The Sealed Room (1909)

Not really having anything to blog about today, I decided to open up my box set of early D.W. Griffith shorts again and watch one of the shorts on it; this time, the selection was The Sealed Room. This being a one-reeler, clocking in at a little over 11 minutes, there's not a whole lot going on, although the disc menu claims it's based on short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Honoré de Balzac. Arthur Johnson plays a King who has decided to build a private alcove (called here a dovecote) for him and the Queen (Marion Leonard) to have some alone time together, blocking off all the windows and having only one entrance. What the King doesn't know is that the Queen has been getting it on with the Minstrel (a young Henry B. Walthall with a goofy mustache). When he finds the two of them in the dovecote, well, he has his masons seal it off -- with them inside -- out of jealousy. The end

Still, despite The Sealed Room having little plot and a short running time, there's still a fairly good amount of interesting things going on. One is in the picture above; if you notice, the wall of the dovecote has a Biograph logo on it, which I presume is there to deal with would-be copyright thieves, since the logo isn't in its normal corner spot. Johnson as the King looks like he's got some sort of ridiculous eye make-up, and Walthall looks like he's playing something closer to a ukulele than whatever sort of instrument it was supposed to be. I wouldn't have thought that guitars made it to wherever the story was supposed to be set when it was set. But neither the place nor the time is mentioned, and guitars were definitely in Spain from the late 15th century on while they reached France by the end of the 16th century. And Walthall's leering as the minstrel is a hoot.

The Sealed Room, having been made in 1909, is in the public domain, so several prints of it are on Youtube: