A Romance of Happy Valley

I've got enough silent films on my DVR that I really should be going through them more quickly. I've got at least one more John Gilbert movie to do, and all the movies I recorded during Silent Movie Day last September. In addition, I recently sat down to watch one that was totally new to me: A Romance of Happy Valley.

This one opened up with what looked like surprisingly modern intertitles, and it turns out that the movie was considered lost for many years until a copy was found in a Soviet archive, naturally without English intertitles. The movie is set in rural Kentucky, where almost everybody seems to be surprisingly OK with their lot in life, despite it not being a very prosperous life. The one person who isn't is Joshua Logan, Jr. (Robert Harron, who died tragically a year after the movie was released). He's apparently read about New York, and the possibility of making big money there. This would allow him to return home and buy his parents' farm and, I'm guessing, offer the family some financial security.

But Dad especially, and to a lesser extent Mom, think the big city is sinful and the rural life is virtuous. Dad, and pretty much everyone else, tries to get Joshua Jr. not to leave, and to become a good Christian and vow that he'll stay in rural Kentucky. The one person who at least has a halfway decent reason for wanting Joshua Jr. to stay is Jenny Timberlake (Lillian Gish). She's the stock character of the girl who grew up with the boy and fell in love with him, with the thought that they'd always get married when they grew up. She's also helping take care of her widower father.

Eventually, Joshua Jr. has had enough of it and runs away in the middle of the night, tellng Jennie that he's going to New York for one year which should be enough time for him to earn the money he needs to return home a success. He gets a job with a toy manufacturer, being given the assignment of making a novelty toy frog that will float in water. (I don't think the sort of clear plastic that would float had been invented yet.) So Joshua Jr. doesn't become a success in year one; instead, it takes him seven years or so to get the money to come home.

Additionally, he's stopped writing, so he doesn't know what's going on back in Kentucky. Dad is in danger of losing the farm, which has a mortgage on it. So the elder Logans have to take in boarders. Joshua does come back, but nobody recognizes him. At about the same time, somebody robs one of the local banks and stops at the Logan place for a room. So all of the plot strands come together for the climax....

A Romance of Happy Valley was made by D.W. Griffith, and I can see why it remained unknown to me until know. I've seen several of the other titles that Griffith made and are the ones that people might think of when they think of Griffith. To be honest, all of those are better. It's not that Romance of Happy Valley is a bad movie; it's more that it feels like there's nothing terribly original or distinctive about it the way there was with the better-known Griffith movies. But it's still worth one watch at least.