Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Thanhouser Collection DVD Volumes 10, 11 & 12 (1910-1916)

Contents: The Actor’s Children (1910), Young Lord Stanley (1910), The Pasha’s Daughter (1911), His Great Uncle’s Spirit (1912), The Portrait of Lady Anne (1912), The Voice of Conscience (1912), In a Garden (1912), Her Nephews from Labrador (1913), His Uncle’s Wives (1913), Seven Ages of an Alligator (1913), The Farmer’s Daughters (1913), [In de Tropische Zee] (1914), Joseph in the Land of Egypt (1914), The Center of the Web (1914), Zudora [chapter 2, “The Mystery of the Sleeping House”] (1914), Old Jane of the Gaiety (1915), In the Hands of the Enemy (1915) and Silas Marner (1916).

Presented as three volumes entitled, More Early Thanhouser, The Genius of Charles J. Hite, and Edwin and Gertrude Return, this is the latest collection of Thanhouser films, which includes the feature films Joseph in the Land of Egypt (1914) and Silas Marner (1916).

The Actor’s Children (1910), the first Thanhouser production, is a tale of an actor who is unable to pay rent for his apartment, and while seeking work with his wife, the actor’s children are cast onto the streets when the landlady rents to someone else. The wandering children are lured by an organ grinder into forced street dancing. Meanwhile, the actor receives news of a huge inheritance. The children are rescued by the police and inexplicably are taken to the office of a theatrical manager. Unable to find their children, the actor and his wife look for them in theater crowds, only to recognize them dancing on stage.

Young Lord Stanley (1910) is a melodramatic story of the disinheritance of old Lord Stanley’s young son. Cast off by his father, the young man emigrates to America where he obtains a job as a family’s horse groomer. In course, he begins to fall in love with his employer’s daughter but is fired to alleviate the possibility of her marrying a lowly groom. In England, the dying Lord Stanley forgives his son, reinstating the inheritance — surprise! The inevitable outcome is apparent.

Our first look at this DVD-R collection of surviving Thanhouser films that have been mastered from prints held by world film archives. The full-frame video transfers range from very-good to excellent, from 35mm print materials. In many cases, these films have been mastered from the sole known surviving prints.

The Actor’s Children (1910) has been transferred full-frame from a good to very-good 35mm print from the Academy Film Archive that is highly speckled in places, jittery, and missing bits of footage to splices, with sections of advanced decomposition that momentarily obscures the picture.

Young Lord Stanley (1910) has been transferred full-frame from a projection-worn but excellent 35mm print from the Library of Congress that is quite speckled, with some original processing flaws, dust and schmutz, but otherwise in very-good condition.

The Pasha’s Daughter (1911) has been mastered from a very-good 35mm print from the Museum of Modern Art. The full-frame, natural-speed video transfer has visible double-image ‘tweening’ (an averaging of picture content of slower silent film frame rates to that of the faster frame rate of NTSC television, usually by a single television frame that combines overlapping picture information from two film frames) that produces a ghostly strobing within fast, lateral movement. The video transfer house could have done a better job. The strobing is quite distracting from the film’s narrative.

The discs feature musical accompaniment performed by Ben Model on a Miditzer virtual (computer-based) theatre pipe organ. Excellent.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is available directly from . . .

Other SHORT COMEDY FILMS of the silent era available on home video.