Happy Silent Movie Day!
Watching a couple films presented by Michael Aus from his personal collection on the YouTube channel for the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum was both a seemingly odd and appropriate way to kick off this inaugural celebration of silent film heritage and preservation. It's not just the national or otherwise large institutional archives that keep decaying nitrate from vanishing entirely. Smaller museums and private collectors do valuable work, too.
That was especially evident in the first of the films, a Lubin one-reeler, "The Judge's Ward" (1909), which was reportedly once considered lost. Part of it still seems to remain so, as there are a few explanatory title cards at the beginning and end in place of missing footage--yet another reminder of the need for film preservation. Otherwise, it's not a good film, and I have nothing to add to what boblipton over at IMDb already said--regarding the quality, or lack thereof, of Lubin productions and of this particular film's similarities to an Alice Guy Solax picture, "The Girl in the Arm-Chair" (1912). There's even actress-playing-an-actress, but no play-within-the-play.
This other film, though, a two-reeler from a small independent studio, the Centaur Film Company, is at least interesting. Unfortunately, that's because of dated racial stereotypes. I'd bemoan the outrageous depiction of black natives of the picture's uncharted island by white filmmakers, but honestly I was just looking for something to analyze by that point. The scenario is slow going early on as it establishes how one rival suitor works a lot and the other is lazy. The woman is unaccountably infatuated with the one that's a "professional invalid." He, however, ends up shipwrecked and washes up on the aforementioned island where he--ugh, of course--becomes something of a chieftain after being rescued.
Yet, rather humorously, other white men come to rescue him, but he refuses to leave. It's only after one of the natives beg the white men to take him, that he returns home and the woman, having since with the other man become a mother, must choose between the rival suitors. One of its titles, "Father of Her Child," gives it away, but it hardly matters. If only he had a product-placement volleyball to befriend instead.
(Note: As of this writing, the details on the YouTube video claim the primary title as "Her Final Choice" and a year of 1913, whereas IMDb appears to list it as "Father of Her Child" and a year of 1916. It's also not to be confused with an apparently different title "Her Final Choice" from 1913, which is listed with an entirely different story and production information.)
