The Lonely Villa
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The Lonely Villa |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1909 |
| length | 8 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | David Wark Griffith |
| script | Mack Sennett |
| production | American Mutoscope and Biograph Company |
| camera |
GW Bitzer , Arthur Marvin |
| occupation | |
| |
_in_The_Lonely_Villa_(1909).jpg)
The Lonely Villa ( German : The Lonely Villa ) is an American crime film by director David Wark Griffith from 1909 . The writer wrote Mack Sennett after the play au téléphone (German: On the phone ) of the French playwright André de Lorde and Charles Foley . The silent film is a production of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and features seventeen-year-old Mary Pickford in her fourth short film.
action
Three criminals plan to rob the Cullison mansion. To get a free run, they forged a message to Robert Cullison, the father of the family, with which he was asked to pick up his mother at the city train station. When the Cullison couple are home alone with their three daughters - the maid and the butler have a day off - one of the criminals comes into the house to deliver the fake news. He secretly takes the ammunition from a revolver lying ready in the salon.
While Mr. Cullison drives the family car to the train station, the robbers attack the country house. Mrs. Cullison and the daughters barricade themselves in the parlor. Cullison has to stop at a roadhouse because of a breakdown and calls home. He learns of the threatening situation and tells his wife to take the revolver. But this turns out to be useless without ammunition. The conversation is interrupted when one of the robbers cuts the phone cord.
Mr. Cullinson can't get his car running at the rest house. A police officer appears on foot and unceremoniously confiscates a covered wagon in a warehouse opposite the rest house, with which he, Mr. Cullison and other rescuers race at breakneck speed to the Cullison house. In the meantime the robbers can break open the first door and are only separated from Mrs. Cullison and the daughters by a last door. Just when they manage to get to their victims, the rescuers storm into the house and overwhelm the robbers.
Production notes
The script for The Lonely Villa was based on La téléphone , a two-act play by the French playwrights André de Lorde and Charles Foleÿ . It appeared in 1901 and was quickly included in the repertoire of the Théâtre du Grand Guignol in the Parisian entertainment district of Pigalle . The material has been filmed repeatedly, for example by the Pathé Frères in several versions of Le Médecin du château . The 1908 version also made it to the United States , where it was published under the titles A Narrow Escape and The Physician of the Castle . Other arrangements, such as an earlier version of Le Médecin du château in 1907 or Heard over the Phone by Edwin S. Porter in 1908, modified the story of the patriarch's triumph to the effect that they murdered the family and let the father of the family, who was hurrying to the rescue, fail cruelly.
In the ten months prior to shooting The Lonely Villa , David Wark Griffith had made more than 100 films for the Biograph Company . In 1908, in his melodrama After Many Years, he first connected two storylines with parallel montages . The Lonely Villa is one of his most important early works. There are three storylines in different locations, the burglars outside, the wife and children barricaded in the villa, and the husband on the way from the city to her rescue. Griffith not only connects the three locations and storylines with parallel montages, but also uses the shorter and shorter scenes, i.e. the quicker sequence of shots, as a means of increasing tension and depicting the simultaneity of events. A few months before The Lonely Villa , Griffith had already depicted a telephone conversation in his film The Medicine Bottle with the help of tension-inducing parallel montages. In The Lonely Villa he had developed his technique to such an extent that the American film scholar Tom Gunning called this film the Locus classicus of parallel montage.
The Lonely Villa is a follow-up to the extremely popular film chases from 1903 to 1908. With his motif of the rushing savior, Griffith coined a stylistic device that became known as Griffith last-minute rescue or Griffith ending and a few years later determined the structure of the films in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance .
The telephone conversation as the main element of the plot is another innovation by Griffith. It is true that the telephone was discussed or used earlier in the film by himself and other directors. One example is Le Médecin du château , a short film from 1908, which was sometimes cited as an almost exact copy as a template for Griffith. The quality of the craftsmanship of Griffith's work and numerous deviations in details, however, refute the assumption that The Lonely Villa is a plagiarism. Rather, Griffith adapted the material and given it its artistic form in more than twice as many settings. Later representatives of the crime film and the media horror built on this and the tension-inducing element of the telephone conversation, reproduced in numerous shots, is still used today.
