As I was watching this I thought, 'Wait... have I seen this before? I could've swore I saw this exact same scenario in another silent short, even directed Griffith himself. This is uncan... oh, yeah, the Lonedale Operator!' Suddenly going back through my recent roladex or whatever of silent shorts I've been watching I discovered I recently watched the 1911 short, also from Biograph, called the Lonedale Operator, and as it turns out these two shorts have practically the same plot: girl is running an office for a train station, bandits come and are going to pull a robbery. The difference is that in 'Lonedale' a sick/dying father left the job for his daughter to do, and here she's just already on the job.
It might not matter to most though, since I'm sure if you're digging in to DW Griffith short films from over a century ago continuity isn't that important, so one might see this before Lonedale. I just find it lacks a certain core-story imagination, despite the fact that Griffith is certainly up to the task of creating suspense out of how the bandits come to the station and terrorize the girl. Now, it is different actresses in both (Blanche Sweet is lacking here, but Dorothy Bernard is alright), but again, I can't help but feel like if you've seen one semi-not-quite-almost helpless woman operator terrorized by thuggish bandits with a train robbery plot short film, you've seen em all.
All this said... I think I might like this one a little more if only because of the second half of the short when things ramp up and there's a sequence involving one of those things on the tracks that two people operate to move along (with the 'girl' along with, she shows some courage for her trust you know!), and this given parallel editing to the oncoming train.
