The Adventures of Dollie

As I mentioned yesterday evening, I didn't have anything cued up already to post about today, so I took the DVD set of D.W. Griffith shorts that I've got and picked one of the movies to do a post about. The one I picked also happens to be Griffith's directorial debut, The Adventures of Dollie.

As you can see from a card added before the movie begins, this is a movie that survives becaus Griffith sent the positives to the Library of Congress to get the copyright, as films as a whole apparently couldn't be copyrighted back in 1908 when the movie was made. There's a documentary called Fragments that's aired on TCM a couple of times which discusses this. Some filmmakers would just send in one key sequence; others, like Biograph apparently, sent the whole one-reeler in. These scenes can be reconstructed, much in the way flipcards would give the illusion of motion. In the case of The Adventures of Dollie, while the action survives, there are no intertitles beyond the opening titles; I don't know if the original film had intertitles. In any case, the action is easy enough to follow without them.

Dollie is the young daughter of a family who decide to go for an outing at some sort of riverside park. Mom and the daughter end up on a wall by the river, when a pedlar comes along, trying to get Mom to buy something. He's way too pushy and she refuses. Eventually, the pedlar decides to get revenge by kidnapping poor Dollie!, taking her back to his wagon.

The pedlar puts a gagged Dollie in one of his barrels, and he and his wife set off in their wagon. But when they cross the river, it gets bumpy, and one of the barrels falls out. You can probably guess what happens the rest of the way.

The Adventures of Dollie is clearly primitive stuff by the standards of today, but for 1908 it shows Griffith having a pretty good idea of how he wants to use the images to tell a story an in easily understandable way. There's the clearly defined good versus evil, and suspense from a sense of danger, along with a happy ending. Already at this early stage he had potential, and it wouldn't be long before he put it to better effect.

Unsurprisingly, since it's in the public domain, quite a few people have put prints of The Adventures of Dollie on Youtube.