One Exciting Night

Like so many D.W. Griffith films, "One Exciting Nigh": has an informative subtitle, so "A Comedy Drama of Mystery" opens in "somber Africa", where the origin of Carol Dempster (as Agnes Harrington) is shown. Moreover, title cards advise viewers to watch the film's beginning scenes with intensity. It's good advice. Indeed, the well-designed plot unfolds in layers; and, the film's characterizations are a great strength. The drama centers on Ms. Dempster, and two suitors - Henry Hull (as John Fairfax) and Morgan Wallace (as J. Wilson Rockmaine). Dempster has accepted a proposal of marriage to Mr. Wallace; not for love, but to save her foster mother from scandal; Wallace witnessed Mrs. Harrington (Margaret Dale) steal a watch, as the Harrington family faced financial ruin. Then, Dempster catches Mr. Hull's eye; and, the two fall desperately in love…

Intricate, imaginative storytelling, and direction from Griffith, who weaves his characters into the standard mysterious "Old Dark House" formula, involving, of course, money and murder. The film's strong performances are tainted by some disturbingly offensive racial stereotypes. For example, the depiction of ambition among black-faced Porter Strong (as Romeo Washington), introduced in his listless "colored" community, is bound to leave you stone-faced. At least Mr. Strong's rolling bug-eyed "darkie" will provide a classic example of a racist character "type", if you're interested. However, such depictions taint an otherwise excellent, near indispensable, Griffith film.

Dempster was not always well-served by mentor Griffith; but, herein, she excels. Her awkwardly beautiful, and naively vulnerable character offered Dempster one of her best roles; and, it is delivered at a time when she had the silent acting prowess necessary for a leading role. Hull is outstanding as her leading man; a thoroughly believable young romantic, he makes their relationship work. Watch for the great courtship scene with Hull, Dempster, and her parasol; it defines their young, innocent love. Wallace is fine as the man who comes between them. Smaller roles, like Charles Mack's turn as an unfortunate houseguest, are likewise expertly played. "One Exciting Night" is perhaps too long; but, Griffith keeps thing moving, and little seems superfluous. The close-to-the-edge and ending scenes could blow you away.

******** One Exciting Night (10/2/22) D.W. Griffith ~ Carol Dempster, Henry Hull, Morgan Wallace, Charles Emmett Mack

THE BAT by Avery Hopwood opened in August of 1920 and was a smash that ran for more than two years and 867 performances. After wrapping on ORPHANS OF THE STORM, Griffith worked on his next project, which was -- ahem -- inspired by the Broadway hit. It would be a modern dress affair, with contemporary characters and thrills, and humor and all that good stuff. There would be a missing heir, a treasure of half a million dollars to be found, a fiendish, masked murderer running around, reaching from hidden panels in the wall to strangle random house guests, a romance of young people and comic lower-class servants.

There are some issues.

First, there's the technical issue of its length. The IMDb lists it as running 128 minutes. The copy I saw on YouTube, derived from the Killiam Collection, timed at 146 minutes, and crawled. I adjusted the speed so it ran a touch over a hundred minutes. Now it was brisk. Unfortunately, for the first three-quarters of its length, it's a snooze.

The opening certainly took its time, with a long prologue that ran backwards sixteen years from the main events, setting up the ending with little surprise. The prologue was about 45 minutes on the Killiam print, 30 in real life. I would have cut it entirely, and dropped a little of the background into the rest of the picture, for a nice 70-minute feature.

Griffith might have wished to make a small picture, but he could not. He was the Great Director, and his public demanded major pieces from him. He could no more direct a five-reel movie than Fannie Hurst could turn out limericks. Like Cecil Demille in his last decade, every movie had to be an epic with a finale that would top his last epic.

Next there's the matter of casting. I won't even go into the actors in blackface playing comic servants. It might have still played in 1922, barely, but looking at them now, it's just insulting. Worse, Griffith had lost the Gish sisters and Richard Barthelmess, and he was stuck with Carol Dempster. Miss Dempster is fine in the closing sequence of the movie, when she nerves herself up to go out after the villain. She was fine at playing the modern -- for 1922 -- woman. Unfortunately, earlier in the movie, she plays the stereotypical Griffith heroine: sixteen years old, virginal, browbeaten by her mother and hiding in her blankets. She's worse than poor. She's ridiculous in the role.

So we have a slow, sodden beginning played by the wrong actors, leading up to the epic Griffith finish, and that ending is fine. People run around. A hurricane starts up. It rips trees and houses apart, it knocks down the players, it threatens them with death, and it's truly exciting.

Unfortunately, by then, I didn't care. The long prologue told me how it would come out. The dictates of drama told me that boy would get girl. I had the leisure to figure out who the villain was, and why that threatening man who invades the girls' bedroom was no threat. There was no dramatic tension, just the socko finish, like the Little Colonel leading the charge, or Lilian Gish leaping from ice floe to ice floe. Too bad. Too little, too late.

One Exciting Night (1922)

** (out of 4)

D.W. Griffith's only venture into the "old dark house/mystery" genre is a rather strange film that also mixes in comedy but in the end it just doesn't work. A baby is born in Africa and sixteen years later she is about to gain control of an estate, although she doesn't know this. Soon someone shows up on the scene committing murders but who is it? On the whole this is a very average film due in large part to its incredible running time, which nearly reaches two and a half hours. The final hour of the film contains about twelve different endings where you think the film is over but it keeps going on and on and on. Henry Hull delivers a good performance but the rest of the cast is rather lame. The biggest highlight is a hurricane at the end of the film, which contains some of the greatest special effects of its time. There's a moment when a servant takes shelter by a house only to have the house tear apart and fly away while the actor is standing there.

