Fortunes of a Composer (1912) User Reviews

Failure and Success

[boblipton · 6/10 · 15 October 2016]

Charles Kent has been eking out a living in Europe while trying to succeed as a composer. Worn down with age and failure, he returns to his family in America to find their apartment empty in this Vitagraph short subject.

Writer/director/star Kent created an interesting movie. The lighting and his slow, weary playing of the role is as fine a bit of use of the medium for psychological exposition as any in the era. As is usual for Vitagraph productions in this era, the enormous acting company of the studio is on display in lesser roles, including such well known players as Norma Talmadge and Wallace Reid. This adds the fun of "spot the star" to an interesting movie.

The copy that has been posted to the Eye Institute site on Youtube is handsomely tinted, although the low light levels of the print may make it a bit difficult to work out what is happening at important moments.

There is plenty in the picture that does ring true

[deickemeyer · 22 November 2016]

Mr. Charles Kent, by very sincere acting, holds up, in this picture, a situation that otherwise would have failed to convince, would, perhaps, have had little effectiveness. As it is, up to the last scene, which is tremendously effective, the interest in the story's outcome, while always awake, is secondary to the picture's lesser qualities, its acting, lighting, scene making and photography, which all are of high order. The story of the old composer's loss of memory and his separation from his friends, and even of the homecoming to die in the empty theater where he had just heard his great opera rendered, are not impossible; but they are not made very real. There is plenty in the picture that does ring true and the scene where the composer dies is fine. The acting all through is excellent. Mrs. Julia Swayne Gordon plays the composer's wife; Edith Halleran and Norma Talmadge play his two daughters, and do excellent work. - The Moving Picture World, June 8, 1912