Clarine Seymour, Netflix and The Future Of Movie Fandom

As part of an ongoing side project to learn more about the Silent Era even as I continue to move forward with this blog, I tracked down a mid-period Lillian Gish movie, True Heart Susie from 1919, and wanted to share a couple of thoughts on the subject.

One of a series of inexpensive rural pictures directed by D.W. Griffith aimed at recouping the losses he suffered when the enormously expensive Intolerance failed to catch the same lightning in the box-office bottle that The Birth of a Nation, True Heart Susie is the story of a long-suffering and true-hearted country girl (Gish) who loses her childhood sweetheart to a "painted and powdered" city girl, only to win him back at the end when the city girl suffers a timely bout of pneumonia.

And when I say "painted and powdered," I'm not saying the city girl is a hooker or even a flapper, I'm saying she uses (gasp!) cosmetics and prefers the lively company of her friends to cooking, cleaning and gazing in adoring silence at one of the dullest leading men in movie history, Robert Harron (who at twenty-seven was at the tail end of a 220-film career that would end in suicide the following year).

It's a rather slight comedy that hinges mostly on Gish's ability to make befuddled self-delusion and virginal reticence charming, and I have to say it's not one of Gish's or Griffith's best. Griffith was a reactionary in the classic sense of the word—wanting to dial the clock back to an earlier time, in this case the 19th century Kentucky of his birth, a bit of problem since by then even Kentucky had moved on. He took the morals of his tales seriously, but increasingly his audiences didn't, and before you say, yes, but it was ninety years ago, what do you expect, I'd remind you that Picasso was already two years into his Cubist phase, Robert Weine was in Germany filming the groundbreaking Expressionist film, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was just a year away from publishing This Side Of Paradise. World War I was over and like it or not, the 19th century had been washed away in rivers of blood, never to be seen again.

Washed away with it was a public taste for black-and-white morality tales about the ordeals of Victorian virgins and once Gish left Griffith's employ to pursue more complex roles, audience quickly came to regard Griffith's movies as fusty relics of a more agrarian, pre-war age. The passage of another two years would mark the last commercial and critical success of Griffith's career.

True Heart Susie is worth seeing, though, beyond the curiosity factor that attaches itself to any work of Lillian Gish, for the supporting work of Clarine Seymour as the city girl.

Seymour was a young actress in Griffith's stable, having first started working in movies at the age of eighteen for the Thanhouse Film Company in New Rochelle. A year later she made a successful screen test for Griffith and moved to Los Angeles. She received good reviews in the few pictures she appeared in, landed the lead in The Idol Dancer (1920) and started working in Way Down East, one of Griffith's last great movies, when (according to Gish, who was there) she died of exposure filming one of the film's winter scene in near arctic conditions. Mary Hay replaced her, filming went on and Seymour's burgeoning fame was buried with her. She was just twenty-one and has largely been forgotten today, I'm sorry to say.

I saw this movie as a download from Netflix—the second reason I'm writing this post. This whole download thing (which computer wiz Katie-Bar-The-Door set up for the hapless Monkey) is a real boon to movie nuts such as myself. For a minimal subscription price (roughly $10 a month), you can stream at no extra charge hundreds of movies directly to your computer (or if you have the right equipment, to your television).

At a time when hundreds of Blockbusters are closing and Warner Home Video is changing its business model (selling most of their film library now on a mail order on-demand basis rather than spending speculative up-front money to stock store shelves), it's clear that the industry at least believes streaming and downloading is the future of movie viewing and that soon enough we'll one day look at all our DVDs the same way we look at those VHS tapes lining the shelves in the basement, as candidates for a landfill.

Which makes me wonder whether Blu-Ray won the format wars just in time to become the moral equivalent of a nuclear-powered buggy whip—both state of the art and obsolete at the same time.

Not that I'll stop collecting DVDs and Blu-Rays in the meantime. You think I'm going to stop watching movies for the next five years just because the dawn of the download age is upon us? Not a chance.

But still, something to think about ...