Charles Ray's first picture at Triangle with producer Thomas Ince, The Coward (1915), today seems trite and badly overacted despite its star-making status at the time. Frank Keenan (made up to look like a human gargoyle, especially in close-ups) as Colonel Jefferson Winslow volunteers both himself and his son in the cause of the Confederacy, but he is rejected because of his age. His son, played by Ray, is in love and painfully aware of his own cowardice, only enlisting as his father points a gun at him. During sentry duty, he panics and runs home.
Old Colonel Winslow takes the son's place to redeem the family honor. However, when the Yankees occupy Winslow's home town and the son overhears their military plans, he makes a risky escape back to the Confederate camp to inform the general. It is the father's own bullet which fells the son as he passes through the lines, and the general must unite the reluctant father with his son who has made victory possible.
Much of the insight into the inner experience and the emotion of the "soul-fight" (as critics referred to this aspect of the drama at the time) was achieved through camera angle and cutting. The battle scenes include none of the principles and appear to have been shot separately; the negative cost of the five or six reel production was $17,922.
Ray recalled that the role was so unsympathetic that no one wanted to be cast in the unheroic part, but he begged for it. "I worked so hard over that Coward that he just couldn't help being real. I dreamed him and lived him and for the time being, I was not Charles Ray—I was that boy." The match of the stage veteran Keenan with the youthful Ray, who actually had more screen experience, was so popular that the pair reappeared in subsequent father-son pairings.
Ray's success was to make him type-cast; he could not leave a certain type of role because of adverse public reaction. As he noted, "After that, I played cowards for a year. People in this business seem to think that because you make a hit in a character once, you should never stop playing it." He typically played a young weakling or a deserter, who is redeemed but often dies in the process. William S. Hart's characters for Ince followed a similar trajectory, but begin at a different point: the strong, mature man who has taken the wrong way in life and must find his way back. The Coward also became one of the best-remembered examples of the Civil War cycle in Thomas Ince's productions, as I outline in my Ince biography.
Old Colonel Winslow takes the son's place to redeem the family honor. However, when the Yankees occupy Winslow's home town and the son overhears their military plans, he makes a risky escape back to the Confederate camp to inform the general. It is the father's own bullet which fells the son as he passes through the lines, and the general must unite the reluctant father with his son who has made victory possible.
Much of the insight into the inner experience and the emotion of the "soul-fight" (as critics referred to this aspect of the drama at the time) was achieved through camera angle and cutting. The battle scenes include none of the principles and appear to have been shot separately; the negative cost of the five or six reel production was $17,922.
Ray recalled that the role was so unsympathetic that no one wanted to be cast in the unheroic part, but he begged for it. "I worked so hard over that Coward that he just couldn't help being real. I dreamed him and lived him and for the time being, I was not Charles Ray—I was that boy." The match of the stage veteran Keenan with the youthful Ray, who actually had more screen experience, was so popular that the pair reappeared in subsequent father-son pairings.
Ray's success was to make him type-cast; he could not leave a certain type of role because of adverse public reaction. As he noted, "After that, I played cowards for a year. People in this business seem to think that because you make a hit in a character once, you should never stop playing it." He typically played a young weakling or a deserter, who is redeemed but often dies in the process. William S. Hart's characters for Ince followed a similar trajectory, but begin at a different point: the strong, mature man who has taken the wrong way in life and must find his way back. The Coward also became one of the best-remembered examples of the Civil War cycle in Thomas Ince's productions, as I outline in my Ince biography.