What an interesting movie from cinema master Maurice Tourneur, possibly the earliest example of his work that's still available. Tourneur was a guy who basically saw what Griffith was doing and took it to the next level. He knows how to construct a feature film very well -- in this case he eases us into the story with some light humor, then he slowly lays on the melodrama and finally ends it with a heartwarming resolution. Though he doesn't use some of the signature shots that we associate with his style from the later teens like the silhouettes and the triangulation, everything is appropriately lit and there's a strong sense of the way Tourneur showing the image as being appropriate to its place in the story.
I was surprised a bit at the irony of the humor. For example there's a title card that says something like "the boys hard at work on their studies" and then he cuts to a shot of a bunch of college guys drinking and dancing on tables and so forth. Chester Barnett plays the main schoolboy, the only one who is expelled (because he hides under a table!). He must prove himself worthy of his father's respect by earning a small sum of money on his own in the world, but along the way to doing that (by working as his uncle's gardener) he ends up falling in love with the town parson's daughter (Vivian Martin) and spending all his money buying her dresses and flowers. He manages to convince her that all these things come from the "wishing ring" she got from a gypsy woman, to maintain the illusion that he is poor. But she has discovered who his father is long before he realizes it, and she risks her life to find a gypsy cure for him on a cliff. This is another example of the use of irony for both humor and drama in the story -- the audience is of course aware that she wouldn't have believed the gypsies in the first place about the herbs she needed to gather on the cliff if he hadn't tricked her about the ring. Shades of O'Henry here.
So why is "The Wishing Ring" a significant film? It shows how evolved the possibilities for film entertainment had already become by 1914. Audiences were willing to accept a mixture of drama and comedy, and Tourneur was more than happy to provide it to them. The complexity of the characters and the story are a precursor to Tourneur's more ambitious later literary adaptations such as "Last of the Mohicans", "Victory", and the now-lost "Treasure Island." It is a film about nostalgia and romance that isn't afraid to wink at the audience, and it doesn't feel even remotely "stagey." Tourneur's actors aren't as uniformly natural as they are in his later films, but I think he was already showing more skill with the actors than Griffith for example had shown in "Judith of Bethulia" the same year. This is much more subtle film-making in my opinion.
I was surprised a bit at the irony of the humor. For example there's a title card that says something like "the boys hard at work on their studies" and then he cuts to a shot of a bunch of college guys drinking and dancing on tables and so forth. Chester Barnett plays the main schoolboy, the only one who is expelled (because he hides under a table!). He must prove himself worthy of his father's respect by earning a small sum of money on his own in the world, but along the way to doing that (by working as his uncle's gardener) he ends up falling in love with the town parson's daughter (Vivian Martin) and spending all his money buying her dresses and flowers. He manages to convince her that all these things come from the "wishing ring" she got from a gypsy woman, to maintain the illusion that he is poor. But she has discovered who his father is long before he realizes it, and she risks her life to find a gypsy cure for him on a cliff. This is another example of the use of irony for both humor and drama in the story -- the audience is of course aware that she wouldn't have believed the gypsies in the first place about the herbs she needed to gather on the cliff if he hadn't tricked her about the ring. Shades of O'Henry here.
So why is "The Wishing Ring" a significant film? It shows how evolved the possibilities for film entertainment had already become by 1914. Audiences were willing to accept a mixture of drama and comedy, and Tourneur was more than happy to provide it to them. The complexity of the characters and the story are a precursor to Tourneur's more ambitious later literary adaptations such as "Last of the Mohicans", "Victory", and the now-lost "Treasure Island." It is a film about nostalgia and romance that isn't afraid to wink at the audience, and it doesn't feel even remotely "stagey." Tourneur's actors aren't as uniformly natural as they are in his later films, but I think he was already showing more skill with the actors than Griffith for example had shown in "Judith of Bethulia" the same year. This is much more subtle film-making in my opinion.
