Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2006 Sommario / Contents

mother could be all bad.When Johann ends up at the chateau, seriously
wounded, Mlle. France takes care of him. When the German captain
threatens Mlle. France with rape, Johann rouses himself from his
deathbed to enjoin him with “FIGHT MEN – NOT WOMEN”, and then
shoots the captain when his admonition is ignored. The portrayal of a
sympathetic German looks forward to reconciliation and peace, though
Griffith received some criticism for him from an embittered post-war
public. Further reconciliation is represented by the stubborn Confederate,
the American Monsieur France, who has set up residence in his father’s
chateau in France, unable to accept the defeat of the South in the War
Between the States. He insists on flying the Confederate flag and calls
himself a citizen of the Confederate States.Then, moved by the arrival of
the heroic American troops to rescue them from the Germans, he
capitulates, and raises the flag of the United States.Thus the World War
reconciles the divisions of the Civil War.
Three other characters are transformed by the war. The father of the
American family is a pacifist. He attempts to get his younger son
deferred after the older one enlists without his consent. He tells the draft
board that his son is essential to the war effort, working in a shipyard,
although we can see that the boy is only aimlessly shuffling time cards.
The son is drafted anyway, and by the end of the film, the old man is
proud and boastful of his two hero sons: “I TOLD YOU WE COME OF
FIGHTING STOCK”. The younger son, a college-educated LOUNGE
LIZARD known as THE OILY PERIL with a KILLING STANCE and a lighthearted
attitude toward the female sex, becomes a real man, standing
straight and tall, disciplined, and in love with the girl he was flirting with
before the transformation effected by army training. The training is
exemplified by young men doing calisthenics at an army camp. Young
Bobby Harron is utterly charming, if not really believable, in his role as
the lounge lizard, round-shouldered, limp-wristed, looking as though he
had a permanent cramp in his stomach. The irony is that Griffith’s
intervention saved Bobby Harron from the draft – for the purpose of
making official war pictures.
The third character to be transformed is his girlfriend, Cutie Beautiful,
played by Clarine Seymour, who thinks of nothing but dancing and flirting
until she falls for the new manly Bobby Harron, back from training camp.
She turns into a faithful woman waiting at home, a nurturer, knitting for
the boys overseas. Harron and Seymour provide the comedy scenes, and,
in fact, they dominate the film, even though Carol Dempster and Richard
Barthelmess are the apparent leads, given their early introduction. The
main title awards the chief significance to Seymour’s character, who
stayed at home. Mlle. France was Carol Dempster’s first lead role for
Griffith. She and Barthelmess are stereotypical and bland lovers, with no
big love scenes: they are apart during most of the film’s events. Both
Clarine Seymour and Carol Dempster were professional dancers who
studied with Ruth St. Denis and briefly toured with her dance company.
They performed in a live prologue, together with Rodolfo Di Valantina
(Rudolph Valentino), for the showing of Griffith’s The Greatest Thing in
Life in December 1918 at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles.
Undoubtedly Griffith played the two young women against each other as
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rivals for his attention, as he did with his actresses in Biograph days.
Seymour is shown here with jazzy feet that won’t keep still even after
she has reformed. Dempster, however, has a solo dance sequence, an
artistic dance in the moonlight, to entertain her guests at the chateau,
and to enchant the older Grey boy. Tragedy for the promising young
actors in The Girl Who Stayed at Home came in the next year. Clarine
Seymour died in the spring of 1920 following an emergency operation,
and Bobby Harron died in the summer of the same year from a selfinflicted
gunshot wound (strangely, in the Hotel Seymour in New York,
although there is no hint of a Harron-Seymour real-life romance), on the
eve of the premiere of Way Down East.
While the completion of the production may have been perfunctory, now
that the war was over, The Girl Who Stayed at Home does not show
it. It has a lot of charm, captivating characters, a clever script, and some
absorbing episodes of documented reality of its times. – EILEEN BOWSER
[DWG Project # 580]
Prog. 2
EVENTO MUSICALE / MUSICAL EVENT
TRUE HEART SUSIE (Amore sulle labbra) (D.W. Griffith;
Griffith’s Short Story Series, US 1919)
Regia/dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Lillian Gish, Loyola O’Connor, Robert
Harron, Walter [Wilbur?] Higby, Clarine Seymour, Kate Bruce,
Raymond Cannon, Carol Dempster, George Fawcett; 35mm, 1682 m.,
91’ (16 fps), Det Danske Filminstitut, Kobenhavn.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
Accompagnamento musicale composto e condotto da / Live musical
accompaniment, composed and conducted by Giovanni Spinelli, eseguito
da/performed by Andrea Bellato (violoncello), Gabriele Bellu
(violino/violin), Fabrizio Merlini (viola). Prodotto da/produced by Paolo
Cherchi Usai per/for Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.
(Cfr. sezione “Eventi musicali” / See section “Musical Events”, p. 16)
Alcuni di noi considerano True Heart Susie il capolavoro di Griffith.
Un’asserzione del genere stabilisce probabilmente l’unico criterio
ancora valido per usare termini quali “capolavoro” in un’epoca come
la nostra, così sospettosa dei canoni, e perfino delle valutazioni
critiche. Sicuramente è un’affermazione polemica, nata per sollevare la
discussione e la controversia più che per consolidare un giudizio
tramandato da generazioni. Ma la cosa più importante è che, nella sua
valutazione di eccellenza, essa indica come una discussione del genere
debba implicare un coinvolgimento emotivo (leggasi: passione) da
parte del critico, e almeno altrettanta argomentazione analitica.
L’ammirazione per un film come True Heart Susie non ha nulla a che
vedere con il pluriennale sostegno istituzionale degli apparati culturali
che rendono sospetti i canoni letterari. Riguarda bensì la struttura
narrativa e il punto di vista, ma anche le sottili sfumature
GRIFFITH