His Own Law

There is a tendency to approach a new film that one has not heard of before with a notion that it is probably not going to be that good. After all, if it was any good.........

When it comes to silent films, this logic (never too strong) breaks down completely. So little - one is every day more amazed at how little - was known about silent films during the Dark Age that followed the introduction of sound that there are still many, many wonderful films to be discovered. This one has been around (restored) for some while (2001) but was new to me.....

It is not perhaps a wonderful film but it is a good one. Bosworth (the perennial and ever-reliable "heavy" in the film-slang of the day) plays a drunken engineer who befriends a young Frenchman. The Frenchman forms a liaison with a young woman but is called up for military service and is subsequently believed to be dead. Since there is now a child, Bosworth marries the woman. All is well until.........the inevitable occurs.

Although contemporary reviewers describe it as Enoch Arden (frequently filmed in the teens) with a different ending, the story alas has something is common with the wonderful 1928 Heimkehr, a great classic of the later silent period. Here the story is not so cleverly scripted nor subtly told nor so interestingly resolved and it very rapidly becomes overly sentimental but it is still a good film, particularly at a time in the US when serious dramas with a genuinely adult perspective (the trade papers called it "heavy") were in rather short supply. It is also well shot ("excellent" in that category for the trade papers) in a manner comfortably intermediate between the typical US (ie close but not irritatingly so) and European (ie contextual but could do better) styles. It would in particular have been good to have seen rather more of the "Chinook" scenery.

One comical aspect of the film is the quite incredible song and dance made over the film's sole sexual episode (if one call it that). Not only if enormous emphasis placed on the intention of the couple to marry (they are narrowly prevented by the absence of the JP) but there is a fantastically ellipsis (unlike most such ellipses it probably lasts longer than the real thing) involving rabbits and doves and owls and I don't know what. It is interesting to compare this with a European film of the same date (Die Würghand) where the heroine is shown being pulled into the bedroom after which the film cuts to the title "The Next Morning". It is true this is not a virtuous heroine (we next see her sharing the wages of her sin with her partner) but the difference between the attitudes to sex is very marked at this point in time when US producers were all already desperately angling to get hold of Pola Negri and Ernst Lubitsch - the trade papers that year are full of it - to try and pep up their act a bit in this respect. Rabbits I can see, doves too but owls....!

The little boy in the later scenes is incidentally - as was often the case and despite the boxing gloves - actually a little girl (Mary Jane Irving).

Frenchman Rowland V. Lee is in a bar trying to mix a complicated cocktail, when Hobart Bosworth gets into a fight with him and then treats him to a drink. When that bar closes, they continue their toot, and the next morning, they are earning some money digging a ditch, when Hobart's partner catches up with him and tells him he has to go supervise the construction project up north, so he takes his new friend, who's also an engineer, along. Lee falls in love with Jean Calhoun, and they're about to get married, but he has to head off to join the French army (the First World War), so that's delayed. The problem is that they celebrated the marriage without a license, she's expecting, and Lee is reported dead. So Bosworth marries her and raises Lee's son as his own. Guess who shows up, having spent three years in a German POW camp?

It's a mature and mostly amiable buddy comedy, with a funny opening. That turns into a melodramatic ending. Bosworth gives a great performance, reminding me of the sort of role that Wallace Beery played in the 1930s, but without the dumb coyness he brought to his roles. Bosworth plays a smart, amiable, larger-than-life character, able to throw a punch or cuddle a puppy as the occasion calls for it, making it clear why his career extended through his death, albeit in supporting roles. Lee, who came from an acting family, appeared in one more movie, then moved behind the screen, becoming a commercially successful director who got chosen for a lot of prestige projects. He retired from the movies and lived another thirty years. Miss Calhoun appeared in a dozen and a half movies from 1918 through 1927, married, and popped up in uncredited roles a couple of decades later.