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

The Craving (1918)

This social drama, written and directed by Francis Ford, stars Ford and Mae Gaston, with Peter Gerald, Duke Worne, Jean Hathaway and W.A. Hoffman supporting.

Laced with the tropes of intrigue cinema, including a maniacally driven evildoer intent on stealing the secret formula that will make him rich and famous, this Ford-penned melodrammer only comes alive as the story turns its focus on the grip of alcoholism. Told in flashback, the main character recounts his alcoholic experiences with delirium tremens (visions of tiny beautiful women taunting with laughter and mischief — doesn’t sound all that awful) that is technically rendered through multiple camera exposures.

Reminiscent of the trick films created some ten years or more before this film, the production company publicity materials touted these camera tricks as revolutionary. Perhaps they were so in their complexity of multiple exposures with a touch of stop-motion animation but the entertainment value of the film lies somewhere between cautionary tale and technical novelty. For historical perspective, audiences can view Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906) and Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (1909) as technical companions to this film.

As we return to the plotted film we are plunked back into familiar Ford territory, with Gaston serving as a Grace Cunard surrogate in a serial film intrigue. Once again, a flashback of her early life in India sparks the film’s narrative. Big sets and numerous costumed extras recount a British-Indian conflict in which her parents are killed and Kasarib (Gerald) subsequently assumes the care of the orphaned girl. Her moral struggles over assisting Kasarib in his nefarious intentions and her own desire to free herself from his control (presumably through the mysterious powers of the mind) are not well-defined and the audience may wonder why she willingly deceives and leads Carroll Wayles (Ford) back into alcoholic helplessness.

It is not difficult to identify the villain of the piece as there are a number of flags well-known to contemporary audiences: he is an Indian (and you know how devious they can be), his wide-eyed hypnotic stare, his silver-streaked hair that emulate horns, his moustache and devishly upturned eyebrows all signal his melodramatic function in this thinly-spun intrigue.

As a moralistic coda, the film treads into A Christmas Carol territory as Wayles is shown by his own ghostly image the horrors of World War I battles in Europe that shock him back into sanity. With the abrupt defeat of Kasarib in a brief fistfight that could have been duplicated from the last chapter of a Ford serial all is now well with the world.

Is the film something more than it appears on first viewing? Probably not, but the film does have a historical value as a representative surviving example of the filmmaking of Francis Ford and in the invisible presence of John Ford as an assistant director to his brother in these, his beginning years as a film director at Universal. The film may be worth multiple viewings to some for historical reasons but cannot stand as a meritorious artistic achievement along side other celebrated film releases from 1918.

— Carl Bennett

The film is accompanied by a music score composed and performed on piano by Ben Model who has scored a musical score that scores (audible groans are invited here). The music often conveys a lightness that lifts the presentation and in turns a sober (no pun intended this time) weight that complements the melodramatic tone of the main story.

Supplemental material includes When the Tables Turned (1911) mastered from two incomplete 35mm prints held by the Library of Congress and the University of Southern California Hugh M. Hefner Foundation Moving Image Archive; The Post Telegrapher (1912) has been mastered from a 2K conflation of 35mm prints held by the Library of Congress, with brief sections of missing frames inserted from another print; The Black Masks (1913) has been mastered from a 35mm print of the 1917 rerelease version entitled Unmasked held by the George Eastman Museum, with missing footage inserted from a 16mm reduction print; an excerpt from Screen Snapshots (1920) featuring Billie Rhodes, Jack Hoxie, Marin Sais and Francis Ford scanned from a 16mm reduction print (3 minutes); and the mini-documentary Francis Ford, Pioneering Director and Actor of Early American Cinema (2023) directed by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and David Granberry (9 minutes), playable with optional English subtitles.

We can’t imagine this film looking better than it does on this disc, at least prepared from this source material. This is our recommended home video edition of the film.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 Blu-ray Disc (BD-R) edition from Amazon.com. Purchase supports Silent Era.

The film is accompanied by a music score composed and performed by Ben Model.

Supplemental material includes the mini-documentary Francis Ford, Film Pioneer (2023) directed by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and David Granberry (9 minutes), playable with optional English subtitles.

This is our recommended DVD home video edition of the film.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 Blu-ray Disc (BD-R) edition from Amazon.com. Purchase supports Silent Era.

This DVD-R edition has likely been mastered from a 35mm or 16mm reduction print (as might be surmised from the publisher-provided still frame above).

The film is likely accompanied by a soundtrack compiled from preexisting music recordings.

Reluctantly, this is our recommended home video edition of the film and we still criticize this publisher for their overpriced offerings that give the consumer as little value as possible.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.