The Girl and Her Trust

Girl and Her Trust, The (1912)

*** (out of 4)

D.W. Griffith short has a female telegraph operator being held up by a couple tramps who plan on stealing $2,000. Once again seeing a Griffith film from this period compared to what else was around just shows why they say the man invited film. Here Griffith uses the editing to build nice tension and some real excitement as the tramps kidnap the woman and head off with the good guy following. The train sequence is brilliantly done and this is 15 years before Buster Keaton's The General.

This is as good a film as any to track the development of editing and camera placement in early narrative short films. "The Girl and Her Trust" has the same story outline as, at least, three other Griffith shorts: "Lonely Villa", "The Lonedale Operator" and "An Unseen Enemy". All four are last-minute rescue suspense films, with few differences between them. They all result in the setup of a girl, or a few girls, locked in a room separate from thieves stealing money; the girl uses a phone, or telegraph, to call men for help. I don't know why any of the ditzes never thought of escaping out a window. At least in "The Girl and Her Trust", there's the malarkey about her fulfilling her "trust".

By no means did Griffith invent this sub-genre; he mastered it with rapid editing. It's futile to attempt to exact the beginning of the sub-genre, but the aforementioned films, especially "Lonely Villa", are remakes of a 1908 Pathé film, "The Physician of the Castle". Suspense is absent in that film; there are only 26 shots in its 6 minutes. Biograph released "Lonely Villa" the following year, and there are approximately twice as many shots in its 9 minutes. In 1912, Biograph released "The Girl and Her Trust", which has almost as many shots as the 119 that appear in the subsequent film, "An Unseen Enemy". Furthermore, Keystone parodies (such as "The Bangville Police" and "Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life") of Griffith's last-minute rescue pictures displayed even rapider, if choppy, editing.

The reason for the additional number of shots has as much to do with staging and additional crosscutting as it does with drawn-out lengths. First, Griffith had criminals and innocents in separate rooms of the setting of the crime; crosscutting between rooms prevented plots from being dull, as he stretched suspense for longer lengths. Then, there's extended crosscutting between the crime and rescuers. Indoor shooting is also Griffith's greatest weakness; he never would get past the theatricality of a missing wall.

"The Girl and Her Trust" has the benefit of taking more of the action outside, as the girl must follow the criminals to fulfill her trust. Outside, Griffith and Billy Bitzer trucked the camera beside a moving train, creating a trademark tracking shot they'd return to in "Intolerance". There's also an overhead angled tracking shot of the criminals and Dorothy Bernard on a handcar. With such innovation and time and space constraints, however, Griffith made the fallacy of not respecting the axis of action (the train goes right, and then goes left, but it's supposed to be the same direction). That can disrupt suspense. Lastly, Griffith rarely, if ever, used medium shots and close-ups in his early films. By 1912, every Griffith film had them.

(Note: This is one of three short films by D.W. Griffith that I've commented on, with some arrangement in mind. The other films are "A Corner in Wheat" and "The Battle at Elderbush Gulch".)

A highly attractive telegraphist at a country railway station spurns the suitor who brings her a soda, but allows the station porter several liberties. A message comes through that cash is being delivered. The porter loads his revolver from a box of cartridges, collects the money bag from the train, puts it in the station secure box, then goes off for lunch. Two tramps see the money and try to steal it by getting the box key from the girl. She barricades herself in her office and sends frantic messages down the wires for help. These are picked up at the next station, and an engine is given right of way to go to the rescue. Meanwhile the tramps try to break down the door. The girl puts a cartridge from the box into the keyhole, puts the points of some scissors to the cap and hits the scissors with a hammer. It is interesting that the cartridge case did not fly backwards and injure her. The bullet however fires into the room with the tramps and scares them. They lug the secure box out to a pump action trolley (like the one in The General), and head off. The girl rushes out intent on rescuing the money and is dragged onto the trolley. Meanwhile, the porter comes out of his house with his sandwiches in time to see the trolley vanishing. A few minutes later the rescue engine arrives; he jumps on and the chase begins. These railway scenes were especially well done, with a tracking shot of the racing engine taken from a parallel road, and shots both of the engine cab and the trolley taken from above. Eventually the tramps tire and the engine catches up with them and they are caught. In the final scene the porter and the telegraphist sit on the buffer beam of the engine as it backs up the line. They share his sandwiches, then a kiss which is shrouded in steam. That romantic ending has hardly ever been bettered.

I've just recently come across this tile while watching the Landmarks of Early Film and I must say I'm completely taken by it.

OK, the visual effects are very dated, but then again, the effects themselves are not what makes the movie.

The thing that really impressed me was the character development of "The Girl". At first we see a girl working at the railstation and being the one who's in charge of keeping the money (one would more likely expect a man doing that in the wild west, not a woman). Next we see a man who fancies this girl and she's concerned for the money. He calms her down. I was sure that she'd be a helpless damsel in distress and he'd come in and rescue her. And here's the thing that surprised me most - it gets deeper then that.

The girl locks herself inside as the two tramps try to steal the money. She has the key to the strongbox. Handing the key over would surely save her, but she keeps to it. Also after locking herself into the room she doesn't faint or starts panicking. No! She actually tries to get help by telepraph. One of the tramps realizes it and cuts the line. Then she even finds a way to scare them off! Amazingly she puts a bullet into the keylock, places the scisors at the back and hammers away to fire the bullet off (something even MacGyver would be quite proud of).

And when the tramps take the strongbox she chases after them! She is a real heroine. But she is overpowered and the man from earlier on (with the help of rail employees) chatches the bad guys in a locomotive/handcart action chase sequence. And to make it a truly happy ending, they even have a little romantic scene when the girl is saved and the guy offers her lunch at the front bumper of the locomotive.

Brilliant.

OK, it's shorter, black and white and with no sound effects at all, but at points it reminded me so much of the panic room... You know... People on the outside trying to get to what a "helpless" woman has in a room they can't break into. And over 100 years old - I was breathless!

The Girl and Her Trust, like all films made in the early 1900s, is very simple and very short, but Griffith introduces a number of filmmaking techniques that remain widely in use to this day. Earlier films generally played like a stage play, with minimal cutting or editing, and each scene taking place in the same location and generally in the same shot. The Girl and Her Trust was one of the first films to suggest that editing could create artificial environments by linking sets together, and it also gave a better idea of what exactly was going on (the close-up of the girl as she places the bullet in the keyhole is a great example).

Besides that, this film also had a very well-made chase at the end, in which the good guys are in a locomotive chasing the bad guys (the guys who stole the $2000 from the girl - her 'trust') who are pumping furiously on a railroad handcart. Although technically crude by today's standards, this scene had every necessary element of a good chase sequence, and it works very well. The film also introduced the idea of cross-cutting in filmmaking, as well as the idea of filming outdoors (a technique barely and clumsily employed by Edwin Porter in The Great Train Robbery). The Girl and Her Trust is a historic film, but as with all films that were made in the early 1900s, you need to keep its age in mind. It's not going to blow you away with visuals or sound, but if you keep in mind the time period in which it was made, you can begin to really appreciate its innovation.