Today, only a handful of Biograph works have a lasting reputation, though many more command and deserve attention, Among those most frequently reconsidered are The Song of Conscience, which achieved the distinction of being the very first film to be reviewed by the New York Times on October the 10th of 1909. The Mary Pickford vehicle The Lonely Villa (1909), a solid mystery centering on a family imprisoned in their own home by a marauder with a firearm; The Lonedale Operator (1911) filmed on an open-air set, one in which a locomotive mounted camera observes the struggle between the heroine (Blanche Sweet) and a railroad gang; and Man's Genesis (1912), a Stone Age parable in which an early screen dinosaur wobbles along the landscape.
If the one-reelers had anything in common other than the AB logo that was featured in each background to protect copyright, it was a sense of speed. They could be made on any inspiration, even the slender basis of a change in the weather; the unit would make up an impromptu story to unfold against the background of a recent snowfall, or to take advantage of a vista of autumn trees. And since there was hardly time to show non-essential detail, Griffith utilized tiles more creatively than previously been tied in the place of cumbersome or irrelevant action, pushing his stories head-long from climax to climax. Marriages were made, broken and mended in the span of ten minutes, wars were fought and lost in the space of a single shot. Griffith's stories springing from the frantic schedule. often based themselves appositely on a race against time and the need to show disparate events interacting with each other, leading him to the logical solution of cross-cutting.
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| No need to ask...she's a smooth operator (Blanche Sweet the Lonedale Operator of 1911) |
And despite the misgivings of various studio bosses - the obstinate vitality of Griffith's editing style never seemed to unsettle the one-reeler audiences.
