This is a quaint early feature film of 54 minutes which is apparently the earliest surviving film directed by the French director Maurice Tourneur. The subtitle of the film is 'An Idyll of Old England', and it pretends to be shot there, but it was in fact made at Fort Lee, New Jersey, after Tourneur was recruited because of his talent and experience to leave France and go to America to boost their film industry. Vivian Martin plays Sally Thorne, a 'village maiden', and there are plenty of other 'maidens' about as well. It is all very fey. Near the village the main social figure is an aristocrat named the Earl of Bateson, played by Alec B. Francis. We mostly see him lying in an armchair with his right leg on a stool wrapped in bandages, as he suffers from gout. His son Giles is the son of the Earl who has been expelled from his college and has turned into a black sheep of the family. The Earl loses patience with him, accuses him of being a riotous wastrel, cuts him off financially, and tells him to get lost and only return after he has been able to earn a half crown (thirty pence, then a significant sum) in order to 'restore confidence' in himself. So off Giles goes to a local godfather named Annesley, who asks him to look after his rose garden for him while he goes on a trip. Annesley tells Giles that his roses are being stolen every night by a mysterious thief, and he asks Giles to try to catch the thief and stop it. It turns out that the rose thief is the girl played by Vivian Martin, who is a parson's daughter. She and her father live alone in great poverty, but she has a smile and charm and an innocent artlessness, and she captures the heart of Giles, whose character begins to undergo a reformation under her beneficent influence. They fall in love but Giles does not know that Sally is going and playing chess every day with his father, in order to soften him up with a view to the father eventually accepting Giles back into his good graces again. At first Sally had thought Giles was Annesley's gardener, but when to her surprise she discovered his true identity, she set about her plan to bring father and son back together again. The film is well made, and though simple and sentimental and naïve to our eyes, it is a worthy early work by Tourneur. It is marked by a very sparing use of intertitles, as another reviewer has remarked, which makes the film less tedious to watch today than many other early silents, which so often overdo them. This was Vivian Martin's first film appearance. She went on to appear in 43 more silent films, appeared onstage and once briefly in a sound film uncredited in 1935, and then became a 'civilian' entering normal life and living to the age of 93, and she became noted as a philanthropist in New York City. Simeon Wiltsie, who played Sally's father the parson, only made film for two more years, and died tow years after that, in 1918. Maurice Tourneur lived to the age of 95, having directed 98 films, and his son Jacques Tourneur became even better known and directed 74 films, not least the outstanding and justly famous classics CAT PEOPLE (1942, see my review) and OUT OF PAST (1947, see my review).
