The Coward

"The Coward," a 1915 silent era Civil War flick, was designed, written and directed to be enjoyable North and South of Messrs. Mason and Dixon's line. Today it's a curiosity piece both as entertainment and as history (I'm showing it in a few weeks in my law school legal history seminar, "Slavery, the Constitution and the Civil War." Our un-hero is a finely turned out Southern lad, popular with the demure lassies and scion to the small but well-kept estate of a former colonel. The fellow lives with his parents and their two devoted slaves, a cook and a sort of valet-butler.

The call to arms, to defend the South (the South was invaded?), comes and the boy heads to the recruiting station where his contemporaries are eagerly lining up to doff formal attire and don uniforms. He chickens out, goes home and confesses to Pa that's he's chicken. No, thunders dad, no member of our family can be a coward. Get thee back and sign up.

He does so but at the first sign of danger, while on picket duty, he deserts and skedaddles home. Mommy embraces him, the slaves try to hide him and Pa has a royal fit when he finds his worthless, gutless offspring gulping down milk and cookies in the kitchen.

Determined to salvage family honor, Pa enlists as a private, replacing his son. Meanwhile, Union officers have occupied the family home and a hiding in the attic deserter overhears their battle plans. Guess how the story develops from there.

A tale of honor cravenly lost and then heroically redeemed, "The Coward" is the kind of satisfying melodrama that early moviegoers loved. The actors magnify their facial expressions to compensate for silently mouthed dialog.

Southerners watching "The Coward" could bask in the family loyalty to the Confederacy and the pliant, loving submission of slaves. Northerners saw an honorable foe whose forces but not spirit could be beaten.

A neat relic from the vaults of the silents.

8/10

I think a lot of the impact of this early silence feature film is lost today, but more about that later in the review. When it was released in 1915, attitudes about plot and drama were very different than today. Predictability was expected from movies and what we would consider over-acting was the norm. Also, having white folks run around in black face playing slaves was, unfortunately, pretty widely accepted. And so, by 1915 standards, this is an exceptional movie and one of the earliest full-length films ever made. I think it is a lot better than its much-admired contemporary, BIRTH OF A NATION--which is ponderously long and one of the most racist films made in America. Unfortunately for the makers of this film, people in 1915 preferred BIRTH OF A NATION and it went on to make a ton of money and was hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. That's really a shame, because there are some exceptional aspects to this film that have been overlooked. In particular, the costumes and battle sequences are excellent (though not quite as grand as those in BIRTH OF A NATION) and the story, though very simplistic and predictable, is still compelling. And, its use of two white folks in black makeup, though appalling, is not nearly as offensive as about 90% of the other film.

Now, as for today's audiences, the plot is very very dusty to say the least. Having the son be afraid of war and deserting was excellent, but the contrived way that his own father accidentally shoots and kills him in battle is so over-the-top dramatically (though not in its day). BUT, it is STILL worth seeing for its historical value. Not a great or memorable film, but one of the most watchable of the early feature-length films.

Coward, The (1915)

