Last Rites of the Maine and Burial of Its Dead (1912) User Reviews

Get a bugler and have him blow taps as though far off, behind the curtain

[deickemeyer · 29 October 2016]

A glorious picture, not because the Selig camera has done its work in a specially glorious way, for the photographs are merely good; but it is a picture to stir patriotic emotions from one end to the other of this land. Get a bugler and have him blow taps as though far off, behind the curtain. The big hulk was covered with as noble a garment of rust and barnacles as ever clung to a ship that has done its duty. Slowly they towed her out past Moro Castle to the place assigned in deep water. Then the ships drew apart and left her. Slowly she sank until her decks were nearly to the water. The sea was rolling. It seemed as though she was being submerged. Someone in the audience hoarsely whispered, "She is going." But no, bravely she rose when the billow passed, as though she could struggle still. Again she sank, or seemed to sink, and again and still again she rose. But now, as she dipped, the waters whitened at her prow; the teeth of the billow seemed to gleam clear across her deck. She began to tip slowly forward. A tall flagstaff had been erected above her and an immense flag was fluttering from it. As it bent downward the rising spray seemed to moisten it and it drooped, and now the spume in the sunshine around it gave to it a nimbus of gleam. The main deck, the flagstaff and the flag disappeared; the stern was the last to sink. There was a ripple where she went down and the waves above her were as waves have been since the beginning. - The Moving Picture World, April 20, 1912