Winning Back His Love

The plot of WINNING BACK HIS LOVE reminds me of the famous 1930 Norma Shearer vehicle THE DIVORCEE: a woman turns the tables on her husband when she catches him cheating. Of course being from 1910, this earlier film does not actually have the wife cheating for real-- it's all a pretense to teach the husband a lesson. However, the plot is not the most interesting element of this movie. The camerawork, while still mostly sticking to the tableaux style common to 1900s one-reelers, has some wonderful digressions from the norm. The introduction of the husband's showgirl mistress is shot from a low angle, while the climactic scene with the wife staging an adulterous rendezvous at a restaurant is shot in tight medium compositions as the husband and wife, separated by a curtain between their tables, hear one another. While this is no masterpiece, even by the standards of Griffith's one-reelers, it is a marvelous step in the evolution of his technique.

A wife decides to fight fire with fire when she discovers that her husband "Georgie-Porgie" is cheating on her with a floozy known as Snookums. A Griffith movie sending out something of a dubious message in an uninspiring fashion. The director had already managed much better by this stage of his career.

Wilfred Lucas leaves his wife, Stephanie Longfellow, every night to rendezvous with actress Vivian Prescott. When Stephanie discovers a note from the scarlet woman, family friend Edwin August tells her the best way to get him back is to make him jealous.

It had been only thirty months since D.W. Griffith had debuted as a movie director, and in that time he had turned almost every aspect of movie-making upside down. In this average work from him, we can see almost every aspect of how he had improved and regularized the form into a model that in a few more years, everyone would be using.

There is the editing, as shown in the restaurant scene: after an initial setting shot, each table is shown in a tight two-shot that focuses on the reactions of the characters to what is going on at the next table; at the theater exit, we see a dozen people in a crowd scene, each doing things that make sense and add to the composition; the costumes are realistic; the sets are realistic; the long explanatory titles are gone and the acting is expressive and not stagily huge.

It's not a great movie, which only goes to show how much Griffith had forced the growth of film in that short time.