*** (out of 4)

One of the handful of Civil War films that were rushed into production and released after D.W. Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION became what's probably the biggest hit of all time. This film here deals with Confederate soldier Frank Winslow (Charles Ray) who is terrified of the war and runs away as a battle is about to begin. His father (Frank Keenan) is a decorated soldier and is embarrassed why his son so he pretty much turns his back on him but soon the son is going to have a chance to redeem himself. There's no doubt that this thing isn't in the same league as the Griffith film but at the same time it's still a pretty good little picture. I think the most interesting this is the actual story because it's pretty much saying you're worthless if you're scared to die for your country. I think the film goes a bit too dramatic during the relationship of the son and father. This relationship includes a sequence where the father loads his pistol to shoot the son if he doesn't enlist in the war and even follows him to the enlistment office and again threatens to shoot him. I found the father character to be rather laughable and he'll certainly go down in history as the most pathetic father I've seen in a movie. The jerk is that bad and we get a sequence towards the end where the son might be dying and the father refuses to say he knows the kid. One major plus for the film are the costumes, which all look like they're real. The battle scenes aren't nearly as grand as the one in the Griffith film but they still look pretty good on their own. The performance by Ray is actually pretty good as he does a nice job at showing fear as his character goes through quite a bit here. The pain from his father's rejection is also something else the actor handles quite well. Keenan, on the other hand, is downright awful here. You'll never see me bashing silent acting because it is what it was at the time. I think it's unfair to bash acting from 1910 because it's not like the acting we see today or saw in the 30s or 40s. However, Keenan's acting appears to be coming from the 1620s. Just take a look at how slowly he moves no matter what his character is doing. I'd swear on my life that he moves slower than a zombie. If he goes to raise his hand it takes a good fifteen-seconds. If he goes to turn around that's probably twenty-seconds. If he goes to stand up it's probably thirty-seconds. You get the point. The movie runs 77-minutes but if Keenan would move at a normal speed we'd probably be looking at a movie under an hour. Even with that bad performance there's still enough to make fans of the silent era check this thing out. It's certainly not a classic or a masterpiece but it's an interesting story with a fine lead performance and some great outfits. The film shares a lot in common with Griffith's THE HOUSE WITH CLOSED SHUTTERS.

The DVD "Civil War Films of the Silent Era" has three Thomas Ince productions on it-- the highly successful 1915 feature The Coward, starring Charles Ray and Frank Keenan (Keenan Wynn's grandfather, incidentally, and at times you can definitely tell), plus two shorts from 1913, Granddad and The Drummer of the 8th. The former is directed by Reginald Barker, who I daresay is the only director most of us could associate with Triangle (he directed The Italian, Civilization, several Hart westerns, etc.)

It's pretty tough not to compare a 1915 film about the South to a certain D.W. Griffith film, and on the evidence Barker was highly capable and in some ways more fluid in his storytelling than Griffith, but didn't have Griffith's eye for the iconic actorly gesture that summed up character in a flash. There's nothing flashy about the on-screen agonizing that represents the delineation of character here, which is well acted for the period but takes literally a third of the movie to get across a fairly simple setup-- Dad (Keenan) is a proud Suthanah and gennelmun, Son (Ray) is a weakling who runs away from the enlisting office, and Dad orders Son to sign up and remembah that he is a Winslow, suh. There's a lot of knuckle-biting to get to that point.

Once Ray deserts the movie picks up noticeably, and the action scenes are very nicely handled-- the manner in which Ray eludes capture in his own house is ingenious and nicely in character for someone who was a boy in the home, for instance. Watching it there are enough echoes of The General-- the enlistment opening, spying from beneath a table, etc.-- that you have to think that Keaton was drawing on memories of it, even if unconsciously. The battle scenes are fairly brief but impressively scaled (especially next to those in the shorts-- it's much like the difference in scale between the battle in The Battle of Elderbush Gulch and The Birth).

But perhaps most interesting is what's missing-- The Birth's racial attitudes. This is much closer to Gone With the Wind's benevolent-paternalist view of master-slave relations, and while a definite air of Old South nostalgia/apologia fills the film, it feels right, for instance, that when Ray first sneaks into his home as a deserter, it's the servants who probably really raised him who take him in and try to ease the discovery of his action by his parents. (Of course, they may also have approved of desertion from the Confederate army...)

A story of the old code of family honor at the dawn of the Cibil War and the way that reluctance to throw one's life away was treated with disgrace and exile. The acting is overwrought by today's standard but mixed in with the exaggeration are some bits of touching human emotion.

Seeing as the film is now one hundred years old and was made about facts that at that point were only fifty years in the past the film makers were able to have a perspective on events that is impossible to us now. As such this is a precious piece of cinema.

As a movie it's a hoary old chestnut but as an historical document it's fascinating. The damage to the print actually adds to the feeling that you're watching a series of Matthew Brady daguerreotypes come to life.