The Avenging Conscience (1914)
Released 24th August 1914
Although joining the Aitken brothers at Majestic allowed D. W. Griffith greater artistic freedom through producing longer pictures, he worked a schedule no less punishing than that at Biograph. The brothers’ finances were so precarious, Majestic relied on the director’s films to finance its operations. Perhaps such pressure took its toll. When younger brother Roy Aitken, who felt he had developed a close relationship with Griffith, met the director in New York, he noticed an aloofness that hadn’t been there before he migrated to California.
Whatever pressure Griffith might have been under, the quality of his output didn’t suffer. Even his first quickly made films for Majestic – which were also his last before beginning work on The Birth of a Nation – were well-received. Of the four films, the last is one of Griffith’s most overlooked and under-appreciated works.
The director was a keen fan of American horror writer Edgar Allan Poe, a fellow Southerner, and had made a short biopic about him in 1909. For The Avenging Conscience (filmed under the working title The Murderer’s Conscience), he drew inspiration from two of Poe’s works: his short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, and the poem Annabel Lee. The principal character, played by Henry B. Walthall, is a budding author who also idolises Poe, and the girl he loves he calls Annabel.
Walthall’s character, known only as The Nephew, loves Annabel (Blanche Sweet), but the ageing uncle (Spottiswoode Aitken), who has raised him since his mother died in childbirth, opposes their romance. Despite their love for one another, the couple decide to part, but, inspired by the works of Poe and his witnessing of the cycle of murder in the natural world – a spider catching a fly in its web; ants devouring a bug – the nephew’s thoughts turn to murder, and he strangles his uncle in his home. Then, after concealing the body within the brickwork of the fireplace, visions of his victim torment the nephew and religious hallucinations threaten his sanity.
Walthall, like all of Griffith’s regular players, was very adept at signalling emotion with the slightest change of expression: a barely perceptible widening of the eyes or flaring of the nostrils, a glassy stare, a tightening of the lips. Here, he calls upon his talent for the understated gesture to signal incipient madness. It is easy to forget that he doesn’t see the superimposed visions we see on the screen, but is reacting to empty space (coached, no doubt, by Griffith’s constant instructions – a benefit of directing during the silent era). The success of the film rests on the believability of Walthall’s performance, and, except for a few hammy moments, he manages admirably. One scene stands out: the nephew trying to maintain a veneer of normality as a suspicious police detective questioning him at his home – the murder scene – taps a pen on a tabletop and his foot on the floor while a clock ticks nearby. Few – if any – silent movies make use of ‘sound’ in such a powerful way, signifying both the systematic unravelling of the nephew’s psyche and the telltale beat of the victim’s heart that haunts him.
A study in psychological decline rather than a crime thriller, Griffith’s film mines material previously unexplored by filmmakers, and pre-dates German expressionism by half-a-decade. The story he tells explores the same themes as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and even incorporates the same ending – although Griffith’s, it has to be said, is less satisfying. Presumably, he felt audiences of the day weren’t ready for the logical conclusion to all that had gone before, which would arguably have elevated the film to classic status.
A familiar name found in the lower reaches of the cast list – he doesn’t even receive a credit in the film – is future screen heartthrob Wallace Reid. He had only been with Universal for a year, but already Reid felt as if he were on a treadmill, churning out movies which he co-wrote with his wife and leading lady Dorothy Davenport and directed as well as starring in at a rate of sometimes two per week. He was keen to act under Griffith, and was thrilled when the director summoned him for an interview. Davenport recalled waiting for him in the car. “Wally came out boiling mad. Griffith was in one of his playful moods, and joked and shadow-boxed on set, barely noticing Wally’s presence. Wally felt he’d hardly been given even a courteous reception by the ‘great master’ and he was sure he could charge the whole incident to time wasted. But Griffith did send for him again, and Wally started to work in a great many features supervised by Mr. Griffith.” One of those films was The Birth of a Nation, a project that was already occupying Griffith’s mind while he filmed The Avenging Conscience.
Although the cinematic behemoth that followed in its wake has eclipsed The Avenging Conscience, it is not without its champions. Vachel Lindsay devoted twelve pages to it in his seminal 1915 work The Art of the Moving Picture; Variety believed that it “will leave an indelible impression and a more forceful one upon those who see it than the Commandment from which the sub-title [‘Thou shalt not kill’] is derived.” Ten years after its release, the writer and critic Gilbert Seldes was hailing it as the greatest American film ever made. He wrote of Griffith, “A sure instinct led him to disengage the vast emotion of longing and lost love through an action of mystery and terror… The picture was projected in a palpable atmosphere; it was felt. After ten years I recall dark masses and ghostly rays of light.”