The Violin Maker of Cremona (1909)
Released 7th June 1909
Mary Pickford had to perform an unscheduled audition to win her first starring role in the movies. On her first day at Biograph, she was an extra in D. W. Griffith’s Her First Biscuits. Once he had completed filming, the director asked her if she knew anything about lovemaking (which in 1909 had a far more innocent meaning than today). The seventeen-year-old actress lied, claiming that she did. Griffith wanted proof, but she refused to pretend to make love to a papier mâché pillar, insisting it was impossible to summon emotion with a prop. So, Griffith press-ganged the actor Owen Moore to be her partner. The mortified actress refused to kiss Moore but permitted an embrace. Despite her chaste performance, Griffith liked what he saw; he cast her opposite Moore in The Violin Maker of Cremona, an adaptation of François Coppée’s 1876 one-act play. Less than two years later, she and Moore were married.
In the film, Pickford plays second fiddle (ahem) to Moore and David Miles, another recruit from the stage. They play violin makers competing in an annual competition to make the most beautiful instrument. Each year the winner receives a fine gold chain; but this year, there is an added incentive. Ferrari (Herbert Prior), the violin maker staging the competition, also offers the hand in marriage of his daughter, Giannina (Pickford). This unexpected development understandably irks Giannina, who loves Sandro (Moore). She knows – as does he – that his skill is inferior to his friend’s, the disabled Filippo (Miles), who also worships Giannina. In desperation, Sandro swaps his violin with Filippo’s. But without realising Sandro has done so, Filippo, accepting that Giannina will never love him, does the same.
Griffith appears to have applied little creativity or thought to The Violin Maker of Cremona. Unlike in Albert Capellani’s otherwise inferior 1909 French version, Griffith provides his characters with no back-story. For example, Capellani shows Filippo rescuing a mistreated dog, establishing his kind nature and providing context to the characters’ dilemma. Miles does so little to portray Filippo’s deformity it barely registers. The shortage of explanatory intertitles also makes the story unclear.
Despite Griffith shooting the entire film in long shot, as if from in front of a theatre stage, the film earned praise for its cinematography. The New York Dramatic Mirror reported that “The photography is particularly artistic – the closing scene in which the light is made to fade away on the figure of the sorrowful youth who has made the supreme sacrifice being art in its highest sense”. The shot the reviewer describes is the film’s sole stylistic flourish: it is almost a minute long, including a nineteen-second fade to black. Griffith achieved the lighting effect using an electrical dimmer outside the set.
The Violin Maker of Cremona proved to be one of Griffith’s lesser works, and a comparatively inauspicious start to Pickford’s movie career.