Silent action film 'A Beast at Bay' holds up

A Beast at Bay (1912)

Starring: Mary Pickford, Alfred Paget, Edwin August, and Henry Lehrman

Director: D.W. Griffith

Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

After a young woman (Pickford) is carjacked and subsequently abducted by an escaped convict (Paget), her boyfriend (August) gives chase along side the prison guards.

"A Beast at Bay" is a clear display of the command that D.W. Griffith had on filmmaking and how he may even have been ahead of his peers in his methods and approaches. The acting, the pacing, the way scenes are staged and framed... almost everything about this film holds up nicely and it almost feels like it could have been made yesterday in a couple of places. This might even be a film that someone who says they think silent movies are dumb or boring or dusty relics can enjoy. It might even make them change their minds.

The film wastes no time getting underway (which is good since it only runs about a 1/4 of an hour), with action and tension from the get-go, switching back and forth between the parallel stories of a convict's escape and a spat between two young lovers. By the time the storylines intersect, viewers have a clear sense that Mary Pickford's character is facing real danger from the menacing bad guy played by Alfred Paget. This is not a mustache-twirling melodramatic villain, but one who feels far more real and who oozes dangerous evil and violence. There's a scene where, if Paget's character hadn't been interrupted, he would have undoubtedly has raped his young prisoner; the sense that is where things were headed was just as clear and horrifying as any 1970s exploitation film, or the slightly more modern revenge genre. It's rare that I have that sort of visceral reaction to a silent movie, because the acting is usually so stylized and overblown--but, as I've noted in previous reviews of Griffith's short films, he was far better at getting more naturalistic performances from actors than his contemporaries. This is one of the big reasons his films have stood the test of time--especially his short films.

The only point in the film where I initially snickered a bit was when the hero and the prison guards try to catch up with the carjacked maiden by commandeering a locomotive and go steaming down a track parallel to the road. "Seriously," I thought to myself, "why not just get a car?"

Then I remembered it was 1912 when this film was made, and it is clearly set in a rural area. The car driven by Mary Pickford's character was probably the only one for miles around at the time the chase began.

And so I was back to not really having anything negative to say about this nice little action film. D.W. Griffith was a visionary pioneer who helped lay the foundation for cinematic story-telling, so it's perhaps not at all surprising that his films can still be exciting to present day viewers. And while I watch mostly old movies these days, so I am perhaps more prone than most to find them exciting, but I really do think there might be enough here to appeal to more "normal" viewers, too.

Check it out my clicking below. Tell me if you agree or disagree in the comments section.