The Slave

James Kirkwood is a sculptor married to Florence Lawrence. They love each other and their baby. However, Kirkwood's work leaves them in grinding poverty. Miss Lawrence offers herself for sale as a slave to enable her husband and baby to lead a decent life.

This looks like one of the movies Griffith made to amortize all the costumes he had convinced his bosses to buy. However, while it looks great on that account, and the final shot is a beautifully composed and lighted one, the performances are far too big. Griffith had already begun to train his actors in a style of performance that required less arm-waving, but didn't use it here.

Among the sculpture displayed in Kirkwood's studio is a smaller version of the Venus de Milo, with no arms.

Much holding of heads and beseeching the skies in this overlong and overwrought melodrama from D. W. Griffith. It's clearly had more money spent on it for costumes and set design than most Biograph pictures, and is almost twice as long as many of their shorts from that period, but that added length makes it something of a chore to sit through. Missing intertitles doesn't help...

What you have to understand about these short films that the 34 year old D.W. Griffith was churning out twice-weekly is that his emphasis was on scenery rather than story. Let's face it, scripts before 1940 were basically stage plays, and before the talking period, scenarios were robbed of dialogue which meant that actors had to improvise under the guidance of the director. You cannot judge this short piece by the script or story, but by what the camera frames. Let's not forget that cinema at this stage was just a moving painting. Griffith was a cinematic Hogarth at this stage and used his short films as a painting. Therefore, you need to watch this offering as a painting that moves.