Across the Mexican Line (1911) User Reviews

A Gibson Girl to the Rescue!

[boblipton · 5/10 · 15 January 2016]

When her lover is condemned to be shot by the Mexican army, it's up to Frances Gibson to save him in this decent but era-bound short subject. If you wish, you can see at at the Harpodeon.com website.

Over at Biograph, D.W. Griffith pretty much hewed to letting the actors carry the action. At other studios, particularly at Kalem, actresses not only participated in feats of derring-do, they did them alone. At Solax, Alice Guy, arguably the first movie director of any gender, ran a middle course.

There is an issue with the story-telling technique; while the action is shown in a competent manner, the acting is kept to a minimum and much of the emotional weight is carried by the titles. Miss Gibson, who initially is set up as a spy, falls in love with one of the American officers -- which is handled entirely in the titles.

If you look carefully, you may notice the Solax trademark on a couple of surfaces. It would not be until the following year that it would be possible to copyright a movie. one of the ways studios protected their intellectual property was to plaster their trademark on random surfaces in a scene, to forestall others from simply copying their films.

Managers will have no difficulty in pleasing their audiences with this picture

[deickemeyer · 25 January 2016]

This film is mentioned again to emphasize the assertion heretofore made that it is sometimes difficult to tell how a picture will take with a different audience. For example, this picture was seen first in New York. It made scarcely a ripple. It was seen again in a crowded house in a small town and was greeted with wild applause. Almost every move the lieutenant made when de Castro surprised him was applauded, while the Mexican was hissed. The girl at work on the telegraph pole sending the message to the American headquarters was almost continuously applauded, and the plunging ride of the American troopers brought forth round after round, closing with an outburst of several minutes when they arrive, stop the execution and capture the Mexicans. The American loves a contest, and if his side wins he is all the more enthusiastic. The illustration of that spirit in this picture pleases the audience in the average theater beyond calculation. There is life, action, but above all that illustration of contrast, the winning of a fight and the exemplification of fair play. Apparently managers will have no difficulty in pleasing their audiences with this picture. - The Moving Picture World, May 27, 1911

Guy Out-Dated

[Cineanalyst · 12 April 2020]

"Across the Mexican Line" was the first of Solax's regular output of military pictures and, reportedly, the only one to be directed by Alice Guy Blanché. It's an unremarkable and dated one-reeler. Its main draw is that it was directed by the world's first female filmmaker. She began making movies in 1896 or thereabouts for the French studio Gaumont. In America, she and her husband formed the Solax studio. Although the output of other early cinema pioneers, like Georges Méliès and Edwin S. Porter, e.g., seems to have grown stale by the 1910s, Guy remained proficient throughout the decade, running her own company, but "Across the Mexican Line" is not one of her better productions. The acting here is broad and theatrical. The staging is equally theatrical, the settings are cramped, and it's mostly filmed by a series of long shots. The only cut to a closer medium shot in one of these scenes is awkward by later standards of continuity editing. As fellow IMDb reviewer Bob Lipton said, much of the story is told through the title cards. For instance, while Dolores turns away from the American lieutenant's advances in the medium shot, a title soon thereafter informs us, "Dolores finds she really loves lieutenant Harvey but duty compels her to keep her word."

And, the story is a bland and jingoistic spy romance set during the Mexican-American War and with the added exotica for the era of an interracial coupling (and which rather gives a double meaning to the "Mexican line" title). Dolores uses her newfound skills in telegraphy to betray her Mexican countrymen and to save her beloved American. Harpodeon's print is missing some footage, which is filled in by text explaining the missing scenes--although they don't explain the seemingly poor use of crosscutting between Dolores on top of a telegraph pole and a shot of two soldiers firing guns. The editing suggests that they fired at Dolores, but the subsequent scene of her shows her apparently unharmed, and we don't see another scene of the two soldiers. Oh well. It compares poorly to, say, the crosscutting last-minute-recuse films of D.W. Griffith, from around the same time.