Runtime: 70 minutes
Directed by: Irvin Willat
Starring: Hobart Wadsworth, Jane Novak, James Gordon, J.P. Lockney, Wallace Beery
From: Paramount
This was a “superdrama”, indeed. I never know whether to name people I follow on Letterboxd or not; what will be revealed: one recently reviewed this film, described as the “most brutal silent” then another gave a review, also positive. As the restoration is on YouTube (more on that at the end), I couldn’t turn down this curio.
The opening is a gentleman named Oscar Krug, returning to a bucolic little Maine town… in 1925. The viewer discovers he had a taxidermy shop, long-since abandoned. He finds an old handkerchief and sighs wistfully to days of yore; except for the ending, the rest of the film is in flashback to 1917 & 1918. Krug loved a girl named Alice. Despite his status as a nice man who even assists children w/ fixing a sailboat or a doll torn apart, he experiences prejudice as it’s World War I time & he’s of German heritage--the father of Alice does not approve, especially once the United States enters the war. As least we don’t have that sort of behavior now in the States concerning someone born in the country with “a foreign-sounding” name, especially from a country that the United States has heat with…
To be serious again, a xenophobic brawl happens outside the shop, resulting in torn clothes & obvious facial bruising. Oscar gets out of town, enlisting in the Navy. Oscar and Alice secretly wed; the father throws her out. You see, he wants his early 20’s daughter to marry his chosen middle-aged guy instead of the middle-aged Oscar. Yes, unfortunate age gaps like this occurred in cinema even that long ago. Things happen, Oscar meets the evil German submarine captain Wallace Beery-recently, I discovered that this actor, often portraying villains, was likely a villain IRL; you can read his Wiki page and discover the accusations former wife Gloria Swanson made against him.
After a horrifying act, Krug is looking for revenge, and I’ll just say that Norman Bates wasn’t the first taxidermist to stun audiences in a motion picture. We are told what Krug did as an act of revenge; it’d leave audiences flabbergasted for a protagonist to do that NOW in a film. Even w/o the benefit of spoken dialogue, the pure rage from Krug was palpable. The interactions between Krug and the evil Lieutenant Brandt were the highlight. Between that and a woman’s sexual assault, people in 2026 won’t believe this was released by Paramount, but ‘tis true.
This was a compelling 70-minute journey that was restored in 2016 by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Library of Congress, and Russia’s Gosfilmofond; the latter two had different prints that were combined-even then, two scenes had to be represented by stills as no known complete print exists. Be that as it may, the restoration was of high quality. Accompanied by an appropriate score from Stephen Horne, I was happy w/ the restoration and that such a wild silent wasn’t lost to the sands of time. Flicker Alley (a great niche label I’ve mentioned on several occasions in the past) have the movie on Blu if anyone’s interested.
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