Suspense

Suspense (1913)

**** (out of 4)

This semi-remake of D.W. Griffith's 1911 film A WOMAN SCORNED takes many of the masters best known techniques and adds new one to them making the end result certainly live up to the title. A woman's maid quits without notice leaving her and her baby all alone when a tramp comes upon the house, finds a key under the door mat and decides to come in. The woman frantically calls her husband at work and he must try and get home before the tramp reaches his wife. This is one of the most legendary films from this era and it's easy to see why because not only does it take stuff from Griffith but there's also enough new stuff here that you'd have to wonder if someone like Fritz Lang or Alfred Hitchcock saw this and learned some of their trade. There are so many wonderful moments here including one where the camera is placed above the tramp looking down on him. Another great scene happens when a car accidentally runs over a man and the way it's shot is just breath taking to watch. The most important thing seen here are a couple split screens where the screen breaks down into three sections and we get to see what all the major characters are doing. This is used to great effect when the wife is on the phone with the husband and the tramp cuts the phone line. As was the case in many Griffith films, the ending pretty much has the good guy having to reach the bad guy before it's too late and directors Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber (who plays the wife) do a terrific job at slowly building up suspense and then pushing it into high gear once everything begins to mount up.

Carl Laemmle of IMP and several smaller film studios banded together in 1912 to create a movie distribution firm called The Universal Moving Picture Company. One of Universal's first movies the new corporation distributed was Rex Motion Picture Company's July 1913 "Suspense." Written, acted and directed by Lois Weber, one of the most creative forces in early cinema, "Suspense" has its narrative threads similar to D. W. Griffith's "The Lonely Villa (1909)" and "An Unseen Enemy (1912)." What makes "Suspense" unique is Weber's cinematography and editing that forged new camera techniques.

Despite claims she invented the three-split-screen--that goes to Denmark's 1910 "The White Slave Trade"-- she did come up with the first "triangular" there-split screen, showing three events occurring at once: the hobo breaking into an isolated house, the mother, played by Weber, who is talking with the husband from that house, and the husband at work. Another novel camera placement was an overhead shot of the hobo approaching the house and looking up at the mother, who is on the second floor.

Once the husband realizes his wife is in danger, he steals a car in front of his shop and races on home, only to followed by a squad of police. Weber uses the camera, situated in the husband's vehicle, to frame him driving as well as to capture the approach of the police in the sideview mirror. Absolute genius.

Weber wasn't the first female director in cinema. That distinction goes to Alice Guy-Blanche. But she did amass quite a reputation as a filmmaker. She explains: "I grew up in a business when everybody was so busy learning their particular branch of the new industry, that no one had time to notice whether or not a woman was gaining a foothold."

"Suspense" would put Weber in the same aesthetic level with Griffith, according to some. Witnessing the innovativeness she exhibits in this 1913 film, it's hard to dispute the claim.

Sometimes the simple approach works best, and in 1913 filmmakers were still working out the basics of what this thing called film-MAKING was and is all about. Suspense is the kind of movie that was at or around the same time of Griffith, who pioneered the use of inter-cutting between different stories. With this film, co-directed by Lois Webber (called in the film places I just looked up the first American woman director), it's a story in a quick ten minutes: after the maid decides to walk out on a mother and her infant (the husband is off at work), a "Pursuer" (aka a vagrant, a bum, a good old criminal) sees the maid leave and prowls around the house until he sees it's time to break in.

The title comes from what Hitchcock often described what suspense in cinema is all about: following what happens when we can see one story unfolding and another is taking place concurrently, but the bomb doesn't go off right away - it needs to take time, and the suspense all comes from when it will go off. In this case the bomb is the Pursuer, acting more like a wild animal than a rational human being (Douglas Gerrard as the Pursuer fills the role to the point of being terrifying most of all in the few close-ups that happen, which is just enough), and it's only a matter of time before it goes off.

There's so much creative direction here from Weber and Phillips Smalley, and it's impressive still today as a mini-masterpiece of filmmaking, where the structure is air-tight and yet there's enough time for set-up (showing this mother, her child, and the husband off in his office, and then the prowler as he goes up the property and through the windows), and then what happens when things escalate. All the shots matter, and yet there's a lot of experimenting with form: there's a moment where you see three subjects - the wife, the husband, the pursuer - all in the frame, and separated by triangles showing what's going on (this shows us why the phone line gets cut at a crucial moment). And even something as simple as a shot through a "keyhole" seems revolutionary for the time.