The Lonely Villa is 750 feet long and was released on a roll of 35mm film with A New Trick . The film was registered with the United States Copyright Office on June 10, 1909 , and released in theaters the same day. Copies of the film are preserved in several film archives.
The material was later filmed repeatedly. The film parody Help! Help! by Mack Sennett , produced by the Biograph Company in 1912 , and Au sécours! by Abel Gance from 1924. In 1914, the Russian director Jakow Protasanow shot the lost film Drama by Telephone ( Drama u telefona ), a remake of The Lonely Villa , which, according to the preferences of the Russian audience, had a tragic end: the family father found his wife murdered on return.
criticism
The Lonely Villa was banned from performing in the metropolitan area by the Chicago Police shortly before the National Board of Censorship was established , when censorship was still a matter of local law enforcement . In a discussion on censorship, a Moving Picture World editor said the film had received high praise from viewers in New York City and excellent reviews from across the country. It was a bloodless drama in the best style of the biographer, and did not contain anything that could burden even the most sensitive minds or arouse bad thoughts in men, women or children. On the contrary, the film clearly shows that honesty is the best way.
The Moving Picture World published a brief review in its June 19, 1909 issue. The reviewer called The Lonely Villa one of the most skillfully staged bloodless film dramas he has ever seen. From the very first moment everything was just tense expectation, and like all films The Biograph was of the highest quality. The reviewer also emphasized the performance of the actors: the villains are evil, the landlord is portrayed realistically in his agony, especially on the phone, and the heroine is as handsome and graceful as always with the biographer. Lonely Villa is another success for the Biograph Company.
The film scholar Vance Kepley judged in a class on Griffith's short films about The Lonely Villa made at the Biograph Company that the plot (with the fake message that lures the father away) seems constructed, and that some takes are too long and awkwardly choreographed .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Vance Kepley , Jr .: Griffith Biograph Shorts . In: The Journal of Aesthetic Education 1975, Volume 9, No. 2, pp. 5-17, doi : 10.2307 / 3331731 .
- ↑ The Lonely Villa . In: The Moving Picture World , Volume 4, No. 23, June 5, 1909, p. 762, digitized .
- ↑ a b c d e Tom Gunning : Heard over the phone: The Lonely Villa and the de Lorde tradition of the terrors of technology . In: Screen 1991, Volume 32, No. 2, pp. 184-196, doi : 10.1093 / screen / 32.2.184 .
- ^ A b Robert Sklar and David A. Cook: History of the motion picture. The Silent Years, 1910-27. Pre-World War I American cinema . In: Encyclopædia Britannica , online edition, accessed January 19, 2019.
- ^ A b Robert Sklar : Film. An International History of the Medium . Harry N. Abrams, New York 1993, ISBN 0-8109-3321-7 , pp. 50-54.
- ↑ a b Iris Barry : DW Griffith: American Film Master . Museum of Modern Art, New York City 1940, digitized , pp. 16-18.
- ↑ Chika Kinoshita: The Mummy Complex: Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Loft and J-horror . In: Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano (eds.): Horror to the Extreme. Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema . Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong 2009, ISBN 978-962-209-972-2 , p. 111.
- ^ Eileen Bowser : The transformation of cinema, 1907-1915 (= History of the American cinema , Volume 2). Charles Scribner's Sons, New York City 1990, ISBN 0-684-18414-1 , p. 67.
- ↑ The Lonely Villa , Silent Era website , April 12, 2015, accessed January 19, 2019.
- ↑ The Lonely Villa in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ^ Sarah Delahousse: Marion Leonard . In: Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal and Monica Dall'Asta (eds.): Women Film Pioneers Project . Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. Columbia University Libraries, New York, NY 2013, September 27, 2013, accessed January 19, 2019.
- ↑ Yuri Tsivian : Early Russian cinema: some observations . In: Richard Taylor , Ian Christie (eds.): Inside the Film Factory. New approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema . Routledge, London and New York 1991, ISBN 0-415-04951-2 , pp. 7-30, here p. 7.
- ^ A National Board of Censorship . In: The Moving Picture World , Volume 4, No. 25, June 19, 1909, p. 825, digitized .
- ↑ The Lonely Villa . In: The Moving Picture World , Volume 4, No. 25, June 19, 1909, p. 834, digitized .