The Avenging Conscience: or 'Thou Shalt Not Kill'

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.

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.

Henry Walthall plays a man whose love for a young girl, played by Blache Sweet, drives him to murder his doting and overprotective uncle. His guilt drives him insane, and in the climactic scene where the detective pushes him to confession, Walthall is so overcome with visions of demons driving him to hell he is on the verge of an apoplectic fit. The most notable things in The Avenging Conscience, in addition to the obvious horrific tableaux and weird scenes of Pan with nymphs at the end, is the way Griffith draws characters in different places together through intercutting and use of props and gestures, i.e. books, pictures, prayer and other things. Perhaps he already had Intolerance in the back of his head while making this oddball adaptation of several Poe works. Also the film appears to have had some influence on other filmmakers; Chaplin's Sunnyside for example, owes something to the bit with Pan at the conclusion. My copy, projected a bit fast, runs only 56 minutes, and clearly there are missing scenes which makes for a choppy continuity. There is a still from The Avenging Conscience in Iris Barry's 1940 bio of Griffith that is from a scene which is no longer in the film. A different still once thought to be from The Avenging Conscience of Griffith directing Walthall holding a pistol to his head was actually taken on the set of Griffith's lost 1914 effort The Escape. The set dressing in The Escape is basically the same as that for the Uncle's home in The Avenging Conscience with a few things switched around, which suggests the two films were shot very closely together, or even simultaneously.

D. W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience is based on Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 short story The Telltale Heart, with elements of his 1849 poem Annabel Lee mixed in. The film opens with the death of a woman, her infant son subsequently cared for by his uncle (Spottiswoode Aitken). When the boy becomes an adult (played by Henry B. Walthall), his mind turns from studying to the charms of his chubby sweetheart Annabel (Blanche Sweet), but his uncle disapproves, warning him to stay away from the woman. Desperate to be with his beloved, and inspired by the cruelty of nature, the young man murders his uncle, walling up the old man's body behind the fireplace, but as the days go by, his conscience begins to plague him...

As old silent movies go, The Avenging Conscience is reasonably watchable if you don't mind the expected exaggerated expressions and wild gesticulations of pre-sound cinema, but it does suffer from an uneven pace: parts of the film are incredibly drawn out, while other moments feel very choppy, as though entire scenes are missing (which might well be the case). I imagine that the whole thing would have worked better with a shorter runtime (the version I watched clocked in at 84 minutes). I also feel like Griffith didn't have the strength of his convictions, ruining this early attempt at horror with a weak ending, an early example of the lame 'it was all a dream' trope (followed by an utterly bizarre scene in which Pan lures children and woodland animals out of hiding with his pipe-playing).

5/10.

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.