Film concert Home, Sweet Home (Neil Brand's band, GCM Sacile 2004)

D. W. Griffith: Home, Sweet Home (1914). Henry B. Walthall (John Howard Payne), Lillian Gish (sweetheart), Josephine Crowell (mother).

EVENTO MUSICALE

HOME, SWEET HOME (Majestic Motion Picture Co. / Reliance Motion Picture Co., US 1914)
    Dir.: D. W. Griffith; cast: Henry B. Walthall, Josephine Crowell, Lillian Gish; 35 mm, 4118 ft, 65’ (16–18 fps: vedi nota / see note), The Museum of Modern Art.
    English intertitles.
    Live musical accompaniment arranged by Neil Brand following the musical indications within the film. Music performed by: Neil Brand (grand piano), Günter A. Buchwald (violin), Romano Todesco (accordion), Denis Biason (guitar), Lorena Favot (vocals).
    Viewed at Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM): The Griffith Project 8, 10 Oct 2004.

Note 1: The 35 mm print screened at the festival appears to have an episode card out of order. The card “Part 4 (Episode 3)” incorrectly pops up in the middle of action in Part 3 (Episode 2). This misplacement is presumably an error in the negative, as there is no splice where this particular card is located. Our thanks to Anne Morra for drawing this to our attention.

Note 2: “Mr. Griffith suggests that the running time for the picture should be: – 16 min. for the first reel, 14 min. to 15 min. for the second reel, and from 13 min. to 14 min. for each of the other reels. The last reel, however, should be run slowly from the beginning of the allegorical part to the end.” (Reel Life, 13 June 1914, p. 3)

Ben Brewster (GCM, DWG Project # 509): "Most commentators on Home, Sweet Home note that, as a multi-episode film, it anticipates Intolerance. More knowledgeable ones note also the analogy with the 1909 Biograph one-reeler Pippa Passes. As in the latter, a series of stories involving different characters are linked by the fact that they find their resolution in chance hearings of the same song. However, in Pippa Passes, a character walking about a city singing in the morning provides the link that anchors all the episodes into a single diegetic space and time (though Griffith does not try to reproduce the unifying series of subtle links of Browning’s play, among Pippa and the various characters); in Home, Sweet Home, by contrast, the only spatial-temporal linkage is that all the stories are set in a cultural universe that knows the famous song by John Howard Payne (lyrics) and Henry Bishop (music). Moreover, it is the theme of the song that counts, rather than the innocence of the singer (as in Pippa), which brings it closer to the thematic unification of Intolerance. But the fact that the stories follow one another, rather than being intercut, obviously makes it closer to the earlier film than the later one."

"Differences underscore the parallels. Thus, three different instruments, an accordion, a guitar, and a violin, play the music in each episode (notably, only the guitarist seems also to sing the words, so the unifier is really Bishop’s music, not Payne’s lyrics, but the tune is so closely associated with the words, or at least the theme of the song, and the song, words and melody, is usually thought of as Payne’s, so the discrepancy is not very important). The three settings contrast three characteristic American environments – a Western mining camp, a seacoast fishing village, and a big city (an agrarian moment is notably absent). Finally, where two of the stories have unalloyed happy endings, with successful marriages blessed with many children, a third is much more ambiguous: the song fails to deter one of the brothers who hate from killing his sibling, so its later success in preventing the mother’s suicide is not an unmixed happy end. Interestingly, the Moving Picture World summary places this episode third and last, whereas the surviving print and the reviews on release indicate that it should go second. If it were in final place, it would bring the film overall closer to the characteristic ambiguity of Griffith’s later Biograph films (such as The Adopted Brother), where the film ends happily insofar as the hero and heroine survive and are perhaps united in marriage, but this is achieved by the destruction of another family group or other innocent characters. The MPW summary also omits the Epilogue. If the Epilogue showing Payne’s redemption was in fact an afterthought, the film as originally conceived would have been a gloomy one indeed."

"Another way of looking at the multi-episode format is as a transitional form between the one-reel film and the feature, a unification by theme of the variety program of short films that constituted the bill in a typical Mutual-served movie house – in this case comprising a two-reel costume drama, a comedy Western, a melodrama, and a society drama. The lengths of the episodes bear this out. In the current print, Episode One is 986 feet long, Episode Two 953 feet, and Episode Three 761 feet (as if it were a split-reeler, with the Epilogue at 80 feet). In Edward Wagenknecht and Anthony Slide’s The Films of D. W. Griffith (p. 41), Slide even claims of Episode One: “Interestingly, prior to the first screening of Home, Sweet Home, this sequence had been released, on April 18, 1914, as a separate story, titled Apple Pie Mary, but with a slightly different plot line. Instead of returning to marry Mae Marsh, Harron (here called Burford Dane) marries Miriam Cooper, and only visits Mae Marsh again on her deathbed, when she forgives him ‘with a sad smile playing about her lips and dies with his baby playing at the bedside’.” Unfortunately, despite the circumstantial nature of this comment, I can find no trace of this release; it was certainly not on the regular Mutual program for 18 April, or any other nearby date. However, it does at first sight seem plausible that an episode from Home, Sweet Home might have been released as a separate one-reeler, just as the different parts of Intolerance were released as separate features. If Home, Sweet Home were Griffith’s first feature-length film, the temptation to think of it as a cautious step towards the feature in this way would be almost irresistible. However, he had made at least three features before this (Judith of Bethulia, The Battle of the Sexes, and The Escape), each of which is a straightforward single-narrative film, so inexperience cannot be the explanation in this case. And the individual episodes are not, if examined closely, very like Griffith’s one-reel films."

