Le coeur sur la main

Tol'able David is a superb piece of Americana, a great film that reproduces a long-lost time in America as well as long-last attitudes.

Richard Barthelmess is superb as David, the younger son in a sharecropping family in Virginia around 1900. The town of Greenstream is idyllic in its beautiful country setting and harmony reigns. David is interested in Esther Hatburn (Gladys Hulette) who lives on the neighboring farm. And they perform the mating ritual of innocents without even knowing it.

Into this peaceful valley comes a trio of thugs on the lam. They decide to "visit" their cousins and lay low a while til the heat is off. As soon as they move in on the Hatburns they take over the lives of everyone they come into contact with. The lead thug (Ernest Torrence) is pure evil. His idea of fun is to squash a cat with a big rock.

David's brother is the local mailman and one day as he is passing the Hatburn place the dog (great little dog) goes after a cat in the front yard. Torrence grabs a board and clunks the dog dead. When the brother confronts him, Torrence throws a boulder at his head, leaving the brother a hopeless vegetable.

The family reacts in anger but as David and his father argue over revenge, the old man keels over from a heart attack. David races out to kill all the Hatburns but the mother runs after him in a great scene where she (Marion Abbott) is dragged through a mud puddle while holding his legs.

The climax of the film is exciting as David takes on the Goliath.

Tol'able David is pure melodrama, and the 1930 talkie version was a flop. But in 1921 with this cast and Henry King directing, it's a simple tale about simple people and is superbly done. The film is filled with great little scenes and bits of business: The drunk dancing alone outside the town hall where a dance is taking place. Barthelmess dancing alone in the moonlight because he is too shy to ask Esther. David and his dog fishing.... Just terrific little bits of innocence and whimsy from a long-gone time.

Richard Barthelmess is the heart of this film and his performance ranks as one of the best I've ever seen in a silent film. At 26 he has no trouble convincing that he is 16-ish. He was a very natural actor who always knows where to find the humor in simple situations. Gladys Hulette is also good as is Marion Abbott as the mother. Ernest Torrence is a memorable villain...

Tol'able David was another smash hit in Barthelmess' early silent carer, joining Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, and The Patent Leather Kid. He was also hugely popular in early talkies, winning two Oscar nominations.

This lovely and poignant silent film is almost lyrical and poetic in its construction. The cinematography is wonderful, since it was actually filmed on location in a little town in Virginia, and the cast is perfect, with the two leads, Richard Barthelmess and Gladys Hulette, simply breathtakingly beautiful to watch. One can easily see why Lillian Gish stated that Richard had the most beautiful male face in the movies.

The plot revolves around the coming of age of the lead male character, and how evil circumstances creep up on a simple country family, which force the youngest son (Barthelmess) to grow up quickly.

The only negative in my experience of watching the film came from the Robert Israel soundtrack. On the DVD version I watched much of the soundtrack sounds like it was recorded at 100% volume and a grating, blasting hum can be heard through many scenes, in the beginning especially. I don't know if the video version has the same fault. Whenever the piano played solo this wasn't a problem. I had to keep the volume really low so I wouldn't notice the blasts.

A lovely film otherwise. I rated it 9 out of 10.

In Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard," a forgotten silent-film actress, Norma Desmond, explained the appeal of silent stars: "we had faces then!" In the musical version of that classic, the lyric "…with one look I'm the girl (or boy) next door…" expanded on the visual powers of silent film actors. Each of those lines could have been written for handsome, charismatic Richard Barthelmess, the star of Henry King's "Tol'able David." Although his too-short pants vainly attempt to obscure the actor's maturity, Barthelmess manages to convince the audience that he is a boy at the edge of manhood. Through his dark eyes, body language, and facial expressions, Barthelmess literally becomes "the boy next door" without uttering a syllable.

"Tol'able David" may be too sentimental and occasionally too hokey for modern audiences, but, if viewed in the context of the post World War I period, the bucolic Americana story is engaging. Like the United States in the years leading up to the Great War, belligerent outsiders disrupt David's idyllic family life, and the young boy becomes a man in the fight to restore his world. The tale is simple, but universal. Enhanced by location filming in Virginia, "Tol'able David" provides a glimpse of country life in the early 20th century. However, produced in 1921, the film preceded the golden period of silent movies that was reached in the late 1920's, and the technical perfection and acting subtleties of that later period are lacking here. Although Ernest Torrence makes a formidable, frightening villain, neither his appearance nor his performance are subtle, and he owes more to the oft-parodied "grand style" of the early silents than to the nuanced acting that evolved later in the decade. However, Barthelmess and his leading lady, Gladys Hulette, perform admirably, even in a broad comic scene with a barrel that seems to have been taken from another movie.

Henry King keeps the story moving, although his camera did not achieve the fluidity that distinguishes later silents. A transitional film made between the innovative days of Griffith and the heights of Murnau, Vidor, and von Stroheim, "Tol'able David" remains entertaining and affectionate towards a vanished way of life and a lost style of film-making. If the viewer can transport him or herself back in time, a dazzling star and a film with genuine warmth and sentiment will immerse the audience in the days when "sentimental" was not a four-letter word.

