A Flash of Light

A FLASH OF LIGHT is a standard one-reel melodrama from DW Griffith. The storyline involves a chemist who goes blind in a lab accident. His haughty, disdainful wife, already out of love with him, takes to the stage while her sister-in-law nurses the chemist as he tries to have his sight restored. The sister-in-law wears the wife's wedding band in order to make the chemist believe his beloved wife has not abandoned him, but with the restoration of his sight imminent and the wife's newfound success as a stage actress inspiring her to get a divorce, the charade can only go on for so long.

Melodramatic in the extreme, but with good acting and inspired filmmaking, Griffith could usually make such a farfetched plot work. Not here: the actors are not up to the standards of Griffith favorites like Lillian Gish and Blanche Sweet, either coming off as overdone stereotypes or barely registering as personalities whatsoever. The filmmaking is competent but nothing to write home about either. Overall, the short is solid for what it is, but you could do yourself much better by watching THE NEW YORK HAT or A CORNER IN WHEAT.

Somehow, a studious chemist ends up married to a party-loving society dame, which would be enough to doom their marriage even if he wasn't blinded and deafened by one of his experiments. Fortunately, his sister-in-law is around to comfort him. Griffith's customary melodramatic twists and turns are rendered even more far-fetched by the broad, polarised characterisations of its leads.

The leads in this Griffith melodrama about a chemist who blinds himself in an accident, causing his society wife to abandon him for a theatrical career, leaving her elder sister to take care of him, is led by members of Griffith's company who never achieved much for him. They did all right elsewhere. The large supporting cast is filled with his usual skilled crew -- if you look, you can spot Mack Sennett in a small role at one of the parties.

The wife is the villain of the piece -- terrible woman going onto the stage! -Griffith raises some interesting and telling questions about then-current attitudes towards divorce. Given the difference in the couple's characters when they marry, should she stay with him after his blindness? Yes, the acting is noticeably below the standards of Griffith's usual leads. Yet the story is worth telling and the question is worth asking. Have we answered it any better a century later?

This wild melodrama has every emotional and narrative stop pulled. It engages with the issue of the ideal wife in an era of successive divorces. The flash of light is basically in the climatic scene when the doctor pulls down the curtain which returns blindness to our protagonist (Charles West).

Flash of Light, A (1910)

*** (out of 4)

Pleasant melodrama from Griffith about a young chemist (Charles West) who has an experiment blow up in his face, which leaves him blind. His new wife doesn't like being burdened with him so she runs off and leaves her younger sister to take care of him. This isn't the best Griffith short out there but he manages to tell the story in a way that will keep you entertained even if that story is rather silly and far fetched. The biggest problem are all the plot twists that has the younger sister taking over the role of the older one and how the husband, even blind, would fall for this doesn't really work nor does the ending and the twist that happens here. Griffith, as usual, knows how to pour the drama on thick and for the most part he does a nice job keeping everything under control and his points about marriage are easy to spot and he doesn't spend too much time preaching here. What does hurt the movie are the leads who aren't the best people Griffith had available and there's even more proof as Mack Sennett, Mary Pickford, Dorothy West and Blanche Sweet also have minor roles here.