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| D. W. Griffith: The Devil (US 1908). George Gebhardt, Claire McDowell, Harry Solter. (Tracey Goessel, FairCode Associates / Library of Congress). Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2024. |
Dir: D. W. Griffith. Story: based on the play by Ferenc Molnár, The Devil (Az ördög, 1907). Photog: Billy Bitzer. Cast: Harry Solter, Claire McDowell, Florence Lawrence, Arthur Johnson, Mack Sennett, George Gebhardt.
Filmed: 12.9.1908 (NY Studio; undetermined NY Street location). Rel: 2.10.1908.
Copy: DCP (4K), 10'08" (from paper print, 570 ft, 15 fps); titles: ENG. Source: Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Packard Campus, Culpeper, VA.
Film Preservation Society (FPS) / Tracey Goessel / Digital scan, 2017. Given the absence of original intertitles, new ones have been written by the Film Preservation Society. 2024 edition.
43rd Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone: Early Cinema – The Biograph Project.
Grand piano: Philip Carli.
Viewed at Teatro Verdi with e-subtitles in Italian, 11 Oct 2024
There is no credit information in the film itself, just the title card with the year of copyright and the name and the address of the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company, like in The Adventures of Dollie.
Tracey Goessel (GCM/FPS The Biograph Project 2024): "Griffith had prior experience with stop-motion shots but always with the intent of not being noticed. Here Satan, complete with long chin and a single, inexplicable Indian feather, pops in and out of the frame with relish and abandon. But Griffith lacked the wit and visual charm of a Méliès. His popping cartoon devil is there to serve a melodramatic plot, not to charm and delight."
"The film bears little relation to the play upon which it was based. While each contains an artist and his model, temptation and, well – Satan, the Biograph tale is the sort of lurid melodrama that can fit into a single reel, ending with the protagonists’ bodies littering the floor. Film could not yet match the stage for complexities of plot."
"Nor for nuance of characterization. In the play, the Devil is of the urbane sort. (Think Laird Cregar in Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait.) In the movies? He is just a pitchfork, tail, and pair of horns away from a caricature."
"At the end of the day, the strongest element to this film is its cast. Not only is there Florence Lawrence as the beautiful model, but making her first appearance in a Biograph is the unconquerable Claire McDowell. There is nary a film she does not improve with her presence."
AA: The Devil (HU 1907) was the breakthrough play by the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár. It turned into an international success, and it was produced also in Finland in 1908 (at Tampereen Teatteri). The only film adaptation I have seen is Griffith's, but Tom Gunning has been able to compare it with the Edison and Vitagraph versions.
When I first saw the film in 1997 the print was so weak that it was hard to make sense of, but I was impressed by the use of the "split screen" of two cursed couples on display together on the stage divided by a wall. Art of the overacting. "Then the Devil took their souls". Again, I am grateful for the restoration which makes sense of the movie storywise and visually.
I am reminded of Claude Chabrol's account of his first encounter with Alfred Hitchcock. Chabrol had been allowed to his press conference. Smoothly Hitchcock gave routine answers to routine questions. Then was Chabrol's turn, and he asked: "Mr. Hitchcock, do you believe in the Devil?" For once, Hitchcock fell silent. He paused to think, looked at Chabrol in the eye and said: "Yes, I believe the Devil is inside all of us, and we battle with him every day".
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Tom Gunning 1997 capsule: "The Devil appears and tempts a married artist to seduce his model. When his wife finds out, the devil tempts her to take revenge through an affair. At a restaurant the two philandering couples meet. The Artist finds his wife with the other man, pursues her home and, again under the Devil's influence, kills her and himself."
In his full 1997 program note, Gunning compares (my paraphrasis:) three adaptations made at the time (by Biograph, Edison and Vitagraph) and notes that the others were dependent on audience foreknowledge of the play where the Biograph version stood on its own. Gunning highlights the unique use of stop motion. This is the only Griffith film at Biograph which uses this technique in such a flamboyant manner. Griffith's stop motion Devil is not a piece of a Méliès féerie but a personification of evil in the human psyche. Even more striking Gunning finds the parallel editing with the immediate cut from artist kissing his model to his wife pacing the floor at home impatiently. Gunning also points out to Griffith's tendency to grim endings at this point of his career. (End of my Gunning paraphrasis).
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I saw The Devil in GCM's Griffith Project (DWG 54), pomeriggio 15 Oct 1997 at Ridotto del Verdi on 16 mm at 233 ft /15 fps/ 11 min, titles missing, Donald Sosin at the piano.
Moving Picture World synopsis from Biograph Bulletin, No. 175, October 2 1908: "A BIOGRAPH PORTRAYAL OF PSYCHIC FORCE. "There's the Devil to pay." Don't worry, the Devil is a good collector, and never discounts. In the ever-existent psychomachy in the human being, Satan attacks the weaker side, the flesh, and has in most cases an easy task in overthrowing the soul. In this picture we have attempted to show in the material that conflict by personifying that which is evil and sinister in our natures by figure of the traditional Satan; hence, in this subject, the Devil is intended to illustrate psychic force."
"Herold Thornton, a successful artist, is so deeply in love with his wife that apparently no power, natural or supernatural, could swerve him from the path of honor. But, alas! he is human, and in his employ is a very beautiful girl as model. This girl has loved her employer with a suppressed, hopeless passion, which needed but a breath to fan it into a blaze. In justice to her it must be said that she didn't realize the strength of this feeling, smothering it with admiration for the artist's devotion for his wife."
"Ah, but the Devil knows how to play the game, and his promptings are so fascinatingly impressive that few can resist. But who is the Devil? He is the embodiment of our evil inclination warring with the pure. So it was that at his prompting the artist falls, as does his model. They are discovered by the wife, who in turn is prompted by the Devil to "get even," which she heeds."
"She is surprised by her husband in a private dining-room of a café in company with a gentleman friend. In frenzy he leaps at his wife's throat, and the Devil laughs. He would have sent her to him then and there, hut for the intervention of the waiters."
"In terror, the poor woman rushes to her home. She is followed by the crazed husband. In vain she pleads, but the Devil prompts: "Kill." Taking a revolver from the dresser-drawer, he moves deliberately toward the terrified wife, and the Devil laughs. A shot and a body and soul part; another shot, and "There was the Devil to pay," and he collected."
"This subject, while thrilling, is most ingeniously handled, with photographic quality of the highest order, showing a stereoscopic effect never before attained." —Moving Picture World synopsis from Biograph Bulletin, No. 175, October 2 1908
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