"By 1913, Griffith constructed these films by combining different plotlines, integrating them by the device he took further than any of his contemporaries, alternating editing. This can be seen partly as a response to the problem of making so many films. There are a relatively limited number of situations suitable for a short dramatic film, and one way of extending the number so that each film is somewhat different from the others is to combine them. Thus, The Adopted Brother has one storyline concerning the hero’s persecution by the family’s full-blooded son, and a second concerning the hero’s restoration of a drunken writer’s self-respect. The two are brought together by the writer sacrificing himself to save the hero from a murderous attack by his brother. Or take The Voice of the Child (1912), whose main plotline is virtually identical to that of Home, Sweet Home’s Episode Three: A husband is so wrapped up in business that his neglected wife is vulnerable to the seduction of another man, in this case the husband’s friend rather than her own. But the resolution involves an elaborate secondary plotline, where the friend, to persuade the wife of her husband’s infidelity, uses a stolen photograph, which the couple’s daughter sees him slip into the husband’s coat pocket, thus enabling the daughter to resolve the couple’s dissension fully once her appeal has induced her mother not to abandon the family."

"The functions of this second plotline in The Voice of the Child are fulfilled by the double overhearing of the song in Home, Sweet Home’s episode “The Marriage of Roses and Lilies”. The introduction of the song is more carefully prepared in this episode than in the others, with byplay between the musician and the homesick boy in the first hearing, and between the musician and the maid in the second, but there is not any real story connected with it. In Episode Two of Home, Sweet Home, there seems to be something much more like an intervening story, but it is so underdeveloped as to be incomprehensible. The first son’s attack on his brother is motivated by the second son’s receiving money from a man, but we never discover why. The older brother’s first attempt is foiled when the same man reappears with an apparently urgent errand for the second son to run, which he reluctantly agrees to, thus removing him from his brother’s reach for a time. We then see him taking a cheery farewell of this man as he strides towards the family shack and his doom. Possibly there was once more footage to explain this secondary sequence of actions, but there is no obvious moment where such footage seems to be missing. Similarly, in the film’s first episode, Robert Winthrop’s business in the East, which motivates his separation from Mary and extended contact with the Eastern girl, is not explained. It looks as if he receives a legacy, putting him into a class above Mary, and thus motivating the letter indicating that there is a gulf between them. But this is never elaborated, and so must remain surmise."

"Another characteristic of the later Biographs is the use of symbolic props, often with ironic reversals built into them. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the heroine’s shawl in The Painted Lady (1912), but one might also mention the mouse in The Lady and the Mouse (1913), the son’s collar and tie in Home Folks (1912), and many others. There are such props in Home, Sweet Home, but they are underdeveloped. Thus the mementos that Robert and Mary exchange in Episode One are amusing, but little comes of them; Mary’s wearing of Robert’s glasses when he returns to her at the end has no function except for the comic effect on her appearance, and the picture postcard she gives him never reappears. The roses and lilies that are mentioned in the title of Episode Three serve as the thinnest of symbolic parallels, blooming in profusion side by side in the wedding shots, and their petals dropping separately in hall and sitting-room in the scenes of the couple’s dissension two years later. Only the husband even takes any notice of them when he idly tries to restore one of the fallen rose petals to its flower before he falls asleep in an armchair on returning from his club."

"This thinness also characterizes the Prologue and Epilogue. The main structuring device, the series of cutaways from the story of Payne’s descent in Europe and North Africa to his mother and sweetheart waiting patiently back home, has no consequences. It is true that the film does exploit the full range of Griffith’s use of such cutaways; sometimes it is clear that Payne is thinking of his sweetheart when there is a cut to her (e.g., when he is composing the song); at others she is farthest from his thoughts, and is brought in as a commentary for the viewer (e.g., when he is being seduced by the Worldly Woman). She, on the other hand, is always thinking of him, expecting his imminent arrival for tea, having premonitions of his downfall when the parallel scene is one of disgrace or sin; but thinking of her lost love is the only thing she has to do in the film. Not until the Epilogue does her story actually link with his, when she conjures the demons and carries him off to heaven. Robert Henderson (in D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work, p. 144) suggests that “the film was notable for its increasingly complex use of technical devices [and] refinement of parallel editing”, but to me it seems a step backwards from the technical achievements of the Biograph films. All in all, Home, Sweet Home cannot be counted as one of Griffith’s more successful films. If, as all the biographies claim, The Battle of the Sexes was simply a potboiler made to fill Aitken’s pressing schedules for Reliance product, Home, Sweet Home seems no more than a showcase for his new company of actors." – Ben Brewster [DWG Project # 509, GCM]

AA: A rewarding and essential musical presentation arranged by Neil Brand, following the original instructions of the film, largely based on variations of "Home, Sweet Home" (1823) written by John Howard Payne and composed by Henry Bishop. A song-driven silent film and an omnibus film, each episode inspired by the song. A film print with black levels missing.