Les feuilles chéant

Alice Guy's US career produced relatively few really good films but Guy was a great searcher after ideas and would from time to time, as she had done in her French career, come up with a good one. It is excellent news for instance that her "race film" of 1912, A Fool and his Money has now been rediscoveerd and restored and let us hope that one day her In the Year 2000, a more sophisticated remake of her earlier Résultats du féminisme, will also be rediscovered. She has also a very good instinct for topical subjects. Her Making of an American Ciitizen, again 1912, if rather crudely presented, was a sharp-witted repsponse to the controversy over immigration tht preocupied the US in these years. Here similarly she has taken the subject of the "white plague", tuberculosis, a disease known thoughout history but considered in the nineteenth century to be the mal de siècle, and produced a typically modern account (cinema custiomarily allied itself with modernity in this way) that rejected the romantic fatalism of nineteenth-centiry accounts. It is clever idea to privilege her Frenchness - picked up by the Moving Picture World review - by a reference to the best known example, Murger's Scènes de la vie de Bohème, and, as it were, reverse the magnets. So it would be quite inappropriate for the girl to die in this film. While "the beautiful death" of Mimi is accepted as a fatality (an aspect even more strongly emphasised by the theatrical and operatic versions), here the doctor's fatalism is shown as being out of tune with the times when advances in medical understanding of tuberculosis and the establishment of specialised sanatoria were rendering it perfectly preventable and treatable (emphasised in a series of films of the subject made by Edison at this time for the in assoication with the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis). The "miracle cure" of Dr. Earle is a bit false and glib (again a rather typical crudity in Guy's deveopment of her ideas) and attracted criticism but unlike the Edison films (which were more or less public service films), this is intended more as a fable of outr time. No more Mimis. It also sows hw well Guy understood the optimistic US conviction about the value of progress and the "optional" nature of death.

Not a bad story. It's about a young woman dying and the little sister overhears the doctor telling their mother that she will pass on when the last leaf falls. The little sister then ties the leaves to the tree to save her sister but the doctor comes back with the cure.

7.5/10

Falling Leaves (1912)

*** (out of 4)

Melodramatic but good film from Alice Guy-Blache about a young girl who overhears the family doctor saying that her older sister won't live by the time the last leaf falls off the tree. The sister is dying of tuberculosis so the young girl goes outside and starts to tie leaves back to the tree and by doing this she gets the attention of a doctor who knows a cure. FALLING LEAVES is exactly the type of film that D.W. Griffith had been making for about three years but Guy-Blache manages to bring her touch to the subject and while it's way too dramatic at times, the heart of the story is certainly brought to the screen with care. Again, if you're not used to movies from this era then it's best you don't start here but I thought for the most part the film's story was told with a certain loving care that makes it worth viewing. Guy-Blache manages to make the film move at a very good pace and there's no question that she knows how to build up some tender moments and especially the scene with the young girl trying to put leaves back on the trees. The cinematography is actually pretty good throughout with some nice shots and the new music score also benefits to the film quite well.

In 2012, 100 years after the release of this movie, a movie starring Eddie Murphy called "A Thousand Words" had roughly the same plot. In "A Thousand Words" Eddie Murphy's character believed that he would die when the last leaf fell from a tree in his backyard. The leaves only fell when Eddie spoke so he had to be more judicious with his words if he wanted to live.

In "Falling Leaves" Dr. Earl Headley (Mace Greenleaf) tells Winifred Thompson (Marian Swayne) that she will die of consumption by the time the last leaf falls (i.e. By winter's end). Consumption was the name of tuberculosis back in the days. Her little sister Trixie (Magda Foy), taking the statement quite literally, tried to tie the leaves to their branches to keep her poor big sister alive.

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Early cinema was male dominated, as it is now. There was one exception, however. Alice Guy-Blache, co-owner of Solax Studios and the first director to create a plot to a movie (1896--The Cabbage Fairy). In 1910, her and her husband, along with a third partner, formed the Solax film production studio in Ft. Lee, N. J. She was the primary director at the company.

Her work stood apart from her male directing colleagues in the industry for her sensitivity and compassion. In March 1912 "Falling Leaves," her look at tuberculosis is a tear jerker. A common theme as seen in the example in "Falling Leaves," Guy-Blache's films are replete with child heroes--after all, the doctor wouldn't have stopped at the house if the kid wasn't hanging leaves outside on the trees. Her first film for Solax was 1910's "A Child's Sacrifice." During her career Guy-Blache wrote, directed or produced over 1,000 films, from shorts to feature films. Her movie-making days ended in 1920 when she was only 41 years old. But she was still active in writing her autobiography in the late 1940's.

Her motto hanging on her wall at Ft. Lee, N. J. Solax Studio for all the actors to see was "Act Natural."