When Marshall Neilan's car run out of gas and Ruth Roland says "no!", she has to walk home. However, Ruth is not the sort of girl to take this sort of thing lying down. She and her sister Marin Sais go riding with him the next day and ask him to pick them some flowers... and then drive off.
This Kalem comedy from 1912 is posted on the National Film Preservation site. While anyone interested in old movies should be interested in this, it will be a tough slog for many. One of the reasons is technical: about the seven-minute mark a lot of decomposition begins and the print becomes only erratically viewable. More than that, this Kalem film is slow. There are only three plot points in its fourteen-minute length. This could have been handled very satisfactorily as a split-reel comedy.
Kalem had a reputation and habit of making action pictures with women stars, first with Gene Gauntier and later in series and serials with Misses Roland and Sais. Pearl White might have been the serial queen, always getting in trouble and being rescued, but at Kalem, the actresses rescued themselves. This gave Kalem a corner on the market for the sort of film that appealed to independent young women. If the editing and acting was not as advanced as at Biograph, at least Kalem's actresses were not the shrinking, Victorian sort of lady that D.W. Griffith preferred.
This Kalem comedy from 1912 is posted on the National Film Preservation site. While anyone interested in old movies should be interested in this, it will be a tough slog for many. One of the reasons is technical: about the seven-minute mark a lot of decomposition begins and the print becomes only erratically viewable. More than that, this Kalem film is slow. There are only three plot points in its fourteen-minute length. This could have been handled very satisfactorily as a split-reel comedy.
Kalem had a reputation and habit of making action pictures with women stars, first with Gene Gauntier and later in series and serials with Misses Roland and Sais. Pearl White might have been the serial queen, always getting in trouble and being rescued, but at Kalem, the actresses rescued themselves. This gave Kalem a corner on the market for the sort of film that appealed to independent young women. If the editing and acting was not as advanced as at Biograph, at least Kalem's actresses were not the shrinking, Victorian sort of lady that D.W. Griffith preferred.
