User Reviews

Drunkard Charles Hill Mailes is out hunting with son Bobby Harron, when he shoots himself. Kindly Lionel Barrymore invites him into his house, but the guest is soon pawing at grand daughter Mae Marsh and kicking a puppy. Barrymore thrashes him comically. When recounting this while bellied up to the bar, Maine's grows enraged and settles on vengeance. He breaks into Barrymore's house to find a keg of gunpowder. He sets a fuse and walks away chuckling. Then Miss Marsh and her little brother come home and settle in for lunch in the front room, while the fuse burns in the back....

It's not one of D.W. Griffith's better-written Biograph shorts by any means, but it has a couple of things going for it. FIrst is the assure manner in which Griffith intercuts between the people in the front room, and the fitful burning of the fuse in the back. The other is the beauty of the print. The copy I saw seems to have been pulled from an original camera negative, and the beauty of the winter landscape as shot by Griffith's usual cameraman, Billy Bitzer, makes this good to behold.

This picture is easily the best offering of to-day's regular releases on account of its tremendously effective climax. We see a half-witted, sodden drunkard set a long fuse of shavings to a large keg of powder in the log cabin of a man who had once befriended him and to which immediately after, two little girls come home from school. But the son of the drunkard is hungry and also comes to the cabin for food, scaring away the children. In a moment, there is a terrible explosion; the cabin is knocked to pieces, but it is the son and not the children who dies. If such an explosion can be made more effective and real, it may be done in some later picture; but we think this will stand for a while. The photography is clear. Alfred Paget is the drunkard; Robert Harron, his son, and Lionel Barrymore, his friend. On the other side, W.J. Butler is the father of the children, played by Mae Marsh and a little girl. - The Moving Picture World, April 5, 1913