save him. We are not left in doubt long. She is alone in the schoolhouse and the idiot comes. He enters and points the revolver at her; tells her that he intends to shoot her and himself and that both will be found together. It is not until now that the scenario writer puts in a scene showing that the hero has the letter from the school teacher making-up after a little quarrel. She had been too proud to send this, but one of her small pupils, the country cupid, had picked it out of the waste basket and mailed it. We remembered that the boy had put two cents in the R.F.D. mail-box with it so that the postman could deliver it, and naturally held that the hero lived perhaps a mile away. The hero now joyfully and very leisurely takes his way to visit his sweetheart, making friends with the children as he goes. It is plain that he never can get there in time to save her. This is the impression the scenario writer intended to give us. His way out of the difficulty was not the old, trite way. He had shown that the idiot was strangely affected by flowers and he had shown the schoolteacher tossing a little bunch of flowers into the waste basket. Good, for the scenario writer! The teacher remembers the idiot's peculiarity and quickly snatching the bouquet from the basket, she holds it to the idiot. He at once forgets what he came to do. Slowly he lays down the revolver while the teacher reaches out ready to snatch it as soon as he shall have taken his hand from it on the table. He lets go and she has it. It's a fine scene, and does credit to idiot, school teacher and producer. But, and here again the scenario writer showed wisdom, the idiot has no fear of the revolver and the teacher doesn't want to shoot him; he soon is snatching it from her again, but at that point the hero enters and makes the idiot spin around at a good tug on his arm. Here the scenario writer is a little weak; for measuring the time that the hero had to come to the schoolhouse in by the time the idiot spent talking to the teacher, we feel that he wouldn't have got there. If he had been shown as getting the letter and starting, immediately after we saw that the idiot had the revolver, nothing would have been lost, for he was pictured as coming very leisurely, and this ending would have been a bit more convincing. - The Moving Picture World, August 12, 1911
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