This is fun little film, a rather early feature-length silent picture, "Hoodoo Ann". It's episodic and has some other shortcomings, but they don't seem to be as bothersome here. The first part, for instance, is of an orphanage where teenage girls and adult women pretending to be small children (like Mae Marsh, in her early twenties) live beside significantly younger boys. After the orphanage burns down (a rather sensational scene to progress the plot), the second episode is an idyllic coming-of-age romance between Marsh and Robert Harron, which is similar to other such pictures D.W. Griffith made, including "True Heart Susie" and "A Romance of Happy Valley" (both 1919). The final episode involves a dramatic gun accident and mystery, which completely deviates from whatever center the narrative may have once had a semblance of. It doesn't matter, though; it's all entertaining with a mostly light and breezy treatment.
Perhaps the best scene here involves the film-within-the-film, which is between the romantic and climactic episodes--inspiring the climax through life imitating art. Harron and Marsh go "to 'the movin' pitchers'", where they see a more than five minutes long film "Mustang Charley's Revenge". This inner-film is a clever spoof of contemporary William S. Hart Westerns. Carl Stockdale plays the Hart parody and even looks a bit like him. The woman, however, is unlike anyone I've seen in Hart's Westerns, which usually involved a more demure, pure Christian woman rather than the cowgirl Rose played by "Pansy Thorne". This burlesque mercilessly jabs at the plots of Hart's Westerns and at acting styles embracing broad gestures. I'm even one of the apparently few people who enjoy Hart's films today, but, then, that might be why I appreciate the parody as much. Hart seems to have been ripe for satirizing: Keystone, with Mack Swain, parodied him, too, the same year with "His Bitter Pill", and Buster Keaton later made fun of Hart in "The Frozen North" (1922). The entire construction of the film-within-the-film scene is quite good, too, in comparison to similar scenes. It includes cutting back and forth between the projected movie to shots of our surrogates Harron and Marsh watching it. The double-exposure effect is rather seamless; except for when the two enter the theatre, the superimposition is betrayed by overlapping the tops of their heads.
Griffith-veterans Marsh and Harron are very good here. They played similar coming-of-age roles in Griffith's directed films, including Marsh in "The Birth of a Nation" and "The White Rose" and Harron in "A Romance of Happy Valley" and "True Heart Susie". In 1916, they also co-starred in the modern story in "Intolerance". I don't think "Hoodoo Ann" is good just for its good parts overshadowing what would otherwise be problems of an episodic narrative and other unconvincing or far-fetched elements, either; rather, they're insignificant, as they don't interfere with the fun. This is one of my favorite non-"special" pictures, or "programmers" from its time.