For younger people who have been raised on online video it may not seem like much. It even may be just slightly contrived around the fact that the husband's car is stolen literally under his nose. But that adds to the 'what will happen next', and the filmmakers keep the pace so quick and tight that there's barely a moment to think about the particulars. When you see an overhead shot of the Pursuer coming up to the door, it's quite terrifying just by the framing and how the actor fills it all like some hobo-demon. The fact that it comes from a woman director doesn't matter in a way - clearly Weber could direct with the best of any of her counterparts, including Griffith (and this is supposedly a remake of one of his own films, with some added visual tricks). It feels like such a simple story and yet so universal that it should probably be shown to any film student first day of class to say 'THIS is how it's done.'

This silent drama short was directed by Phillips Smalley and his wife Lois Weber who also appears. She plays a woman with a baby left alone in the house after her maid leaves a notice of her quitting. A wandering tramp finds the key under the outside mat left over by the maid. When the mother realizes her situation she calls her husband at work who rushes in a stolen car with police and car's owner in pursuit...While melodramatic, this was quite an exciting thriller for the early days of cinema that still provides some moments today. And how fascinating to see one of the earliest uses of the split-screen in seeing various actions happening simultaneously which in this instance is in three ways in what was called the triptych. So on that note, I highly recommend Suspense.

Lois Weber was one of the most interesting filmmakers of the 1910s and early 1920s, and despite being one of the most successful directors during that period, she is now largely neglected in the history books and by many silent film enthusiasts. This film of hers "Suspense" is only one of seven I've seen available on home video (as of yet). In 1996, Anthony Slide ("Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History") said that only a dozen or so of her films survive, which according to IMDb is out of the 132 pictures she directed. Regardless, it's a shame that such features of hers as "Discontent", "The Dumb Girl of Portici", "Shoes" (all 1916), "To Please One Woman" (1920) and "What's Worth While?" (1921) which exist aren't more accessible. It's no consolation that the films of many of Weber's contemporaries suffer worse fates.

Weber specialized in producing social-problem dramas, or message films. "Suspense", however, is the only film of hers that I've seen which did not sermonize. It's a straightforward entry in the genre of last-minute rescue, action-suspense pictures made especially popular in the Nickelodeon age by D.W. Griffith, with such one-reelers as "The Lonely Villa" (1909), "The Lonedale Operator" (1911), "An Unseen Enemy" and "The Girl and Her Trust" (both 1912). Kevin Brownlow said that "Suspense" more specifically took from and one-upped the plot of Griffith's "A Woman Scorned" (1911). Indeed, the editing of "Suspense" is as fluid as in any of Griffith's short films, and Weber uses some novel camera perspectives that Griffith and his cinematographer Billy Bitzer never had.

"Suspense" isn't quite as fast paced as Griffith's last-minute rescue films, or probably as hectic as the Keystone parodies of them, such as "The Bangville Police" and "Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life" (both 1913). I roughly counted 46 shots in "Suspense", which would be approximately just fewer than five shots per minute or 15.5 feet of film per shot. On the other hand, Griffith's "An Unseen Enemy", with about 119 shots, has approximately seven shots per minute or an average shot length of 8.4 feet. Even Griffith's earlier picture "The Lonely Villa" I counted to have about six shots per minute. Some of my numbers might be a bit off, but they give you a general idea: Weber's film is slower than Griffith's films. This isn't a weakness, though; the somewhat not as fast pace allows for a different tension over whether the husband speeding in a stolen car and chased by police will rescue his wife before the slowly approaching tramp reaches her, and it allows more time to capture the advanced viewpoints of Weber's camera. Moreover, the crosscutting, matching and rapid succession of shots is excellent.

"Suspense" is a surprisingly advanced film for 1913, especially in regards to the camera angles. The oft-mentioned triptych shots had already been used in the Danish "The White Slave Trade" films (Den hvide slavehandel) (1910)--also for telephone conversations. The shot of the tramp where he approaches and passes nearby the camera for a close-up while climbing the staircase was borrowed from Griffith's "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" (1912). More original perspectives in "Suspense" include the overhead angles and mirror reflections. Overhead angles are employed when the tramp enters the home, such as one point-of-view shot from the perspective of the housewife (played by the director) looking down from a window, which menacingly catches the tramp looking back at her and thus the camera. A mirror shot in the bedroom shows the wife's reflection in frame before she enters it. Rearview mirror reflections show the police approaching the stolen car of the husband as he races home. Clearly, Weber thoughtfully considered and executed the perspectives of her camera views, as relating to the characters or the audience, and the connectivity and rhythm of the shots placed together. Quite exceptional for a generic one-reel plot.