Alas and Alack (1915) User Reviews

Might Have Beens

[boblipton · 6/10 · 2 July 2022]

Cleo Madison is watching her daughter when a wealthy yachtsman puts his tender ashore She tells a tale to the child of a princess who loved a prince, but a witch drove the prince away and imprisoned the princess in a seashell. That is why you can hear crying when you put your ear to the shell. The yachtsman overhears the story, and gets a few of the daisies that brighten her shack. He then returns to his yacht and his fat, uncaring wife, to dream of what might have been. Meanwhile, Miss Madison' husband, Lon Chaney, returns with the day's catch and more nets to mend.

Today it seems heavy-handed and sentimental. At the time, it was an attempt to not so much tell a story as a study in moods, and the truism that things never turn out as well as we might wish.

"Alas and Alack" for the Texas basketball players , , ,

[pixrox1 · 6/10 · 21 June 2013]

. . . as they are as likely to win another NBA championship during the reign of King James in the Sunshine State as Lon Chaney is to finish this 1915 incomplete short (they ran out of film during the second week of the shoot, so director Joseph De Grasse reportedly threw up his hands and exclaimed "Alas and alack!"--a common expression in 1915, what with the Great War raging and all--hence the title of this sea shore sea shell of a tale. Which is a real shame if you look at the WHOLE script, since the mermaid round-up scene would have given Chaney an early opportunity to perfect his merman guise, and as film mermen historically survive into their early hundreds, this good luck charm of a role may well have prolonged the future screen hunchback and opera phantom's career to the point that he could have reprized his more watery foray in a Harry Potter film or two. The bit about the "fisher babe" (Mary Kearnen) rescuing Icarus from the sea also stacked up as a sight to behold, so true silent film fans are left with just two words to sum up their chagrin over the sad turn of events that befell this flick: ALAS & ALACK!

Worth it for Chaney fans

[Michael_Elliott · 25 February 2008]

Alas and Alack (1915)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Incomplete short has Cleo Madison telling her daughter a story about the noise in a seashell while her husband (Lon Chaney) is away fishing. The woman dreams of becoming rich one day and it seems her wishes are granted when a rich man pulls up on shore. The final six minutes of the film are missing so there's no way of knowing if she leaves with the man or stays with her husband. The most important thing about this early Universal short is that Chaney plays two roles including a hunchback in a dream sequence. The hunchback scenes have him in limited make up but it looks okay. The special effects are pretty good for the time and Madison makes for a good lead. Hopefully the final minutes will be found someday.

A lass and a lack of a good script

[F Gwynplaine MacIntyre · 2/10 · 18 February 2003]

For some reason, many silent films with contemporary settings had flashbacks to ancient times. The most obvious example of this is Cecil B. DeMille's 'Male and Female', with its flashback to Babylon ... and, indeed, several of DeMille's movies from the Jazz Age found convenient excuses for sending the main characters back to ancient times (via flashback) on some flimsy pretext. 'Alas and Alack' is a very low-budget film which follows this same structure, interrupting the main story with a barely relevant fantasy sequence set in some fairy-tale mediaeval kingdom.

Lon Chaney plays two roles in this film; his two make-ups here are rather less convincing than usual, but one of his two characters is a fantasy grotesque, so the make-up for this role doesn't need to be plausible. The lead role here is Jess, a poor fishwife somewhere on the Pacific coast, well-played by Cleo Madison. Chaney plays her (nameless) husband, a fisherman who is the equivalent of Tevye the milkman: he gets very little work done because he's busy fantasising about what he would do with his wealth IF he were a rich man (biddy-biddy-boom)...

SYNOPSIS WITH SPOILER: One day, Jess meets a yachtsman who IS rich: Charles Holcombe, who is wealthy but unhappily married to a wife who nags him constantly yet who otherwise ignores him. Jess and Holcombe are attracted to each other, but ... well, the marriage bonds are sacred. They linger on the edge of some sort of romance, but it doesn't happen. He goes back to his spouse (a fishwife in the figurative sense), whilst Jess (a fishwife in the literal sense) goes back to mending fishnets for her husband. Something wonderful **almost** might have happened, but...

This turgid plotline is interrupted while Jess tells her daughter a fairy tale about a beautiful princess who is magically imprisoned in a seashell; to this day, if you put a seashell to your ear, you can hear the princess moaning. The characters in this fairy tale are played by the actors in the main story, as dual roles: Jess becomes the princess, Holcombe becomes a handsome prince, while Chaney shows up as a grim mediaeval hunchback: a practice-run for Quasimodo, perchance? The events in the fairy tale are meant to parallel the events in the main story, or meant to point to some moral, or something. What really happens is that the main story, such as it is, screeches to a halt so that we can see this twee muck about the wee princess in the seashell, and then just when we're beginning to lose CONCH-usness (pardon the pun, it's very shellfish of me), we pick up the dull thread where it left off.

This is one of those stories where people are ABOUT to make tremendous changes in their unfortunate lives, but never quite work up the nerve. Well, why should we care? Chaney's make-ups are interesting, and Cleo Madison gives two decent performances as the princess (who can't quite come out of her shell) and the fishwife (ditto). I'll rate this movie 2 points out of 10.