Once you've watched a lot of early silent dramas you notice certain themes which recur on a regular basis. A popular motif in nickelodeon days was that of the criminal who reforms and chooses a better mode of life, usually thanks to the love of a good woman who believes in him. This plot turns up often, especially in the Westerns of William S. Hart (and others), as well as in contemporary crime stories. By the mid-1910s the reformation trope was so familiar it was ripe for spoofing; Charlie Chaplin utilized it in his two-reel comedy 'Police,' which was itself a reworking of His Regeneration, a serious drama starring Broncho Billy Anderson in which Chaplin had appeared in a cameo role.
D. W. Griffith's short drama The Transformation of Mike, made for the American Biograph Company in 1912, uses the theme in a straightforward fashion. Familiar leading man Wilfred Lucas, who also wrote the scenario, plays Mike, a young man who takes a room in a tenement. He encounters a young woman (Blanche Sweet) who lives in the same building with her father and brother. Despite their modest lodgings Blanche's father is fairly prosperous, and he makes the mistake of flashing a wad of bills in a tavern. Mike notices the man's money, but is unaware that he's Blanche's father.
Later, when Mike sees Blanche at a neighborhood party, he invites her to dance with him. Her friends warn her away, however; it seems he has a reputation as a dubious character. She refuses him and dances with a bland young fellow instead. Mike brusquely cuts in and orders the other man away. Blanche is offended by this, and steadfastly refuses to dance with him. They argue, and we get the sense that, despite his anger, Mike rather admires her spirit.
Soon afterward, back at the tenement, Mike breaks into the apartment where the prosperous man lives, ties him up, and robs him. Blanche and her brother, in the next room, react fearfully and take cover; the boy escapes in a dumbwaiter and alerts the police. And then Mike and Blanche see each other, and Mike realizes he's robbing her father. He's shocked of course, and so is she. (Talk about awkward!) They talk it over briefly, and Mike is ashamed. When the police arrive, Blanche helps him escape, and it's implied he'll go straight and become a better person. We never find out whether Mike is truly "transformed," so the ending is ambiguous, but hopeful.
The Transformation of Mike tells its tale in a direct and uncluttered fashion, and is performed with the earnest intensity we associate with the Biograph players. One unusual aspect of this film is that an unedited print exists; that is, a reel of the original rushes, as they appeared before Griffith edited them into the finished product. While it's common knowledge that movies are usually filmed out of sequence, it's nonetheless interesting to see how the director and his crew organized this raw material. For instance, all the scenes at the top of the tenement stairs were filmed back to back; and then, all the scenes at the bottom of the stairs were done the same way. Various characters come and go, the police dash in and out, etc. It looks like a jumble, but of course, by 1912 Griffith had become quite expert at assembling these random pieces of film into a perfectly coherent and satisfying whole. The Transformation of Mike, in its finished form, stands as a good example of what made Griffith's Biograph output the top dramatic short films of the era.
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