It's another film by Mr. Collins that seems pretty muddled. A man comes home to find an officer assaulting his wife. He is arrested -- the wronged man -- and returns home, but the police are on his trail. His wife and child are killed, but he flees. In the chase, he throws several officers over a cliff and finally tracks down the cause of his woes.
It's pretty heady stuff, carried out at such a breakneck pace that it's often hard to figure out what's going on. Director Alf Collins, during his decade of directing movies, was accounted an expert in chases, and that's what this movie largely consists of. Its melodramatic plot has been writ much larger and at greater length as movies have expanded to feature length, and his cutting from one scene to the next is poor to the modern eye. Quite clearly, he has no talent for the rhythms of such operations, or -- if I wish to be charitable -- his rhythms are alien to the modern eye, washed away in the sea changes established by D. W. Griffith's regularization of film grammar beginning four years later. Yet we can see their primitive origins here.
It's pretty heady stuff, carried out at such a breakneck pace that it's often hard to figure out what's going on. Director Alf Collins, during his decade of directing movies, was accounted an expert in chases, and that's what this movie largely consists of. Its melodramatic plot has been writ much larger and at greater length as movies have expanded to feature length, and his cutting from one scene to the next is poor to the modern eye. Quite clearly, he has no talent for the rhythms of such operations, or -- if I wish to be charitable -- his rhythms are alien to the modern eye, washed away in the sea changes established by D. W. Griffith's regularization of film grammar beginning four years later. Yet we can see their primitive origins here.
