jamesjustice-92

I have watched this little 17-minute gangster flick a long time ago and I remember praising it highly, in comparison to other D. W. Griffith early shorts I've watched side by side back then. Now I can't say that praise was justified.

Yes, with each movie Griffith was becoming more and more prolific and slowly honed the skill to bring the art of motion pictures to its bloom in the mid-1910s and 'The Musketeers of Pig Alley' was certainly a step in the right direction after the average 'The painted lady' but not without its buts too.

The story revolves around a young man who was robbed by a gangster and he tries to get his money back from him - seems simple enough but in reality this story turns into something completely different by the end of it. Firstly, one important character disappears without a trace and is never mentioned again (many sitcoms have successfully stolen that screenplay trick when you don't have to explain why a character was written out of the show, it just was, and anyone can decide for themselves what happened to them); secondly, the characters spend a lion's share of screen time just following each other and it would be alright if the movie was two hours long but when it's only 17 minutes every second spent on something skippable can be considered blasphemy. And the most important part is that Griffith chooses a happy ending when most of the gangster movies would take a different path for their antagonist, and it's not a bad thing per se because there is still hope for everybody and every good deed can become a road to redemption but it nevertheless looks odd and unrealistic in the context of everything that was done beforehand in the narrative.

All in all, The Musketeers of Pig Valley is yet another average movie for the new and aspiring director looking for his style in this brand new world of moving pictures who is not afraid to do something different, and who is eager to learn on his own mistakes.

The way D. W. Griffith could make his pictures was astonishing: he told simple, yet touching stories of people we all can associate ourselves with and The painted lady is one of the best examples of that.

In this short a young girl falls in love for the first time but an unfortunate event leaves her traumatized so much so that she loses her mind and herself. We've all experienced a broken heart and know that it's a long way to recover from that, some of us never do.

Minimum of subtitles and maximum of expressions - that's what differs Griffith from the rest of filmmakers of his era, and that speaks sometimes in favor of him, the other times it doesn't, when the script or the performance is not strong enough - in case of The painted lady it was both of them. Yes, the descent of a young girl from joyful to mad is powerful but it feels rushed because of the movie's short runtime and unnatural because of the script's strictly superficial framework and leaves you with one eye slightly more open by the ending.

I came across this little movie some time ago and knew nothing about it beforehand besides the year - I just love those good old movies, they are so silly at times but very informative; with each one I can see the signs of a cinema yet to come, how much they influenced today's cinematography and most probably everything that was made up in the first 30 years since the invention of cinema had got its tails in today's industry as well. Filibus is certainly one of those.

When it comes to who made what first, people tend to forget that not everything was made in America - sure the likes of D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin have popularized the moving pictures art genre but let's not abandon also the forgotten creators of yesterday, i.e. The movie makers of Italy who first came up with a peplum genre and epic, long tales (two hour long 'Cabiria' was made in 1914, a whole year before Griffith's groundbreaking 'The birth of a nation') and then tranformed the detective genre with 'Filibus' adding sci-fi and a little of cross-dressing drama to it (that was mostly unheard of in the 1910s, especially in Italy).

Filibus is the name of a female antagonist, played gorgeously by Valeria Creti, an evil mastermind, a criminal and simply a sky pirate (this way it was put in the title of the movie). She has an airship, a zeppelin-like aircraft which she uses to transport her, drop by and pick her up anywhere she wants and multiple identities, including male, which makes her crimes almost unsolvable by the poor detective Kutt-Hendy who just doesn't know who to look for.

The told story is simple enough to make you dissolve in it and short enough to carry you till the end safely without falling asleep. Filibus is insidious and she makes you want to empathize with her more than with others and you unwillingly start to root for her instead of good guys of the movie who are just plain boring people with nothing but a thin shadow behind their one-dimensional characters. In fact, the whole 70-minute movie could have easily been a short 25-30 minute first episode of the series that was for some reasons stretched out to full length but there never came a continuation of this story, and it's a pity. I think Filibis had got potential back in the day and should have been either a series of films (in the vein of Louis Feuillade's Vampires films that came out later in the year) or a longer, more well-thoughtout detective story than it turned out to be.

Considering its solid age of 110 years Filibus doesn't feel dated or irrelevant, it uses the technical advantages of the era to the movie's fullest and the cast gives fine performances, if you're not into authenticity that is.