May and December

Middle-aged Kate Bruce proposes marriage to young Billy Quirk. He accepts, despite his soliloquizing to the audience. Soon thereafter, elderly W. Chrystie Miller proposes to Mary Pickford. She, despite some misgivings, accepts. The two couples encouter each other, and the youngsters chat with each other, while the oldsters seem to enjoy their talks.

It's a split-reel comedy from Biograph, but it's not directed by Griffith or the ambitious Mack Sennett. It's directed by Frank Powell, and it's not a comedy in the sense of being particularly funny -- what Biograph and early Keystones labeled "farce comedies". It's a comedy in the classical mold, in which a bad situation is corrected. Although Quirk mugs his asides, and Miller makes a production of getting down on his knees to propose, it's not particularly amusing or surprising at any point.

Kate Bruce was a favorite of Griffith for motherly roles, and from 1908 until her retirement in 1931, she was a busy actress, with appearances in almost three hundred movies of various lengths. Little is known of her outside her birth in 1860, her death in 1946 and her friendship with the Gish sisters. Lillian Gish said that she lived austerely and never spoke of her past.