Suspense (1913 film)

Suspense
Film still
Directed by	Phillips Smalley Lois Weber
Written by	Lois Weber
Starring	Lois Weber Val Paul
Production company	Rex Motion Picture Company
Distributed by	Universal Film Manufacturing Company
Release date	July 6, 1913 (1913-07-06)
Running time	10 minutes
Country	United States
Language	Silent with English intertitles

Suspense is a 1913 American silent short film thriller directed by Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley. Weber also wrote the scenario and stars in the film with Valentine Paul. The film features early examples of a split screen shot^[1] and a car chase.

Plot

A servant leaves a new mother with only a written letter of notice, placing her key under the doormat as she leaves. Her exit attracts the attention of a tramp to the house. As the husband has previously phoned that he is working late, the wife decides not to ring back when she finds the note but does ring back when she sees the tramp. Her husband listens, horrified, as she documents the break-in and then the tramp cuts the line. The husband steals a car and is immediately pursued by the car's owner and the police, who nearly but don't quite manage to jump into the stolen car during a high-speed chase. The husband manages to gain a lead over the police but then accidentally strikes a man smoking in the road and checks to see that he is okay. Meanwhile, the tramp is breaking into the room where the wife has locked herself and her baby, violently thrusting himself through the wood door, carrying a large knife. At that moment the husband arrives, pursued by the police. As the husband runs towards the home, the police fire warning shots into the air, panicking the hobo. He runs down the stairs, to be met by the husband at the front door. After a short struggle, he overpowers the hobo, who is then grabbed by the police. The husband runs upstairs, everything is explained, and all is forgiven as the couple embrace.

Cast

• Lois Weber as The Wife
• Valentine Paul as The Husband
• Douglas Gerrard as The Pursuer
• Sam Kaufman^[2] (1885-1972) as The Tramp

Release

Suspense was released on July 6, 1913, by the Rex Motion Picture Company.^[3]

Reception

"best nickelodeon film ever made"^[4] — Russell Merritt (1941-2023)^[5]

"The threat to the woman in Suspense is explicitly sexual"^[6]

"The film is a sensory feast with clever use of mirrors and imaginative visual composition". — moviessilently.com^[7]

"With its stark title and startling visuals, more realistic characters, less reliance on explicit narrative and instead favoring more subtle story-telling, this bears less resemblance to its contemporaries than to the films that would later be created by Hitchcock" — Voidsville Follies — ^[8]

"Known for her moral melodramas of the late 1910s, it’s fun to watch Lois Weber making a film that favors sensationalism over the social commentary that would become her wheelhouse." — thehorseshead.blog^[9]

Legacy

A print of the film is preserved at the film archive of the British Film Institute.^[10]

In 2020, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".^[11]

It was released on DVD/Blu-ray in 2018 in a box set called "Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers", with a new score by composer Skylar Nam.^[12]

External videos
Sam Kaufman (1885-1972) as The Tramp
Anne Morra, Associate Curator of Film, speaks about Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley’s film Suspense via youtube from MoMA Celebrates 1913: Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley’s Suspense, Museum of Modern Art[10]

Further reading

"Suspense is an exercise in narrational self-consciousness...Suspense patterns itself on earlier filmic variants of Andre de Lorde's play Au telephone (1901), such as Edison's Heard over the Phone (1908),^{[13] [14]} Pathé's A Narrow Escape (The Physician Of The Castle) (1908),^[15] and Biograph's The Lonely Villa (1909). Moreover, the script scarcely modifies the stock narrative ingredients of a wife imperiled in a remote location while her husband rushes to the rescue after learning of her plight over the telephone. Because the filmmakers could count on audiences already knowing what to expect from the film, producing the titular suspense provides a challenge; Smalley and Weber meet this by heightening tension and intensifying the film's psychological dimension through manipulation of style. Sprinkled liberally throughout with touches that encourage spectatorial involvement without ever damaging narrative clarity" — Charlie Keil (2001) Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 ^{[16][17][18][19]}

"Interestingly, The Lonely Villa is seen by scholars to have as its source a French play of “Grand Guignol,” of the 1890s, Au telephone by Andre DeLorde. Tom Gunning^[13] has discovered that prior to Griffith’s Villa, there are three known cinematic adaptations: a 1907 film from Pathe, Terrible angoisse, a 1908 Edison film, Heard Over the Phone and another from Pathe, Le Medecin du Chateau, released in the U.S. in March 1908 as A Narrow Escape.^[20]

Lon Chaney false assertion

The film has been falsely asserted as Lon Chaney's earliest extant film based on a brief scene in which a similar individual appears on camera. The documentary Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces states that his film debut occurred after his wife's suicide attempt in April 1913 and that "his earliest films were made at the first studio to open in Hollywood, Nestor Studios."^[21] Though well-known Chaney scholar Michael Blake's A Thousand Faces: Lon Chaney's Unique Artistry in Motion Pictures does note that the possibility exists of Chaney's performing in a role during a period of unemployment in 1912, it also notes that he rejoined Clarence Kolb and Max Dill's company in San Francisco, California, in September 1912.^[22] Blake specifically dismisses Chaney's appearance in Suspense in his book A Thousand Faces: Lon Chaney's Unique Artistry in Motion Pictures.^[23] Chaney website creator Jon C. Mirsalis originally attributed the appearance of the hobo who is struck by a car to Chaney but, after examining a high-resolution digital scan frame by frame, has recanted his earlier claim and now concedes that the individual is not Chaney.^[24]

The Internet Movie Database, an unreliable source, lists Lon Chaney as having an unconfirmed and uncredited brief role;^[25] however, this is disputed by silentera.com, which states "Despite attributions to the contrary, Lon Chaney does not appear in the film."^[26][27][24]

See also

• List of films featuring home invasions

References

External links

• Media related to Suspense (1913 film) at Wikimedia Commons
• The full text of Suspense (1913 film) at Wikisource
• Suspense (1913) film via Women Film Pioneers Project
• https://noirencyclopedia.wordpress.com/2017/02/11/suspense-1913/
• https://catalog.afi.com/Film/70969-SUSPENSE
• https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/655073/suspense
• Suspense at IMDb

This page was last edited on 20 March 2024, at 12:45