The House with Closed Shutters

Six stars. Because the first five minutes of this 17-minute film are so tedious. We are subject to Dorothy West prancing around her house, waving the battle flag she has just sewn, in an absurd paroxysm of patriotic frenzy.

Then we get several minutes of various young men strutting like peacocks in their spanking new uniforms. A third of the run-time has passed, and NOTHING has happened yet!

Yeah, yeah, "scene-setting", "establishment of character", "presaging". But I watched this just after rewatching "In the Border States" (in a set of Griffith's Civil War films on the second disk of the Kino release of Birth of a Nation). And this film suffers drastically from the comparison.

Now, once the lads rush off to war, things improve. And the rest of the film gives us a really bizarre tale of honor, cowardice, and retribution. Henry Walthall (a Griffith regular) gets to toss aside the heroic convention that his status would demand, and Dorothy West gets to shine as his sister, left to deal with her brother's failure. The consequences of that failure end up turning into something out of a Poe story. I'll also give a nod to Grace Henderson, as the mother. She's the best actor in the film. I can believe everything that she shows from start to finish.

This isn't one of Griffith's better shorts. The start it too absurd and too long. But the resolution is splendidly perverse. 5 February 2025.