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Show people and society swells, D.W. Griffith mediates the opposites and gives W.C. Fields a proper entrance, tripping over a pooch and greeting the tyke hugging his leg with a puff of cigar smoke. Melodrama sets the stage with the New England judge (Erville Alderson) disowning his daughter, she expires in a circus tent while back home mother (Effie Shannon) brings one of her dolls to her bosom. "A strange, whimsical creature," orphaned Sally (Carol Dempster) is the galumphing waif protected by Fields' Prof. McGargle, a warm-hearted sideshow shyster. Riding the rails, drenched by water towers and dried in coal furnaces, "shivering needs—desperate remedies." A menace to the crank who cannot recognize his own granddaughter, to the magnate's son (Alfred Lunt) a vision of raw loveliness. (The seduction on the meadow continues on a dormant carousel, with a close-up of hands and flowers recalled by Renoir in Partie de campagne.) Slapstick tumult cracks the Victorian ice: One melee is dispersed by a charging pachyderm, another has the big top crashing down and Fields escaping with feather headdress and stogie. The comic juggling at the carnival might be documentary footage of the Ziegfeld Follies, bar stool and spittoon sprout from his peanut cart, the ink pen dipped in the coffee mug and the bowler hat caught in the cane are already in place. (So is the jalopy that comes apart as it races toward the courtroom, the link between the climaxes of Intolerance and Man on the Flying Trapeze.) The verdict is a Griffithian fountain of tears plus a Fieldsian punchline, the con-man's natural evolution into real estate business. "Sally, you are growing up!" With Charles Hammond, Roy Applegate, and Glenn Anders. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |