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Back in the Limehouse to combine a pair of stories from the author of Broken Blossoms, D.W. Griffith advances upon the mental realms of The Avenging Conscience. The gamine (Carol Dempster) is a dancer with a lively imagination, "everywhere she builds romances," Cleopatra in her own mind, say. The braggart (Charles Emmett Mack) and the songwriter (Ralph Graves) are orphaned brothers, the former's baritone hints at finer feelings behind a caddish exterior and the latter's moodiness suggests the violence underlying the sensitivity. Dueling music fills the air, sonorous Scripture courtesy of the pious preacher (Tyrone Power Sr.) versus sinful song via the fiendish fiddler (Morgan Wallace), "a troubled heart" jerks from side to side. (The trickster boasts a direct line to Hell, his mask of angular sensuality camouflages a snaggletoothed troll.) "Beauty to the world" the only way the artist knows, poesy and harshness and fervor and abstraction in a constellation anchored by a literal glowing star, "a symbol of Eternal Love." Flames break out backstage at the music hall, the spunky twirler pacifies the clamoring audience in a scene recalled by Hitchcock (Torn Curtain) and Edwards (Darling Lili). "Sit down! I'm the only fire here." Her garter is enshrined by the admirer from Shanghai (Edward Peil Sr.) whose attentions are rewarded with a tip to the police, "after this you let white girls alone." (He corners the heroine in his lair later on and pulls the curtain to reveal the horror of horrors, the vacant bed waiting to be occupied.) Secret tunnels under pawnshops, Scotland Yard figures in the fog, "pure and sweet dreams" if you can get them. The toddler inheriting all of this in the end might be Shelagh Delaney. With William J. Ferguson, George Neville, Charles Slattery, and Porter Strong. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |