Today, only a scant amount of Biograph works have a lasting reputation, though many more command attention. Among those most frequently reconsidered are Pippa Passes, based on Robert Browning's 1841 verse drama, which achieved the distinction of being the very first film to be reviewed by the prestigious The New York Times, an event that took place on October 10, 1909. The Mary Pickford classic suspense story - The Lonely Villa (also 1909) is the story of a family who become imprisoned in their own home by a marauder with a firearm, 1911's The Lonedale Operator, in which the camera was mounted on a locomotive to observe the conflict between heroine Blanche Sweet and a railroad gang, and Man's Genesis (1912) a Stone Age parable in which an early screen dinosaur wobbles along across the desolate landscape.
If the one-reelers had anything in common at all, other than the 'AB' logo that was embossed in all the backgrounds to protect copyright, it was a sense of speed. They could be made on any inspiration - even the basis of a change in the weather, the unit would improvise a story johnny-on-the-spot style against the backdrop of a recent snowfall, or to take advantage of a vista of autumn trees. And since there wasn't the luxury of time to show minutiae of detail D.W. Griffith utilized titles more creatively than he previously had in lieu of the cumbersome or irrelevant action, pushing his stories headlong from climax to climax. A marriage could be made, broken and mended all in the span of ten minutes. wars could be fought and lost in the space of one single shot. His stories springing from this frantic schedule often based themselves ironically enough on a race against time. There was now a need to show widely separate events interacting with each other that led him to the logical solution of cross-cutting.
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| No train in vain in the Lonedale Operator |
Despite the many misgivings of the studio bosses, the obstinate style of Griffith's editing technique never seemed to disenchant the one-reeler audiences.
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| Mae Marsh wants equal Woman's Genesis rights too |
Griffith confessed to borrowing his ideas from Charles Dickens and novelists who think little of leaving one set of characters in the midst of affairs while going back to deal with earlier events in which an entirely different set of characters is involved.
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| Judith, Judith, Judith - Judith of Bethulia (Blanche Sweet as pie here) |
As Griffith's experience grew, so did his ambition; more complex stories, larger casts and budgets that were less convenient to Biograph and in 1914 would part ways (not very amicably) with the studio after his ambitious four-reel Judith of Bethulia, a film that garnered so much reproach from Biograph ,such that with heavy hand would fire the man who would only go on to become the most revolutionary director of all time.