Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

A young war hero gets five days of leave to visit his mother in his home village but gets sidetracked by the people he meets on the journey. The film is profoundly moving and once the slightly pathetic tone of the story is set firm it becomes the highly emotional journey that will leave every viewer in tears. It's heart-wrenching when the two lovers realize that they truly have found each other the moment they have to separate, possibly forever. The naiveté and stubbornness of the protagonist is illustrated by many small stories in the beginning: his willingness to give up his material goods for his new-found friends, his support for the crippled, the elderly and his dedication to at least hug his mother one last time. It's also his youth that makes him ignore the terrible facts of war - and although people around him die off like flies he seems oblivious to any kind of danger. When the voice-over concludes that we have lost a human being who might have been remarkable...

This is a story about a straight, even dull guy with a overwhelming fetish for gunswho  falls in love with a no-good woman that coaxes him into committing robberies. It turns out to be a nice Bonnie-and-Clyde variation. The first part felt heavy-handed and slow. Using a courtroom scene with witnesses, arguing for the lead character's noble character felt strange. Annie's motivation for pushing her husband to a career in crime is thinly explained, although she was the more interesting character in the film. Favorite scene: While her husband robs a bank in the background, Annie chats pointlessly to a policeman standing in front. It is not clear to me why she tries to grab his attention. Great sets: The meat packaging company has some nice shots of hanging meat. Is that the earliest film to use this type of location?

An innocent country girl is in love with her neighbor that marries an infidel girl. A comparatively linear story, compared to the other DWGriffiths films I have seen so far. The pacing is extremely slow, and it might be interesting to know what had moved Griffith to take on this movie. An amusing side note are the intertitles. The English is obfuscated at least, perhaps meant to be in the tone of a romantic poem, but pretty confusing for me. There is already quite a lot of use of geometry inside the image frame, which sometimes work really nicely. The scene ends are clearly marked by fades to black or title cards.