The Power of the Press

By the time this Biograph came out, Klaw & Ehrlanger had taken over and D.W. Griffith had walked. And, while the people at Biograph had learned a lot of the mechanical lessons of Griffith's era -- the acting is fine, the cutting is fine, the crowd scenes are well done, and the composition uses the familiar 'Biograph Right Wall' -- nonetheless, this is clearly not Griffith's work. What is missing is movement within the frame, the sophisticated complication of action that Griffith understood and which the unnamed director and cameraman did not, and the sense that the story is about more than story. As a result, it winds up looking like Griffith's work from 1909, and unremarkable Griffith from that period.

That being the case, this is a technically interesting movie, since it underscores what Griffith understood about film making that his contemporaries did not. If, however, you are interested in good movies, rather than seeing everything that Lionel Barrymore did, or the young Alan Hale, give it a miss.