Mixed Babies

Eddie Dillon and the Mrs. Haven't had a child, so they adopt. The new mother goes with the child to a department store to pick up some necessities, where she leaves the infant in front of the store with a clerk deputized for that purpose.

D. W. Griffith has a writing credit for this one, and I mistook if for direction. It was 1908, so I didn't expect much in the way of the considerable advances he would make in movie technique, but there were the flat sets with no sign of the Biograph Right Wall, overacting, and no crowd direction; there are a bunch of men standing right outside the store doing nothing, and the women shopping inside likewise. Wait. It was Wallace McCutcheon directing, and this was released in June, a month before Griffith got his first directorial credit.

That explained it. Typical direction before Griffith began to change things later that year. Never mind that Billy Bitzer and Arthur Marvin had already come up with the Right Wall effect. McCutcheon's technique had advanced very little since 1905. He would direct seven more movies for Biograph over the next month, one for Melies the following year, and die in 1918, about 56 years old.

Having worked as a labourer in Connecticut during his teens, and then achieving modest success as a stage actor, Mack Sennett got his break on the big screen with the Biograph Company in one-reelers like this one. Lucky for him, D.W. Griffith was writing and directing them which empowered Sennett to go on and do the same.