An Awful Moment (1908)

User Rating:

4.5/10   

Director:

D.W. Griffith

Writer:

D.W. Griffith (writer)

Release Date:

18 December 1908 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Short

Plot:

As a judge passes sentence on a man, a gypsy woman in the audience vehemently protests, and she has to be physically removed from the courtroom...

Plot Keywords:

Gypsy | Melodrama

Cast

George Gebhardt	...	Matteo Rettazzi / Policeman
Marion Leonard	...	Fiammetta, Matteo's Wife
Harry Solter	...	Judge Mowbray
Florence Lawrence	...	Mrs. Mowbray
Gladys Egan	...	The Mowbrays' Daughter
Linda Arvidson	...	The Maid
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Florence Barker
Dorothy Bernard
Kate Bruce
Charles Gorman
Gertrude Robinson	...	Woman in Court
Mack Sennett	...	Policeman / Man in Court
Dorothy West

Runtime:

12 min (16 fps)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Silent

Company:

American Mutoscope & Biograph

Flawed But Interesting

This flawed but interesting short feature is worth watching just because it is hardly your run-of-the-mill short drama of the era. D.W. Griffith had a brief period when he seems to have become interested in criminals who come up with bizarre ways of harming their victims, and while the movies about them don't always work all that well, the ideas do make for some interesting moments.

In "An Awful Moment", the story concerns a vengeful gypsy woman who is out to hurt a judge and his family. Her scheme is implausibly weird, the kind of pointlessly complicated plot that The Joker or The Penguin might use to try to get rid of Batman. But it does lead to some real suspense, and Griffith's technique increases the tension by showing sequences of peaceful family life that go on even as the gypsy is planning out her revenge. It's the kind of technique that Griffith and others of the era would soon use to much greater effect, in more plausible stories.

In itself, the movie is definitely interesting enough to be worth seeing. It does suffer from being thoroughly implausible, and some brief parts of it (at least on the video version) are also out of sequence, whether from an editing error or just from the condition in which the film has survived. But there are a lot of things that you could watch that would be much duller than this.