By October of 1908, D.W. Griffith had advanced far enough in his study of movie direction to try some experimentation without the guidance of Wallace McCutcheon Jr.; after all, he had been doing this for three months by now. So when he made this movie, he was ready to do some things differently. In this one, it's the Jewish father who rejects the prospective gentile son-in-law; there are only a couple of titles in the entire movie, which is quite remarkable for 1908; and there are two sequences -- short, but definitely there -- in which Griffith and company venture outside the confines of the studio to take a look at a busy commercial street of the Lower East Side, and the composition is good and no one looks at the camera, although one person does look at one of the main characters as he hurries down the street.
That may not strike you as noteworthy. Of course people aren't going to look at the camera! Yet a week ago I looked at a feature from 1914, with a tracking shot set on the same street, and people looked at the camera. So either Griffith was able to get everyone on Hester Street to do what he said -- which I guarantee you, he could not -- or he had convinced his bosses to let him hire enough actors to fill up the street, everyone to do something that made sense. You do this and you do that, and you look at him when he rushes by. That's not cheap for ten seconds of screen time, but that is apparently what he did. However, it was only the beginning.
I'd like to write more about the story, about the sheer humanity of beginning it with the death of the Jewish family's mother and casting lovely Florence Lawrence as the Jewess, but you wouldn't believe me if I told you that. You're convinced D.W. Griffith was a racist by any standard, even for 1908. So I'll just mention that amazing, natural-looking crowd scene and let it go at that.
