The Miser's Heart

I didn't have anything planned to blog about today, so I went in the closet where I've got a bunch of my DVDs packed up and pulled out both the cheap Mill Creek box set of John Wayne films, and the two-disc set of D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts. Since the shorts are, well, shorter, I watched one of the movies on that disc that I hadn't seen before, The Miser's Heart.

There are multiple stories going on here, although they all come together. Kathy is a little girl living with her mother, who falls ill, leaving Kathy to play on her own for the day. Kathy lives downstairs from the titular miser, who seems to be a bit less of a miser and more of a man who just doesn't trust banks and keeps his money in a safe in his apartment. But that's a target for thieves, and two men are going to come looking for that money.

Meanwhile, Jules (a young Lionel Barrymore) is a thief who steals a bag of food from a working class man, and runs off with the bag, winding up in the courtyard behind the building where Kathy and the miser live, so he meets Kathy and their stories intertwine first that way. But then, something more dramatic happens when the big-time thieves come, looking for the miser's money. Kathy happens to be in the miser's room at the time, so the thieves more or less kidnap her and hold her hostage outside, hanging from a second-story window!

Jules sees Kathy and is able to save the day, in what is an interesting little two-reeler that already shows Griffith's growing command of techniques like inter-cutting and how to build up suspense. The acting (which according to the cast list on IMDb and Wikipedia, as the movie has no credits, also includes a young Donald Crisp), is not much to write home about, since movies were still early enough and being churned out fast enough that learning the techniques for effect movie acting were still taking a back seat. But the movie is still entertaining enough.

One other thing to note is the presence of the American Biograph logo on the stairwell, which I presume was included as an extra attempt to maintain copyright, since the copyright laws still hadn't been updated to facilitate copyrighting entire movies.

The Miser's Heart is in the public domain now anyway and you should be able to find a copy on your favorite video site.