The Avenging Conscience redux

About two years ago, I mentioned that somebody over at the TCM boards had watched the 1914 D.W. Griffith movie The Avenging Conscience or: Thou Shalt Not Kill, a silent I had never heard of. There are several prints on Youtube, and I downloaded one what with the movie being in the public domain. I finally got around to watching it recently.

Henry B. Walthall plays a man whose mother died in childbirth and who was raised by his uncle (Spottiswoode Aitken). The Nephew grows up and is set to inherit his uncle's modest estate at some point. But the Nephew falls in love with The Girl (Blanche Sweet), a girl of modest means whom the uncle either doesn't like or just doesn't think is of an appropriate class for his nephew.

At this point things turn weird, as D.W. Griffith seems to be taking multiple pages from Edgar Allen Poe. The movie uses title cards containing lines from Poe's poem "Annabel Lee", which are clearly meant to refer to The Girl. Meanwhile, The Nephew has been reading Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart", which gives him ideas of how to deal with his uncle. Of course, if you know the Poe story, you know that the beating of that heart is going to play on The Nephew's conscience....

I found The Avenging Conscience to be quite the strange movie, as it seemed to include a whole mish-mash of things that didn't always fit together. There was a brief story line about a maid and a grocery delivery boy who were in love that didn't seem to go anywhere, and an epilogue that looked like it was a preview for Mickey Rooney's Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. And the resolution of the main plot doesn't quite follow "The Tell-Tale Heart" either.

The Avenging Conscience isn't the greatest movie I've ever seen, but it's certainly worth a watch.