The Avenging Conscience: or 'Thou Shalt Not Kill'

Henry B. Walthall stars as the Nephew, who has been raised and doted upon by his Uncle (Spottiswoode Aiken). But when the Nephew meets the Sweetheart (Blanche Sweet), the Uncle objects to their plans to get married. This leads the Nephew down a path toward murder and madness. Also featuring George Siegmann as the Italian.

This is a pretty strange movie, with a lot of unexpected developments and odd imagery, including floating Jesus, Moses and the Ten Commanments, shirtless kids crawling out of a tree, a devil hanging out with animal-headed friends, Pan playing his flute, and Mae Marsh deciding that the best way to get a man is to wear a waitress outfit. Walthall is very entertaining, especially in the unhinged final quarter of the movie. The very last section is a cheat, but not totally unexpected. This didn't hold the cultural impact of The Birth of a Nation or display the kind of artistic ambition of Intolerance, but in many ways I found this more entertaining. Recommended.

This D. W. Griffith film is an early effort by the director and shows his developing skill on the lead up to epics such as Intolerance. It's about a young man who falls in love with a girl. This love drives a wedge between him and his uncle who has set a path for him that does not allow for such frivolous distractions. This situation drives the man to murder his overbearing uncle. This event leads to madness and psychological breakdown.

The story is based on Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' with elements of 'Annabel Lee' and 'The Black Cat' thrown in for good measure. It's a rare horror outing for Griffiths. Indeed it is one of the very first fully form horror films at all. As such it is of interest. It contains several eerie and macabre details like the ghostly spectre of the uncle back from the dead and thoughts of murder represented by a spider on web and ants attacking a larger insect en mass. It's very primitive stuff overall but that is to be expected considering its age. Worth a look if you are interested in the genesis of the horror film though.

The Avenging Conscience / Thou Shalt Not Kill (1914) : Brief Review -

Perhaps, Griffith's only horror element but still a pathbreaking material for a crime genre which was later renamed as murder mystery. An instant but profound Classic! So, DW Griffith has made some horror material and I wasn't aware of it but Today i have learnt it. I can argue for a whole day on a topic 'What is Horror Genre'? Mostly, masses know only one definition and that's ghost or spiritual evil stuff. It ain't like that, anything that is little bit horrifying even with psychological or medical terms is also called Horror but let it be. Even, i don't agree much. So, for me this isn't a Horror film and that's why i am not gonna talk about horror proportions. For that, there are films like 'Nosferatu', 'Dracula', 'Frankenstien' and many others. The Avenging Conscience hardly has any horror element to be scared of. Two or three visualisation scenes and that's all horror you got there. I would love to call it a murder mystery though. Yes, it has more than enough content for that and in my opinion it was pathbrreaking. That scene when an investigator questions the murderer, how brilliantly Griffith has used pendulam voice, tick-tick sound and shivering hands. I mean this was more than 100 years before Christopher Nolan used the similar sounds in 'Dunkirk'? Wow! Prevented from dating his sweetheart by his uncle, a young man turns his thoughts to murder. The guilt and his fear of getting caught leads him to realisation of his conscience and then there's a twist at the end which i won't be spoiling here. Seriously, I was not hoping for the twist at the end and at one moment I was even doubtful about Griffith making such a film. Thankfully, he didn't disappoint and i was all happy after watching the film. A landmark in the genre and much before people got acquainted to such stories.

RATING - 8/10*

By - #samthebestest.

Avenging Conscience; Thou Shalt Not Kill, The (1914)

*** (out of 4)

Feature from D.W. Griffith, which he quickly shot before he started filming on The Birth of a Nation. An uncle is constantly putting presure on his nephew (Henry B. Walthall) to spend more time on his work. When the nephew falls in love with a local girl (Blanche Sweet) the uncle demands that they call it off. When the nephew can't think of anything else, he decides the only way to keep the girl is by killing the uncle. This film is based on several Edgar Allan Poe stories with the second half of the film dealing mainly with The Tell-Tale Heart. You can tell this film was quickly made but there's still some nice direction, good performances and G.W. Bitzer's wonderful cinematography. There's some nice scenes dealing with devils and ghouls from Hell as well as a scene of Jesus. The special effects are quite nice for the era as well. Mae Marsh and Ralph Lewis have small parts. Due to the lack of copyright laws at the time, Griffith used all these short Poe stories without any credit being given.

Poe's psychological story "The Tell-Tale Heart" uneasily receives Griffith's trademark Victorian approach – turning the madman anti-hero of the original into a frustrated love-struck milquetoast! The broad gestures typical of Silent-film acting render the proceedings unintentionally comical now, especially where the ghostly apparition of the murdered relative is concerned – who, by the way, is fitted with an eye-patch throughout and, yet, no reference whatsoever is made to his all-important "vulture eye"!!

Still, the various hallucinations at the climax – crude though they may be – are reasonably effective. Incidentally, the stilted presentation and moralistic overtones evident here also marked the other Griffith horror effort that I've watched – THE SORROWS OF Satan (1926); all I can say is that, in spite of the solid reputation THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE enjoys within the director's canon, personally I was underwhelmed by the film on a preliminary viewing.

Other cinematic adaptations of the classic tale I've checked out – all of them relatively recently – are the interesting 1928 short (viewed on the very same day as the Griffith title), the so-so 1936 British feature-length version and a pretty good animated rendition of it from 1953.