Death's Marathon

In a short D.W. Griffith silent film, things happen fast. In here, we witness a little courtship from two men, both after the same girl. The woman marries one of them, then has a baby, then marriage troubles and then witness a climactic suicide scene. All of this happens fast. You had to condense things back in the film business in the early 1900s because the average film was only 10-20 minutes long, although by the mid Teens films began to slowly lengthen.

Anyway, the losing beau for the girl's affections winds up racing across town to save the other's guy life. He's the one in dire straits. The ending is shocking, is all I will say.....certainly not what was expected.

Henry B. Walthall, as the fickle and then troubled husband, is the star of the film, although Walter Miller and Blanche Sweet have key roles, too. However, it is Walthall and his strange facial expressions that grab the viewer's attention more than anything else, I believe. (The scene with him on the telephone is pretty haunting.)

This is among Griffith's bleakest short pictures. Oddly enough it's also another spin on the Lonely Villa story, in which a person in distress details their plight to a loved one over the phone, although this time with a very different focus.

Death's Marathon is also a return to a smaller canvas for Griffith, with only a handful of actors and basic locations. Griffith handles the visual storytelling with skill, using only a light sprinkling of unobtrusive title cards and letting the images do the rest. For example, we open with the simple "Partners in business, rivals in love", then cut to Henry Walthall and Walter Miller sitting in an office with their backs to each other. Walthall then gets up and walks into – another cut – the next room (meaning the audience focuses more on his character), after which we cut again to Blanche Sweet sitting alone in a garden, and we know instantly that she is the disputed object of affection.

The parallel editing finale that this situation eventually builds into is one of Griffith's best in terms of its construction. Griffith works largely with repetition and symmetry, with the shots of Walthall and Sweet not changing much and virtually mirroring each other. Only at the last moment does Griffith introduce a new element – when the baby is brought to the phone. The ride-to-the-rescue is granted less significance in Death's Marathon, with only four shots of the speeding car, and again these shots are all very similar to each other. It's enough to be occasionally reminded that the car is on its way – the real drama is between Walthall and Sweet over the phone. Without the burden of intertitles, we are left to guess at what they are saying to each other, and the whole thing has a rather eerie and morbid tone. Sadly as there is not that same sense of danger we get when someone is, say, being menaced by a burglar, Death's Marathon can never be as exciting as The Girl and Her Trust or An Unseen Enemy.

It demonstrates Griffith's versatility that he could make such a diverse bunch of films out of a single idea, having remade The Lonely Villa as a western, combining it with his claustrophobic "Sealed Room" type thrillers, and now putting another new spin on it with the suicide theme. It's a very tightly constructed little work, although to be fair, Griffith probably could have done this sort of thing in his sleep by now. The trouble is for all its cleverness Death's Marathon is not quite as effective as it should be, and comes across as a kind of failed experiment, albeit a very nice looking one.

A slight - but welcome - variation on Griffith's trusted formula sees Walter Miller racing to the office of his business partner (an on-form Henry B. Walthall) to try and prevent him from committing suicide after racking up crippling gambling debts. To complicate matters a little, Blanche Sweet is the long-suffering wife on whom Miller is also sweet.

Interesting early film, directed by D.W. Griffith. Walter Miller and Henry B. Walthall are partners in business, and rivals for the affections of Blanche Sweet. Ms. Sweet chooses Mr. Walthall, and the two are married. Soon, he goes out on the town, leaving her and the baby home alone. Then, Mr. Miller realizes Walthall is stealing from their company to pay off gambling debts…

This film is given great depth by Griffith's use of windows, doorways, and a mirror in background shots The performances are noteworthy, especially Walthall and Sweet, during the film's climax. A contemporary automobile is featured in the exciting race to save Walthall's life. For it's time, this must have been a shocker. The absence of blood is strange, but the performances make "Death's Marathon" worth running.

******* Death's Marathon (6/14/13) D.W. Griffith ~ Henry B. Walthall, Blanche Sweet, Walter Miller

And the moral of today's story is: Don't marry the wrong guy, if you can help it.

Would rate this higher if it hadn't been SO interminably bleak at the end. The idea may be the woman can move on - as the title card says she is "set free from this unfortunate alliance" - but free to do what? Can she remarry? With a child already there? One might hope so; we don't know much about her as this story is really about the man. The other downside too is that, despite Griffith's effective use of cross-cutting (which he seemed to be the pioneer of), a lot of the major dramatic tension of the piece comes from the telephone conversation between Blanche Sweet, the wife, and Henry B Walthall as the husband, and the latter coming to the moment of putting a gun to his head over some extremely sour gambling debts... and, obviously, we can't hear what they're saying. The heartbreaking moment comes when the wife puts the baby on the phone - also the moment where the actor's penchant for smiling too much as he's talking in his cut-away shots makes sense - and yet I do wish it had been the sort of thing where had this been a sound-era short, there would be a little more context than simply watching two people talk for stretches of time (though short as here, it still feels a little too long, if only by some seconds).

All this said, there's a great dramatic core to the story and Griffith tells a story with an excellent beginning (the two men vying for the woman and she picks, well, the wrong one in retrospect, as is so many decisions in life) middle (all those debts happening in real time) and okay end (what I just discussed). It makes for a good short, though I wish it had been great. If there's one key flaw it's the end being too one-note in its despair, with barely a hint of any catharsis or hope, which is what a story as heavy as Griffith's style needs. This is not to say it isn't a choice that films might shy away from in other circumstances.