The Bright Shawl

The film was shown in November at the annual Lillian and Dorothy Gish Film Festival in Massillon, Ohio (the Gish home town). It was a newly restored print and featured an extraordinarily energetic and adventurous piano accompaniment for its entire eighty minutes. As a silent picture, it had very good performances. Robinson, then only thirty years old, was given a mustache and goatee and aged to look sixty. Was Mary Astor ever seventeen?? She was in this film and looked beautiful as Robinson's daughter. Barthelmess and Dorothy Gish were fine romantic leads, and William Powell villainous as a Cuban officer. The plot is rather involved, with spies, secret messages, and gun running amongst the Cuban patriots and Spanish army. Finally seeing this film made me marvel at the craftsmanship and detail given to such works in the cinema -- eighty years ago! (The actual film debut of Robinson was seven years earlier in 1916 as an extra in "Arms and the Woman," as revealed via an unmistakable still in the book, "The War, the West, and the Wilderness," by Kevin Brownlow.)