American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century Read Online Free PDF

“show only the face.” D.W. decided the day would come when he’d have close shots of the actors’ faces in his films, too. He was like an explorer who had no map, only his instincts to lead him into this new territory. In two busy and fertile years, D.W. came to understand that film had a previously untapped power. A movie, he had begun to realize with his uncanny insight, could be more than just a well-told tale. “I believe,” he said, “in the motion picture not only as a means of amusement, but as a moral and educational force.”
     
    At the tail end of 1909, the film he decided to make, A Corner in Wheat, was (like most of his early Biograph releases) a melodrama. But D.W. had deliberately shaped it with an distinctive ideological point of view. The country’s many strikes, the muckraking journalists’ attacks on greedy financial titans, William Jennings Bryan’s passionate “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention with its contrast between “the farmer who . . . toils all day” and “the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain”—all the anger and rage of the era had seeped into D.W.’s nerves and now fed his imagination.
    A Corner in Wheat was loosely based on a Frank Norris short story, although the author was never formally credited or, for that matter, paid. “We never bothered about ‘rights,’ ” D.W.’s wife breezily conceded. “Authors and publishers were quite unaware of our existence.” And Norris, in turn, had been inspired by the actual turn-of-the-century manipulations of Joe Leitner to control the Chicago Board of Trade wheat market.
    The real-life scheme was cunningly complex, and Norris’s fictive adaptation was part of a planned sprawling trilogy of novels. D.W.’s storyteller’s gift compressed the sweeping scope of events into just three sparse and distinct strands. Each was controlled, unmannered, and very affecting. Audiences were introduced to farmers stoically working in a field; the Wheat King hatching his plot to control the market; and the city’s downtrodden poor hoping to buy bread to feed their families.
    During the course of the short film, no character from any of these settings journeyed outside his carefully delineated world. They did not speak to one another. They remained independent and self-contained. Yet D.W.’s deft parallel editing among the three strands was not just a technological innovation but an inspired act of storytelling. With subtlety and control, he succeeded in capturing the essence of the early-twentieth-century marketplace. His technique, his cutting between well-crafted and realistic scenes, created an uncanny feel both for the alienation in the American social experience and for the inescapable connections, the bread on the table, that bound the nation together.
    D.W. did all this with poise and reserve, without histrionics. Still, the film brimmed with energy and a consistent point of view. The story built like a calm, well-reasoned argument, its discipline adding to the suspense, until at its end the audience was presented with three haunting images: The Wheat King, after receiving a telegram stating that he now controls the world’s market in wheat, suddenly slips and falls into a grain elevator, the wheat enveloping him until only a single desperately grasping hand is visible, and then it too is engulfed and disappears; police, brandishing revolvers and clubs, charge at the enraged poor who, because the price of flour has doubled, can no longer afford to buy bread; and a solitary farmer, a pastiche of Millet’s The Sower, working in a lonely field as night falls.
    The unique and overflowing power in the film, its compassion and anger, did not go unnoticed. The reviewer in the New York Dramatic Mirror wrote: “This picture is not a picture drama, although it is presented with dramatic force. It is an argument, an editorial, an essay on a vital subject of deep interest to all . . .