The Salvation Army Lass

It may be "obvious" to one reviewer that the versions available of this film were restored by the Salvation Army, but anyone who actually knows anything abou the history of ilm restoration will know better.. You can find the version in at least two places (with or without Salvation Army introduction just as you please) but in each case the version of the film itself is the same. It is a Renovare restoration and Renovare - not to be confused with Renovaré which is some sort of religious organisation -was the restoration process devised by Kemp Niver in the 1950s that made the restoration of the huge bulk of films from the paper-print copies held by the Library of Congress possible and it was the Library of Congress itself that funded the restorations. . At that time some 60-70,000 feet had been copied but there remained two million feet of film that hadn't and Renovare were able by both restore and document vastly more footage, resulting in the monumental Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection of 1967.

These are early restorations in terms of the long march towards the recovery of some part of the world's pre-1930 film heritage and there are many things that can be criticised but pioneering efforts deserve to be respected and I feel a small apology is due to the Salvation Army and a very large one to the memory of Kemp Niver who died in 1996.

If you take a look at the version of this movie that has been posted to Youtube, you are not, I think, getting anything like the original theatrical version. Most obviously, the way the film moves -- derived from Library of Congress Paper prints -- is jerky. This is common to most of the older paper-print-derived Griffiths. Comparing versions of THE CURTAIN POLE from the 1970s with ones from the 2000s also shows a jerky movement that recent restorations lack. In addition, the long titles, including one or two that directly address Florence Lawrence's character, are nothing at all like any other Griffith movie I have ever seen. The conclusion that seems obvious to me is that this was restored by the Salvation Army for its own, didactic purposes, by people who seem to have no familiarity with the rapidly-evolving state of the art in the era in which it was made. The brass-band arrangement seems poor to me, but that is a matter of taste.

Trying to make sense of it in terms of Griffith in 1909, I noticed his increasing command of crowd scenes, both in the tavern and on the street, where Miss Lawrence first encounters the Salvation Army; everyone is doing something that makes sense, and the flow of movement helps direct the eye. In addition, a later shot, in which people approach the camera, shows a moving composition that Griffith had first tried in 1908 and which would reach its peak in THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY.

Other than those bits, it's impossible to say much about this movie.

The 34 year old D.W. Griffith breaks film making down to its finest component in this 15 minute film. He has a habit of romanticizing the past through the flashback, almost as though he is re-dreaming history in a palatable format.