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"A Story of the Strange Meandering River of Life." The opening pan gives a Corot view, a pastoral sprawl swiftly darkened by murder. (The peddler's daughter is a responsive audience for the crime, laughing and then crying from behind the bushes.) "Little Miss Yes'm," the witness (Lillian Gish) caring for her mother ten years later, a nearby stream incarnates the old woman expiring in the back of the wagon. The penurious clan takes in the orphan, the matriarch (Eugenie Besserer) is a "quiet but strongly sweet soldier in the battle betwixt Good and Evil." One of her boys (Robert Harron) becomes the adoptee's sweetheart, the other (Ralph Graves) dies in the war as a chill strikes back home, cf. Ford's Pilgrimage. A job at the "House of Shadows" is the heroine's affliction, the ogress (Josephine Crowell) is just dying for a reason to wield her scourge, the "lascivious eye" of her husband (George Nichols) gets extra lascivious when the maid works a butter churn. A picturesque array of premonitions and revenants from D.W. Griffith, "the wind in the trees" visible throughout. Gish barefoot splashing at the prudish Harron might be a Lenoir nymph, her fleeing from a sheet-wrapped hobo mistaken for a ghost is worthy of Mabel Normand. A paroxysm at the graveyard, bereft mother with hands raised heavenward while embittered father pokes at the dirt beneath their feet, the materializing spirit has consequences for Dreyer's Ordet. "Farewell, until our tomorrow." The tell-tale remembrance reemerges in the middle of an attic scuffle, the miracle of a rotter's conscience is couched at the close in a Beverly Hillbillies gag. With George Fawcett, Tom Wilson, and Katherine Albert. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |