THE SEALED ROOM (1909) comes from that phase of American cinema where nearly every scene opens with a spoiler, and intertitle helpfully explaining what we’re about to see.
This always seemed like a real false step in film history, as movies started aspiring to tell more elaborate stories but didn’t know how. Adaptations of famous books allowed for plottier yarns and could, in theory, rely on the audience being somewhat familiar with the tale, so maybe you didn’t have to explain everything? But critics complained that these movies were getting pretty obscure, and foreign imports were often based on books more familiar in their native lands than to US audiences.
But maybe this admittedly dumb and frustrating development isn’t so much a false path as a necessary stage on the journey out of what Tom Gunning calls “the cinema of attractions” and into the kind of moviemaking where the filmmaker undertakes the telling of a story, using not just performances and title cards but shot choices. It could be argued that it’s a small step from using title cards to signal plot developments to using closeups, POV shots, intercutting, coda-shots (a Griffith nicety Gunning identifies as one of his underrated inventions) for essentially the same purpose.
The cinema of attractions never went away, of course. The individual startling moment is still a key thing in movies, especially the most commercial ones. I think narrative cinema today strikes a balance whereby it’s hard to be sure whether the story is an excuse for the big sensational moments, or the moments are an excuse for the story.
Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett are both in this scene as extras, apparently. Maybe on the right of frame there?
This quasi-horror period pic shows Griffith pushing into the action, cutting his stars off below the shins — to allow subtler performances? But these do not eventuate. There are still people framed full-figure in the background, perhaps to silence the “Show us their feet!” crowd, if such a crowd really existed. So we get to see at least somebody’s feet. A sop to the shrimpers.
Early scenes suffer from film warping (or maybe paper warping, if this is from a paper copy?) so that the supposedly impregnable room feels instead rickety and subject to wobble. Not quite clear WHY this room has been constructed but everybody seems happy about it, so definitely not for walling-up-alive purposes. Some kind of early panic room, I suppose.
Funny bit at 4.25 where a melodramatic messenger rushes in and everybody starts waving their arms in a frenzy. Either an intertitle has gone AWOL or Griffith just decided we didn’t need to be let in on what all the fuss is about.
There’s a lateish instance of the explicatory mime at this point as the troubadour, far right, mouths some enthusiastic realisation — I *think* I can lip-read the words “She’s mine!” This kind of thing would happily be rendered redundant by the interpolated closeup which could emphasise a silent moment of emotion without the need for thespian telegraphy.
As soon as hubby has run off to wherever everybody’s been waving their arms about — perhaps on a crusade, perhaps just seeing to a sick cow, we don’t know — wifey’s waving arms turn from (faked) alarm to joy at being alone with the lusty troubadour.
While wifey is showing trouby her Single-Entrance Room, hubby, a sort of hot Karloff figure, returns unexpectedly having presumably won his crusade in record time or healed his ailing livestock, whatever. Contiguity editing allows him to peep in on and react to the innocuous/incriminating goings-on in the S-ER, and he does a big dramatic cringe. This shot exchange allows Griffith to depart from the one-room-one-shot technique: the S-ER is framed closer than the big room, and when he cuts back to get hubby’s reaction he’s taken the opportunity to punch in closer. The big cringe is ridiculous enough to make us kind of wish he hadn’t, but it’s good film technique in principle.
We now get a huge bit of explicatory pantomime as hubby plots his Terrible Revenge via the medium of hand-wringing. His acting is so big he has to actually draw his sword to put the point across with the force he wants, even though he doesn’t use it. Instead he’s able to get a whole construction team to show up on the spur of the moment (it’s good to be the king) and silently transform his Single-Entrance Room into the titular Sealed Room, with wifey and trouby still inside.
The bowl-cutted bricklayers look like they’re all set to perform some proto-Stooges comic relief slapstick with the mortar, but this is avoided.
Wifey and Trouby’s illicit activity in the now-Sealed Room mainly seems to consist of triumphant laughing and zieg-heiling at how clever they’re being, which kind of makes us eagerly anticipate the moment when they try to pass through the curtain and bash their foreheads on the brick wall noiselessly assembled behind it.
Do construction teams charge extra for working in dead silence? If so, it’s money I’d be happy to pay.
Hubby does some more enormous acting, directed at the curtain and the brick wall behind it and I suppose at the man and woman behind that. Again he picks up his sword, just so he can act even bigglier.
The discovery of the immurement is where a wider range of camera angles could really help a filmmaker. To make his actors’ responses visible and central, Griffith has them walk to the centre of the shot and perform their horror outwardly at us. But the dramatic shape of the scene would seem to demand that they stay for a bit at the new wall, trying to comprehend it, comprehending it, trying to scrape at the mortar, failing, trying to comfort one another, all that. The need to capture performance while confronted with a blocked doorway is what led Kubrick to shoot Jack Nicholson from below in THE SHINING, a moment William Friedkin thought was horribly gimmicky — surely it’s a very practical solution to an unusual dramatic situation — a man talking to a door.
The troubadour is the first one to go into a mad panic — these fancypants loverboys talk a big game but one spot of immurement and they crumble like chaff. Montresor or whatever his name is gets a case of the galloping cabin fever. He is Henry B. Walthall, an important early Griffith star, and his frantic pounding on the walls, extreme though it is, forms an effective background for Marion Leonard’s stillness.
Recriminations! The lovers blame one another for their entombment. Might be just as well blaming the bloke that bricked them up.
I guess people got asphyxiated faster in the good old days, because soon Walthall and Leonard are gasping for air, while the Count (apparently he’s a count, not a king, per IMDb, played by Arthur V. Johnson, not such an important early Griffith player) crows triumphantly without.
Walthall is evidently one of those actors who likes his props — it’d take a heart of stone not to laugh as the suffocating minstrel attempts to fan himself and his lover with his mandolin. Waft those last particles of oxygen down your windpipe! I shouldn’t laugh, I might do the same in his position.
I was waiting for hubby to have a change of heart, as the film still seemed to have a minute to run, but it stops right there, the lovers die, and the last bit is taken up with a restoration demonstration in which the AFTER image seems to have more dirt on it than the BEFORE. Like, “we digitally added dust motes to the picture to make it look like a proper 1909 film.” There’s an app for that.
One thing I should admit: the intertitle-as-autospoiler arguably has its own dramatic value, one of building anticipation. It’s one thing to see a man escape or a baby get rescued from an eagle’s nest, but if you’re forewarned that it’s going to happen, you can enjoy suspenseful anticipation. This happens in books all the time, when the author inserts a line hinting at more dramatic goings-in to come — be patient, gentle reader, things are calm now but later you’ll get to hear all about “that madman business.”
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