The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England

Almost all credit for inventing the language of cinema is given to the admittedly brilliant D.W. Griffith. This has led to other pioneers being over-looked. There are many Australian film-makers for instance who are rarely mentioned in film histories (did you know that the Tait brothers made the world's first feature film in 1906 "The Story of the Kelly Gang"?). Perhaps more surprisingly over-looked is Maurice Tourneur (who was not Australian!), who, in mini-masterpieces like "The Wishing Ring", displays a command of cinema language that is astonishingly advanced. This charming and beautifully filmed gem is an absolute must-see (the Grapevine Video version is very good). Editing, lighting, cinematography, and skill in story-telling are all outstanding. And it's funny too! See it!

I have recently read about Maurice Tourneur's The Wishing Ring. The writer mentioned how the film is well edited. It was also mentioned that everything was filmed in Fort Lee but made to look like England. Tourneur chose buildings that looked English and he even built a Church to cover the fact that the Hudson river was behind it!

This is a very well made film from Tourneur. It is pleasing and it keeps you interested throughout. The actor's performances are also very good and enjoyable to watch. Vivian Martin is starring in her first film here and she does it with the confidence of any experienced actress. She is very vivacious and a total joy to watch.

The Wishing Ring is far from perfect. It is fairly well put together but some scenes can seem slightly confusing why they have turned up at this location. However, it is well directed, well acted, and well shot. It is an enjoyable watch.

The story is simple: boy meets girl. It's commendably light, however, and the plot is seemingly fortuitous (not to say unpredictable). Well, it is an idyll. Director Maurice Tourneur displays a film vocabulary to rival D.W. Griffith, at least at this point--before "The Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance". Medium shots, with occasional close-ups, dominate rather than long shots. He uses intertitles sparingly and adopts iris shots from Billy Bitzer. The dolly shot across a dinner table is great.

Actually, Tourneur was a superior storyteller compared to Griffith in respect to a simple story; this film isn't drenched in melodrama and Victorian sentiments. Additionally, I like how it begins on a stage and ends there. The age of feature-length pictures were born via photographed plays by Italian studios and Pathé film d'art, but, soon, the cinematic films by Tourneur, Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille and others, in addition to The Great War, prevailed over the movement to reduce cinema to a travesty of theatre. Yet, "The Wishing Ring" has its problems, as would other early films; for example, there is still the missing wall during indoor shooting and some obvious staging of actors for the camera's view.

This is a quaint early feature film of 54 minutes which is apparently the earliest surviving film directed by the French director Maurice Tourneur. The subtitle of the film is 'An Idyll of Old England', and it pretends to be shot there, but it was in fact made at Fort Lee, New Jersey, after Tourneur was recruited because of his talent and experience to leave France and go to America to boost their film industry. Vivian Martin plays Sally Thorne, a 'village maiden', and there are plenty of other 'maidens' about as well. It is all very fey. Near the village the main social figure is an aristocrat named the Earl of Bateson, played by Alec B. Francis. We mostly see him lying in an armchair with his right leg on a stool wrapped in bandages, as he suffers from gout. His son Giles is the son of the Earl who has been expelled from his college and has turned into a black sheep of the family. The Earl loses patience with him, accuses him of being a riotous wastrel, cuts him off financially, and tells him to get lost and only return after he has been able to earn a half crown (thirty pence, then a significant sum) in order to 'restore confidence' in himself. So off Giles goes to a local godfather named Annesley, who asks him to look after his rose garden for him while he goes on a trip. Annesley tells Giles that his roses are being stolen every night by a mysterious thief, and he asks Giles to try to catch the thief and stop it. It turns out that the rose thief is the girl played by Vivian Martin, who is a parson's daughter. She and her father live alone in great poverty, but she has a smile and charm and an innocent artlessness, and she captures the heart of Giles, whose character begins to undergo a reformation under her beneficent influence. They fall in love but Giles does not know that Sally is going and playing chess every day with his father, in order to soften him up with a view to the father eventually accepting Giles back into his good graces again. At first Sally had thought Giles was Annesley's gardener, but when to her surprise she discovered his true identity, she set about her plan to bring father and son back together again. The film is well made, and though simple and sentimental and naïve to our eyes, it is a worthy early work by Tourneur. It is marked by a very sparing use of intertitles, as another reviewer has remarked, which makes the film less tedious to watch today than many other early silents, which so often overdo them. This was Vivian Martin's first film appearance. She went on to appear in 43 more silent films, appeared onstage and once briefly in a sound film uncredited in 1935, and then became a 'civilian' entering normal life and living to the age of 93, and she became noted as a philanthropist in New York City. Simeon Wiltsie, who played Sally's father the parson, only made film for two more years, and died tow years after that, in 1918. Maurice Tourneur lived to the age of 95, having directed 98 films, and his son Jacques Tourneur became even better known and directed 74 films, not least the outstanding and justly famous classics CAT PEOPLE (1942, see my review) and OUT OF PAST (1947, see my review).

A Pittsburgh jewelry businessman teamed up with a mail order agent to form the World Film Corporation, based in Ft. Lee, N. J., to distribute and produce original movies. Lewis J. Selznick, the jeweler, and Arthur Spielgel, the agent, collected other investors to partner in the new enterprise, established in mid-1914. Its goal: to hire top-notch film directors and actors.

One of the newly formed company's initial hire was French Pathe director Maurice Tourneur. The first movie he directed for World Film was the romantic comedy, November 1914's "The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England." Based on a 1910 Broadway play, the film could easily be confused with the works of a later director, Ernst Lubitsch, who defined the genre during the 1930's.

Selznick, father of producer David O. Selznick ("Gone With The Wind"), would be ousted from the World Pictures board two years later--a pattern that would constantly reappear in Selznick's film executive career in his later years. He would be involved in several studio start-ups, only to be squeezed or cashed out in every instance. Because of his father's connections, however, David O. Was able to secure a position at MGM Studios early in his career. The elder Selznick has a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

"The Wishing Ring" was Tourneur's fifth film in his young directing years. He would go on to become one of silent movies' most influencial directors. He was instrumental in forming the Motion Pictures Directors Association, the forerunner to today's Screen Directors' Guild. Tourneur would work for several major studios, but if he had any faults, his artsy aesthetics got in the way of his plots later in his career. Tourneur would return to France in 1928 after MGM had withdrawn a director's role in a Jules Verne movie.

In "Wishing Ring," however, he allows the plot to go full steam, showcasing his actors in perfect framing. The ending shows a unique pan shot of all the movie's characters, a technique Martin Scorsese would use to great effect in his 1995 "Casino ". "The Wishing Ring" was Vivian Martin's first film appearance. Some claim the actress would rival Mary Pickford in popularity in her 44-movie career.