"Tol'able David" (Inspiration/First National, 1921), directed by Henry King, stars Richard Barthelmess in one of his most celebrated roles of his career. Following his previous successes opposite Lillian Gish in D.W. Griffith directorial masterworks of BROKEN BLOSSOMS (1919) and WAY DOWN EAST (1920), this is Barthelmess, like David, on his own and proving himself more than what he can be, in this case, a youth who becomes a man. Taken from the short story by Joseph Hergesheimer, with screen adaptation by Henry King and Edmund Goulding, TOL'ABLE David was so successful that it elevated Barthelmess to the rank of accomplished leading man. Even with these fine credentials, TOL'ABLE David, has become close to becoming a forgotten item of truly great movies from the silent film era.

Following the inter-title opener: "Behind three great ranges of mountains lay the pastorial valley of Greenstream. There the Kinemons had long made their home as tenants on the rich farm of John Galt," comes individual title introductions of its basic characters before the plot gets underway: "Hunter Kinemon (Edmund Gurney) kept the Biblical tradition of a family united by every tie of love and home"; Mrs. Kinemon (Marion Abbott), mother of a home her tenderness helped create"; David (Richard Barthelmess), the youngest son who was called his mother's boy;" Allan (Warner Richmond), the elder son, reckoned the strongest man in Greensteam County"; Rose (Patterson Dial), Allan's wife, loved as a daughter of the house; Esther (Gladys Hulette), the granddaughter of neighbor Hatburn (Forrest Robinson); and John Galt (Lawrence Eddinger), storekeeper, village postmaster, and richest man in the Valley." David is the central character, one many claim to be "tol'able." Aside from "David and Goliath" being his favorite Bible story reading, he wants nothing more than to become like his older brother, Allan, right down to assuming his job of driving the daily hack twenty miles to West Virginia. The family and neighbors live peaceful lives in their own little rural community. All that changes with the arrival of three outlaws ("trouble like the shadow of a black cloud hurried across the countryside toward Greenstream") fleeing from the law of another state: Iska Hatburn (Walter E. Lewis), "chief fugitive of a fugitive family"; Luke (Ernest Torrance), "his elder son whose peculiar humor it was to destroy whatever he encountered"; and Little "Buzzard" Hatburn (Ralph Yearsley), the "baby of the clan." After seeking refuge in the cottage of their Hatburn cousin, the trio begin to make life intolerable for the community, especially for Tol'able David and his faithful dog, Rocket.

While other movies have been inspired by the success of TOL'ABLE David, with the Harold Lloyd feature, THE KID BROTHER (Paramount, 1927) told through comedy with serious overtones, the basic premise itself of TOL'ABLE David was remade as a talkie by Columbia (1930) with Richard Cromwell, Joan Peers, Henry B. Walthall and Noah Beery under John G. Blystone's direction. Virtually forgotten, the 1921 original, under Henry King's leisurely paced direction, ranks one of the finer retelling of good versus evil stories captured on film. It's a fine example of a movie tailor-made for Barthelmess that also gives a well-produced account of rural West Virginia mountain farmers from another time frame. Though Barthelmess in true essence was older than his David of under twenty, he's youthful appearance is enough to make his David believable. The brutal beating of David's brother that leaves him paralyzed (scene eliminated in some prints) and wife with newborn baby in total shock, is quite grim and startling, but nothing compared to what's to follow with David and those responsible.

The film itself must have made an great impression on producer/director William Castle to insert TOL'ABLE David as part of a movie within a movie sequence for his classic "scream" feast of THE TINGLER (Columbia, 1959) starring Vincent Price. Once seen, it's hard to forget such an impressive scene set in a neighborhood silent movie house consisting mostly of teenagers mesmerized through the piano scoring action of young Barthelmess up there on the screen before something occurs to distract them. Unlike many well notable silent film classics, television showings of TOL'ABLE David have been extremely limited. It's only known broadcast (and rebroadcast) was on New York City's own public television station, WNET, Channel 13, for its "Million and One Nights of Film" (1965-66). As with the scene lifted from THE TINGLER, TOL'ABLE David did become part of the revival theater generation, including a presentation from New York City's Museum of Modern Art around 1980 to an attentive audience. Thanks to home video and later DVD format, TOL'ABLE David has become readily available through various distributors. The best and more accurate form (99 minutes as opposed to slightly shorter prints) was from Grapevine Video equipped with satisfactory orchestral score. Other prints include those scored by Robert Israel, or a bargain basement edition with no scoring at all.

In conclusion, TOL'ABLE David may look primitive to the modern eye, but remains quite tol'able for it's melodramatic theme and believable performances by entire cast. (****)

Richard Barthelmess plays the title role in Henry King's tale of dark clouds in late-19th Century small-town Americana. He's the gawky youngest of two sons, wearing ill-fitting clothes and impatient to be looked upon as a man, who suddenly finds himself burdened with huge responsibilities when his older brother is crippled by three heavies and his father dies of a heart attack. Nothing more than a modern retelling of David and Goliath, but it's told with pace and vigour - and with lumbering Ernest Torrence stealing every scene he's in as the brutish thug with a leery eye on David's sweetheart.