The Taming of the Shrew

D. W. Griffith was still learning his craft when he took on the Bard with this adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. Unable to call upon Shakespeare's words, Griffith resorts to physical comedy to deliver the crude message that to win the heart of a violently psychotic wife one has to pretend to be even more violently psychotic than her. Florence Lawrence and Arthur V. Johnson look like they had a lot of fun banging heads together.

This is worth seeing as a solid early effort to film Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew", and it is also of interest as an early pairing of director D.W. Griffith and cinematographer Billy Bitzer. Although it now looks like a relatively unfinished attempt, for its time it is a creditable adaptation.

It's not surprising that the slapstick sequences work better than the rest of the story, since they do not rely very much on explanation or dialogue. Its other noticeable strength is the sets, which have a fair amount of detail for the time. Bitzer's photography usually catches the setting and the action well.

Some of the story developments and relationships among the characters are not fully explained, so either some inter-titles have been lost, or else it was assumed that the audience could fill in the details from being familiar with the story.

Certainly, audiences of the time could have enjoyed the comedy portions with only a passing memory of the plot. While the comic sequences themselves would not hold up against the later Keystone comedies or other such features of the mid-1910s, for 1908 they work well enough.

This is an early Griffith effort -- when you're turning out eighty or ninety movies a year, you look everywhere for a story. A full reel, this was an immense production in Griffith's schedule and it shows. Although it is shot in simple long takes and the crowd scenes are staged well but not as amazingly so as later efforts would do, this has a full and beautiful set, in an era when set dressing was practically non-existent. The acting is broad in the comedy scenes, and more controlled in the romantic scenes. Notice the background actors gesticulating wildly in the kitchen scene (and the trademark 'AB'!) which looks looks a lot like Sennet's later Keystone style.

Although Griffith directed more than five hundred pictures, almost all of which survive, he has a vast corpus of works that are rarely seen, because so many people concentrate on his best features and perhaps a dozen of his best-known shorts. Kino is to be applauded for including this in their silent OTHELLO dvd and for hiring John Mirsalis to do the delightful, simple score.