This movie makes a story out of an Old Ballad I had never heard before. I immediately went and listened to it for forty seconds before growing weary of its slow story, typical of Ye Olde Ballade in which Young Sir Whosis has been poisoned by La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and instead of letting him vomit and die, mommy wants all the details and for him to rewrite his will so she gets Great-Uncle Herman's Waterford Crystal, which should have come to her, but it went to her b*tch of a sister, who left it to Whosis, just to spite her, just like her, and it's so selfish of you to be thinking of yourself and dying when you should be thinking of me. You're just like your father that way.
Anyway, in this story, J. Hastings Batson wants Basil Gill to marry Grania Gray, but Gill wants to go fishing in Scotland. There he meets Violet Graham, the miller's daughter, and eventually they get married secretly, because otherwise there would be no Dramatic Conflict. There was a lot of that going around the movie industry in this period -- there still is -- and ordinarily I wouldn't care. The camerawork is good, the acting is good, the story is ok, if standard, even if it falls into the already-antiquated "illustrated text" style of film making, in which most of the times the actors just do what the titles tell you they were going to do -- sometimes the titles tell you what the actors just did. There's a lot of outdoor shooting, and you get to see real, old buildings, and you can tell they're not sets. Beautiful.
Moving back a little, the problem is those titles. Sometimes they're lifted from the ballad, lines like "On the banks of the Allan Water, none is so sad as she." Then you see Miss Graham being sad. That's all right. However, at other times, the titles turn long-winded and clunkily expository, like "Feeling that Richard is incapable of such heartlessness, Elsie determines to go to Strathallan to see him." The inability to maintain a consistent auctorial voice in the titles is disconcerting.
It's still very early days for title-writing, an art that would not be seen as much more than a matter of utility until the 1920s. It's movies like this, which would have been great successes had such things been available, that showed their need.
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