Children of Eve

John Collins was a brilliant director whose rapidly rising career was cut short when he died within three days at the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York of "Spanish influenza" on 23 October 1918, while his wife Viola Dana (who stars here) was on a train to California expecting her husband to follow her. Edison had just begun releasing full-length features in earnest in 1915, and this is an especially elaborate production. Dana is very appealing and credible in her role, and the horrific fire finale (which was staged by filling an abandoned factory with waste nitrate film and setting it ablaze) still impresses - it almost reached cameraman Ned van Buren's platform and the fumes nearly overwhelmed him. Collins's narrative technique isn't as smooth as it would become, but the story is compellingly told with no punches pulled and is superior to many extant 1915 features. This is not an "ordinary moralistic melodrama", but a film with substantial life to it, especially when screened with a live audience.

CHILDREN OF EVE is a rather routine message picture of the variety that Hollywood still likes to burden us with around awards season. Inspired by the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, CHILDREN OF EVE is part-social commentary and part-melodrama, and the two modes don't always mix amiably. The plot feels padded out, hitting the familiar tropes aficionados of 1910s cinema will recognize (long-lost children, miserly men melted by love, "leave him if you really love him you low-born tart!", etc.) and the morals are presented in preachy title cards. Viola Dana is charming in her role, though-- in fact, the acting is solid altogether. However, this is definitely of historical interest only.

Robert Conness is a young seminarian who falls in love with a good-time girl. To save his future, she walks out on him; a friend dies, leaving him a ward to raise. Fast forward a while, and Conness is now an industrialist with child laborers in unsafe condition. His ward is Robert Walker, a socially progressive minister, who attempts to save good-time girl Viola Dana.

It's a set-up for melodrama, and melodramatic is it indeed. However, this is one of the movies that John H. Collins directed his wife, Miss Dana in, and while the melodrama is there, and the camera set-ups are simple, the editing is amazing, and the way the characters behave and evolve is absolutely believable. Miss Dana may reform, but she reforms over the course of several incidents, and she still feels the old urges to go out dancing. Walker is well meaning, but he is also a bit of a prig who is not clear on his own motivations. With these two in the foreground, Conness' evolution from budding theologian to seemingly heartless capitalist seems possible, as well as the big finale, a deadly fire at his factory.

That's based on the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, and it's here that Collins shows his special magic, by the editing. The camera set-ups are simple, but he is willing to edit them for speed and excitement in a way that none of his contemporaries did. Griffith's looks slow; the Russian Academicians look like burlesques. Collins cuts and cuts, and cuts again, and shows you an image of the dead children laid out on the ground for just long enough to register.... and then cuts away.

It's no wonder that the two of them, working in tandem, easily survived the collapse of the Edison Film Company. Alas, the Spanish Influenza epidemic killed Collins in 1918. Miss Dana's screen career extended through the end of the silent era, and she passed on in 1987 at the age of 90.