A Woman in Grey

This fifteen-part serial, "the last of the adult serials", is a beautifully photographed and edited action melodrama, with surprisingly good acting in all roles. Produced in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., it has crisp editing, fast action, and carefully lit and composed interiors. The lush pictorialist exteriors are also handled with great care. The film seems very much influenced by D.W.Griffith's Biograph melodramas, incorporating Griffith's editing techniques, and Billy Bitzer's lovely composition of individual shots.

The producers of the film seemed to have entre to the homes of some of the wealthiest people in the community, and the production values are so high I can't believe the people responsible for the film were inexperienced locals. In a fifteen-part serial of this great complexity, one would expect some loss of focus, but the director and the photographer/title-maker seem always to be absolutely in control, and experimental lighting and camera angles occur throughout the film. The extraordinary rhythmic momentum of the film is never lost despite the films complex plot turns.

Highly recommended, even though the Grapevine Video VHS tape is a generation or two away from the best quality, and is therefore of high contrast, with considerable loss of "highs". Still, a startlingly good bit of film-making to see.

My dad collected 8MM Films when I was a kid. This was one set where we had the entire collection. This was my first taste of the silent drama of early film. The cliff hanger endings, beautiful upstate Pennsylvania scenery, and lush life styles of the rich at the turn of the century, along with the mystery makes this of course a classic. I would love to find this on DVD.

A Woman in Grey is based on a very creaky melodramatic Victorian novel of the same name by A.M. and C.N. Williamson (1898). It is sometimes described as one of the last "adult" serials but the term "adult" here is distinctly relative. Pretty is a doughty heroine but it is really the silliest nonsense imaginable, endlessly repetitive (just try and count the times you see the same wretched "secret passage"), hopelessly illogical completely without humour and with a degree of sadistic violence that is completely at odds with the supposed motives of the characters involved. A man who wants to get a girl to decipher a code for him spends most of his time throwing her off cliffs and bridges and chucking her out of windows. A man who supposedly loves her hands her over to a pair of highly implausible sadistic serial killers....

There is not much mystery to the serial except for the entirely unexplained madman who makes an appearance in one episode (the solution is readily guessable more or less from the outset) but there is a profound mystery surrounding the US serial film in general What was it in US cinematic practice (and it may very well have something to do with the influence of Griffith) that made it impossible, however many serials were churned out, for the US to make anything that came even remotely close to the charm and magic of the great French serials of Feuillade? In the posh little English town of Bath, Charles Norris Williamson died this same year - probably from shame.