Review by springfieldrental

When small pop-up theaters began showing longer dramatic films rather than short actualities in the early 1900's, films such as 1904's The Moonshiner was one of the reasons why these informal store-front rooms began to evolve into permanent movie houses, called Nichelodeons.

This Wallace McKutcheon-directed and story written film details in 12 minutes how a backwoods moonshine operation looks like. The comings and goings of customers and suppliers to a remote cabin run by a family (whose daughter is strikingly beautiful for the times) making illegal alcohol. Intermixed is an undercover agent who spots the illicit front and rides off to get reinforcements. Through it all, Billy Bitzer, who years later would become the primary cameraman for D. W. Griffith, uses a series of pan shots, recently introduced to the technology of filmmaking, to show these numerous arrivals and departures.

The documentary-like film finally settles into a YouTube-like video with, what was very unusual for its time, several inter titles on how to make moonshine from a still. After several lengthy minutes, the arrival of the agents finally gets things percolating. The conclusion begins with a physical fight involving a chokehold applied to the moonshiners' lookout (a technique that would be illegal in today's law enforcement world) as well as a series of gunshots that leaves scores dead. Such violence of the intensity portrayed was not quite seen before on the bedsheet used as a projector screen, and it is indeed worth sticking around for the surprise ending-- a death scene that still burns in my mind several days after seeing it.