The Unchanging Sea

I've mentioned a couple of times that I picked up a two-disc set of D.W. Griffith shorts and have been going through the shorts on them rather slowly, any time I don't really want to blog about a feature or want a second post on a day. With that in mind, I recently watched another short from the movie, The Unchanging Sea.

Based on a poem by 19th century British writer Charles Kingsley, the movie tells of three fishermen who go out to sea to earn their living. The main character is married, and spends a little time on the beach with his wife before going out to sea:

Not quite Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr

After the fishermen set out to sea, we get the ominous question:

With a question like that, expect the answer to be "No!"

Eventually, our hero washes ashore somewhere other than where he set out, although it's hard to tell since D.W. Griffith had a paucity of filming locations (IMDb says San Pedro and Santa Monica, California):

Definitely not Burt Lancaster, and probably not even Robert Mitchum as Mr. Allison

A lot of time passes, enough for the fisherman's daughter to grow up (played as an adult by Mary Pickford) and fall in love with a fisherman of her own, which understandably frightens Mom.

Upstaged by a cat, more obviously when the film is running

There's a lot to pack in to a little under 14 minutes, and Griffith does fairly well, considering this is still 1910 and pretty early in his career. I found the story to be a bit tough to follow, although that's because you need to pay attention to the story where I was paying more attention to images to pick out for the blog. You can argue that says something about how advanced narrative could be already in 1910.

There are various prints of The Unchanging Sea on Youtube. The print should be in the public domain, but as always with silent movies, if there's backing music that probably wouldn't be in the public domain and that might cause the video to be pulled from Youtube (something that already happened when I posted a link to Griffith's A Corner in Wheat many years ago).