His Trust, Part 1

I wanted to review a movie today and not just do another entry in the Thursday Movie Picks blogathon, so I decided I'd do a short. I popped by D.W. Griffith box set into the DVD player, and the next one on the set that I hadn't done a post on was His Trust.

This being a 14-minute movie, there's not much plot. It's the Civil War, and southern Col. Frazier goes off to fight, leaving his wife and young daughter to be taken care of by their loyal house slave George (Wilfred Lucas in blackface). Sure enough, Col. Frazier is killed in action, followed by nasty Union forces burning down the Frazier place. George, however, stands by the lady of the house.

His Trust has any number of problems, although the one that everybody is going to jump on is that of having white actors put on blackface to play the black characters. Needless to say, this ranges from people looking like the sort of college student who covers his face in body paint at its least bad, to some characters looking quite ghoulish, notably the female servant, who I don't think has a name. George having the wrong color hair doesn't help:

The other big problem is that Griffith conceived His Trust as a longer movie (about 25 minutes), while Biograph insisted on releasing another one-reeler. So the movie got split in two, as a title card informs us at the beginning, with the other half being His Trust Fulfilled. The result is a short that ends abruptly, leaving us with all sorts of unresolved plot points, because, frankly, this isn't the end of the movie. My box set doesn't have His Trust Fulfilled, although there seems to be several edits available on Youtube, since the movie is in the public domain.

On the other hand, His Trust already shows Griffith's adeptness at composition. The battle scene that kills Col. Frazier is well-handled with the exception of the actor playing Frazier keeping his eyes open in death, while there was a really nice shot in the house-burning scene:

I'm glad I picked up the Griffith box set, as movies that old don't show up very often.