The only thing exciting in "One Exciting Night," D.W. Griffith's slow go at the old dark house formula, is the climactic hurricane sequence. Everything else tends to be extremely dull, drawn out, convoluted, overly explained, exposition-heavy, repetitive and racist. Not only unexciting--it's excruciating, really--it doesn't take place in one night, either, although it should have... it so much should have. In fact, the narrative takes place within nearly two decades. In the complete version of the film, at least, it's over an hour in before it gets to the night in question (I viewed the Critic's Choice VHS from the '90s, which runs 124 minutes). Everything before that should've been cut; it's just unnecessary subplot and filler. I know this was early in the subgenre of old dark house horror comedies, but still, Griffith demonstrated no appreciation that these things are supposed to be light and fast paced. Instead, he indulged in his worst tendencies of excess as a filmmaker: plentiful and verbose title cards, leading the spectator ad nauseam through every plot point, including frequently replaying scenes, too many characters and melodramatic subplots, bland and simplistic appeals to grande themes (greed, love, life, death), African-American stereotypes portrayed by white actors in blackface and minstrel show antics.

There are five title cards before we even see an image with scenery or characters in the film. Furthermore, Griffith contradicts himself in them by calling this a "little effort" before going on, "In this absolute departure from all OLD METHODS of story telling we leave much to YOUR IMAGINATION besides the detection of who is the villain. Therefore it is well to watch closely the early scenes as they become important later on." None of that is true. This was a bloated effort, it is very much in the vein of old methods of storytelling, with Griffith's usual Victorian melodrama and the old dark house stuff being ripped off the popular stage play of the time, "The Bat" (later adapted to screen in 1926 and 1930 by Roland West), and Griffith's storytelling leaves very little to the imagination, including the obviousness of the villain's identity long before it's exposed, and Griffith repeats things over and over again, so there's no need to pay particularly close attention. The film is so bad, though, the best way to enjoy it may be to barely pay attention and use your imagination instead. Just make sure to tune back in near the end for the hurricane, where the repetition in the editorial form of temporal replays are acceptable--I'm OK with seeing Henry Hull hit by the same flying tree branch twice.

The story begins in Africa where a mother dies, leaving a fortune to her infant child, but the next-in-line heir schemes to have a woman pretend the child is hers, thus concealing the baby's identity so that he may inherit the fortune. Upon his death, however, he admits the fraud. And, for the next two or so hours, this plot will be ignored. Jump to the states years later, and Carol Dempster agrees to a blackmail scheme to marry an older man so that he doesn't rat out her thieving and abusive mother. Now, forget that plot, too, because it doesn't really matter, and it's only mentioned a couple times later, including with one of the many flashbacks, lest we forget. Dempster meets a younger man, the hero played by Hull, who had also played the similar part in the stage version of another old dark house horror comedy, "The Cat and the Canary" (adapted to the screen in 1927 and a few times after that). Hull has a spooky house, so, of course, he sets about throwing a party and hiring some African-American servants. That a bootlegger is murdered in the house and that he's a prime suspect doesn't deter him in these activities in the least. Only after another man is murdered, and he's once again a prime suspect, and after he discovers that the bootlegger hid half a million dollars in his home does the situation become tense. This is also when the old dark house formula finally kicks in.

And most of the subgenre's tropes are here in spades--at least the ones that also appear in "The Bat": secret passages and mysterious panels, hidden cash, nighttime shadows, hands reaching out from hidden corners to grab people, flickering lights, a storm, people running around scaring themselves silly, comic relief, a whodunit murder mystery and a masked villain. Unfortunately, most of the comic relief is debasing slapstick of an African-American stereotype named Romeo played by a white actor in blackface, portrayed as a dishonest (Griffith's title cards inform us that he found the war medal he passes off as having earned), running around scared and wide-eyed at the sight of almost everything. Meanwhile, another blackfaced character is referred to by two different racial slurs and as "primitive," and that's not even counting Griffith's title card informing us that, "It is well known that Black Sam is the dark terror of the bootleggers' band." In the end, all of the blackfaced caricatures, as well as the extras that include some actual African Americans, are portrayed as either servile, stupid or lazy.

Another title card, "Pictures -- white man's magic to be treasured," seems to sum up well what Griffith thought of his own filmmaking prowess. Yet, while he was one of the more innovative of pioneering directors at Biograph and into his features of the 1910s; in the 1920s, with one or two exceptions, his work is among the most detestable, as the quality of his pictures suffered from the financial changes in Hollywood and as he failed to keep abreast of advances in content, tone or technical matters, with his dated racial and Victorian ideals becoming ever more burdensome within inferior goods.

D. W. Griffith made his only venture into the mystery field here, primarily due to the success of the "old dark house" genre, stimulated by Mary Roberts Rinehart's novel, THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE, which was very successfully filmed and staged (with Avery Hopwood) as THE BAT. The script written by Griffith (as Irene Sinclair) is extremely complicated, and engages the cast in a jointed series of plots revolving for the most part about attempts at discovery of a missing half-million dollars of bootlegger takings, secreted somewhere within a mansion that is replete with secret passages and hidden panels. Griffith gave his mistress, Carol Dempster, the female lead romantically linked with Henry Hull, whose kinetic limberness is difficult to match, although she acts well, and vigorously too, as much of the scenario provides comedic lunacy; Morgan Wallace is particularly engaging as a Dempster suitor. The film is well-edited, and the special effects by Edward Scholl are creative, to say the least; however, Griffith's penchant for adding numerous story lines to his cinematic landscape causes more than a bit of weariness in the viewer as the work pitches constantly among romantic, mystery and comedy themes; as to be expected, the small moments of detail when the talented players are given rein are generally the most satisfying.