God Disposes

This is a rather hackneyed piece of work. It concerns a man who marries an actress and is disinherited. Faced with dire poverty, he decides to try his hand at burglary and comes close to shooting his own father (only failing because his child, unknown to him, has removed the bullets from the gun).

It is always good to have another film from Alice Guy's company Solax and provides a relatively rare chance to see Magda Joy, "the Solax Kid" (in imitation of the Thanhouser company's "Kid". Marie Eline and "Kidlet", Helen Badgley). One curious aspect of these girl child-stars is that they were frequently used to play both male and female children and here a very deliberate ambiguity seems to be maintained (in dress and "Little Lord Fauntleroy" hair-style) regarding the sex of the child. While the cast-list identifies her as "little Gladys", both contemporary reviews scrupulously avoid any such gender identification and the surviving Dutch version of the film quite specifically identifies the child in the final scenes as "the grandson".

This film is the EYE collection and was (as per my original review) previously misidentified as A Terrible Lesson> It is now correctly identified.