This is the featured film of the 9th of 12 Conquest Film programs released by the Edison company in 1917. All five titles from that have recently been restored and issued on dvd by Fritzi Kramer with a score by Ben Model in cooperation with the Library of Congress via a Kickstarter program. Ms. Kramer hopes to have the set available for more general release soon.
Raymond McKee is David Balfour, a young lad who, on the death of his father, is sent to his ancestral home of the Shaws, occupied by his uncle, Joseph Burke. Burke was the younger son, and so had no right to the estate, but McKee's father let him have it; now, though, his son should have his rights. Burke, however, has no such intentions. He tries to kill McKee. Failing in that, he has him kidnapped -- or, as we might say nowadays, shanghaied -- aboard a ship bound for North America and slavery. Onto the stage of this story steps Robert Cain as Alan Breck, a swaggering adventurer who, confronted with a boatload of men who mean him harm, leads McKee in a two-man mutiny, then across the wilds of Scotland, back towards the Shaws.
Alan Crosland directs with a sure hand, and offers some views that are surprising to me, despite what I consider a good understanding of silent movies. Although he uses the compositions of the film screen and the infinite vistas well, he sometimes uses theater effects, like spotlights, to focus the eye. The actors are all capable, the characters well-drawn, if broadly so, and the print the dvd was drawn from was handsomely toned -- a coloring process in which the silver nitrate which formed the blacks and grays of most black-and-white prints were replaced by other, more colorful compounds.
All of these -- the bright colors, the broad strokes of character, can be explained by the source material. Robert Louis Stevenson had originally written his novel for young readers -- what we would classify these days as Young Adult Fiction -- and in works like this and TREASURE ISLAND, he invented a new branch of literature. This production captures those impulses excellently for the cinema of a hundred years ago.
This would not be one of my reviews if I did not point out a flaw or two. The minor one is that some of the titles were hard to read. Perhaps, before making the dvd generally available, the titles could be redone in a more legible form. The second flaw is more basic. Raymond McKee is, alas, too old to play David Balfour. At the time of the production of this movie he was 24 or 25. Master Balfour was a callow youth, perhaps ten years younger. In any era when people played children when they were in their 40s. it would not have mattered. Today it requires a greater stretch of the imagination than I or, I fear, most of even a willing audience, can manage.
