The Evidence of the Film

Watching old movies one regularly discovers that there's nothing new under the sun, as fifty years before the Zapruder film a film company accidentally records evidence that solves a crime (and as usual captures clear images far from the eye-straining security camera footage one continues to get in real life).

Enhanced by scenes actually shot in New York when Taft was still president, it also demonstrates that even in those early days film acting was already free of that exhausting arm-waving often derided as 'silent film acting'; while over sixty years before Verna Fields won her Oscar for editing 'Jaws' the editing suite at Thanhouser was already seemingly staffed entirely by women!

A messenger boy (Marie Eline, a girl) is wrongfully accused of stealing bonds worth $20,000.

The only known copy of this film was rediscovered in 1999 on the floor of the projection booth in a Superior, Montana movie theater. In 2001, this film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

How the heck a film that was lost and then found discarded (in Montana!) looks as good as it does is a mystery. We can holdout hope that more lost films will turn up, though it seems less likely all the time. This one is a great little crime caper, even if they are trying to pass a girl off as a boy for some reason.

One of the better existing Thanhouser movies. 11-year-old 'Thanhouser Kid' Marie Eline once again plays a boy, this time a messenger boy wrongly suspected of stealing $20,000 of bonds when he's framed by a crooked financier (William Garwood). The hero of the day isn't the lovely Florence La Badie, who's criminally under-used, but the Thanhouser Studio, whose crew manage to capture some damning evidence.

"The Evidence of the Film" is one of the relics of cinema's early days. It's a product of the Thanhouser Company, a studio in the New York area whose work is mostly lost. The surviving ones tend to have simple plots (this one involves a boy suspected of theft).

An example of just how early in cinema this was is that Charlie Chaplin hadn't yet debuted in movies. The people making it probably never guessed that movies would eventually entail sound, color, and plots so intellectually profound as to be over-the-top (2001: A Space Odyssey).

Anyway, it's worth seeing as a look at cinema's infancy. The girl who plays the accused boy acted for a few more years after this before retiring.

The Evidence of the Film (1913)

**** (out of 4)

Excellent Thanhouser film has a broker stealing $20,000 from a person who demands it back. He sets up a plot to where it seems like a messenger boy is delivering the money but he actually swaps out the envelope, which leads the boy into trouble. What neither of them expected was a film crew to be on the scene.

THE EVIDENCE OF THE FILM is without question one of the studios greatest films. Considering over eight hundred of their films are currently lost, it's hard to go out on a limb and call it the greatest but it's certainly an important film that mixed drama and crime with movies playing an important part in the story. What makes this film so special is that it actually gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the Thanhouser editing room, which is great to see today. Another strong aspect is that the story itself is quite clever even though the title of the film pretty much gives away the ending. Still, there's no question that this is a rather important one and an excellent one at that.