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6/10
Even The Hideous Have Emotions
boblipton24 March 2019
David Miles is a hunchbacked violinist; to be more accurate, he looks a bit round-shouldered. This hideous affliction apparently means he has never tasted of human kindness. As a result, when a young woman gives him a bouquet of flowers as a tribute to his fiddling at a party, he blows it out of proportion and falls ill, until the doctor in attendance suggest to the woman she pretend to like him to cheer him up.

As you might expect from that description, I do not particularly admire this Griffith film, despite its kindly message and decent acting -- actually, for the summer of 1909, fine acting. The message is offered too broadly for my tastes.

Miles continued to act with Griffith's company until about 1912, when he became a director, again with Biograph. He remained there until well after Griffith had left, but his movie career ended in 1916 with the direction of a feature starring Griffith wife, Linda Arvildsen, for the Kinemacolour company.
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5/10
The Faded Lilies review
JoeytheBrit12 May 2020
A case of unrequited love taken to extremes and given a typically overwrought treatment by D. W. Griffith.
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5/10
No love for the ugly
MissSimonetta16 May 2020
Warning: Spoilers
THE FADED LILIES is a typical melodrama of its period and not one of the more impressive early DW Griffith movies. I generally like his short film work-- perhaps even more than his more lauded feature film career-- but the staging and acting are standard here, with nothing exciting or memorable to take away when those ten minutes finish. The story has also not aged well: a hunchbacked musician falls in love, is rejected, then goes insane. The woman he loves decides to feign interest in him to stave off his suicidal feelings, but when he figures out the truth, he skips his medicine and dies so she can be with her conventionally attractive lover. It's a rather ugly message, quite similar to the later Mary Pickford vehicle STELLA MARIS, a lovely movie marred by an identical turn of events.
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A Consummated People
Single-Black-Male3 March 2004
The 34 year old D.W. Griffith smooths out the conflict between the urban poor and mainstream society in this short film by airbrushing their rules of engagement. It is out of touch with reality, proving that Griffith was a dreamer and a loner. He's romanticizing the society that he lives in, and placed a strain on his cast and crew by distancing them as a result of his self-advancing agenda. He has his own definition of beauty, and he is using it to construct the identity of the American nation. It is a preliminary sketch of his future epic, 'The Birth of a Nation', foreshadowing the weight of his destiny.
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Grips the heart
deickemeyer21 October 2014
One of those pathetic dramas by the Biograph company which grips the heart and actually forces one to follow the story to the end regardless of whether one likes it or not. The death scene is so realistic that the audience scarcely breathes when the man is passing through the mental agonies attendant upon his discovery of the deception which had been worked upon him and the physical agony of approaching death. The woman's part was taken by one whose face is new in the Biograph pictures. She is no better than those who have acted such parts before, but her acting was good and she correctly interpreted the part. Photographically little was to be desired. The lighting appears a bit harsh in places, but in the main it is quite satisfactory. - The Moving Picture World, June 26, 1909
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