Thomas Ince made rapid progress in the motion picture business, progressing from actor to director, as I outline in my biography of Ince, but this required he quickly learn the rudiments of film directing and technique. Mary Pickford had just left Biograph and D.W. Griffith for a starring position at IMP, where she was paid $175 a week, and Ince became her director.
The Dream (1911) was one of their first films, with a scenario credited to her. It also parallels Ince's 1908 one act play, Lizzie's Dream, about an overworked maid who falls asleep to believe that she has an inheritance which her employer's miserly family try to steal, only to lose their own money. The Dream opens with Pickford's real-life husband, Owen Moore, enacting a role recalling his own heavy drinking—a swell who becomes intoxicated in a restaurant with another woman. His wife is at home, concerned, until he comes in and collapses on the sofa in a drunken stupor.
Falling asleep, he imagines that instead his wife drinks, behaves boisterously, and goes to the restaurant with a man who is not her husband. He follows them, panicked, and is dismayed by what he sees. Returning home in despair, he commits suicide, at which point he awakens from the dream. His wife has to persuade him that all the events were in his mind. The couple reunite, and he reforms.
The structure of the narrative allows the meaning of the two sets, the restaurant and the home, to be interpreted in contrasting ways. The restaurant is a place of temptation and drink, but where it once permits the husband to act out every desire, it can also do the same for his wife and leave him humiliated. The home should be a refuge, and becomes so at the end, after the husband's return had extended into it the unruliness of the restaurant. By the conclusion the restaurant has become a place that frightens the husband. While the ten minute The Dream reflects little that is notable in technique, it does impress in the way the story facilitates the dual possible characteristics that lead to the reformation.
The Dream (1911) was one of their first films, with a scenario credited to her. It also parallels Ince's 1908 one act play, Lizzie's Dream, about an overworked maid who falls asleep to believe that she has an inheritance which her employer's miserly family try to steal, only to lose their own money. The Dream opens with Pickford's real-life husband, Owen Moore, enacting a role recalling his own heavy drinking—a swell who becomes intoxicated in a restaurant with another woman. His wife is at home, concerned, until he comes in and collapses on the sofa in a drunken stupor.
Falling asleep, he imagines that instead his wife drinks, behaves boisterously, and goes to the restaurant with a man who is not her husband. He follows them, panicked, and is dismayed by what he sees. Returning home in despair, he commits suicide, at which point he awakens from the dream. His wife has to persuade him that all the events were in his mind. The couple reunite, and he reforms.
The structure of the narrative allows the meaning of the two sets, the restaurant and the home, to be interpreted in contrasting ways. The restaurant is a place of temptation and drink, but where it once permits the husband to act out every desire, it can also do the same for his wife and leave him humiliated. The home should be a refuge, and becomes so at the end, after the husband's return had extended into it the unruliness of the restaurant. By the conclusion the restaurant has become a place that frightens the husband. While the ten minute The Dream reflects little that is notable in technique, it does impress in the way the story facilitates the dual possible characteristics that lead to the reformation.