The Ocean Waif

About 43 minutes of a 5 reeler exist. Story by Eustace Hale Ball tells of a waif (Doris Kenyon) who escapes a brutal stepfather and hides out in an abandoned house only to see a writer seeking solitude (Carlyle Blackwell) move in shortly thereafter. Of course he falls for her although he is engaged to be married. She goes back to her home and needs to be rescued from the clutches of her stepfather.

There are some beautiful scenes and pictorial compositions, but director Alice Guy undermines the story by presenting Kenyon's waif as the film's central character (though Blackwell gets top billing). In Hale's story, the writer is the protagonist and in the film, Blackwell also serves this function despite Guy's focus on Kenyon. Bottom line is that too much of the film focuses on Kenyon's antics in the abandoned house, which might be charming but do nothing to advance the story. There's also a silly bit in which the servant (Edgar Norton) thinks the house is haunted.

A rather dour Lyn Donaldson (aka Lyn Donelson) plays the jilted fiancée, William Morris is the stepfather, and Fraunie Fraunholz plays Sem, a sort of village idiot. Blackwell and Kenyon are certainly watchable and were big stars of the time.

You may have to calibrate expectations to just how early a film this is, as it shows signs of wear, some cheesy acting (Eek! A mouse! Oh no! A ghost!), and only 41 minutes of it have survived. On the other hand, pioneering director Alice Guy-Blaché tells a complete story and captures some endearing shots. The casting of 19-year-old Doris Kenyon was wise; she has such a wonderful, almost modern screen presence and a big, natural smile. The fragmented scene with her milking a cow really shows this off. She's also engaging when she dusts off an old mirror to peer into her reflection, and when she's out in a field gathering flowers with the leading man (Carlyle Blackwell). The film is not all lightness though, and there are cringe-worthy moments with her abusive foster father (William Morris), who tries to rape her. It's too bad the entire print doesn't survive, but what does is easily worth the quick watch.

I just saw this film as part of TCM's Women Pioneer Filmmakers Series. What a fascinating woman Alice Guy Blache was! And what a shame (although that isn't a strong enough word) that her legacy is not well-known to the public. This film is quite enchanting--parts of it reminded me of "Broken Blossoms" (1919). But while it has elements of tragedy, and even a dark streak of incest courtesy of the foster father, there are tender and light-hearted moments of comedy that keep it from bogging into too much sentiment. Guy's motto was "Be Natural", and it's amazing how well the actors in her company took this to heart--there is very little of the histrionic style of acting in this film, which makes it so much easier for a modern audience to watch.

Alice Guy Blache's films should be revived, they should be available on VHS and DVD, and her legacy needs to be recognized!

"The Ocean Waif" is a run-of-the-mill production for 1916, with a simplistic romance that turns melodramatic at the bookends with an abusive stepfather. The treatment is mostly light in the middle. One especially funny moment, intentional or not, comes after the writer finds his muse in the runaway ocean waif; he claims to have written his best story and then reads this line from it: "The girl was as beautiful as a rose." At least, the leads, Carlyle Blackwell and Doris Kenyon, were attractive.

The film was directed by Alice Guy, who was the world's first female filmmaker, beginning with Gaumont in France back in 1896. It's impressive enough that she managed to remain in the business for twenty-some years during a period of the most rapid development; she outlasted Edwin S. Porter, Georges Méliès and many other of her contemporaries. If not much else, "The Ocean Waif" demonstrates that she, or at least her assistants, adopted new techniques and practices, such as quick scene dissection, closer camera perspectives and star treatment, which is what men like Porter and Méliès failed to do by the 1910s. The film isn't particularly good in any of these respects, but it's at least not outdated for 1916. I was confused, however, by the use of an oval frame masking in the opening sequences; the effect didn't appear to have a function.

More interesting than the film proper is the preservation, restoration and presentation of its, reportedly, sole surviving print. The film apparently lacks some footage, and there's considerable deterioration, but when there's not, it's a beautiful, antique fine-grain 35mm print transfer under the typical scratches and mottling. I'm, perhaps, even more impressed and thankful that one of the leaders in distributing silents to home video would risk its reputation by presenting such an aged film. I commend Kino for that. I hope they and others continue to release rare films that lack pristine prints, because most silents that survive, which is not most of them, do not exist in the great condition of some of the more popular home video presentations.

Frederic Chapin who wrote the story and Eustace Hale Ball who wrote the screenplay have put together a very hybrid concotion here. The ocean waif part of the story is lkie somethig out of a Mary Pickford film while the plot about the novelist coming to write in a haunted house is straight out of George Cohan's hit play of 1913, Seven Keys to Baldpate which was actually filmed in 1916 in Australia and would be filmed again, with Cohan himself in the lead, in 1917. It's quite neatly done if one ignores those very tiresome close-ups that were fashionable in nearly all US films 1915-1918. The best thing is perhaps Londoner Edward Norton doing the "British servant" act that he would continue to do for in umpteen films for three further decades......

The glaring close-ups contribute to the even more glaring predictability of the rest of the plot.