Silent movies - Suspense

Comedy, science fiction, horror, romance, crime, adventure, fairy tale, slapstick, animation, is there something that is still missing in my silent movie journey? There is indeed - documentary.

An obvious choice would have been the first film to be called a documentary (which is debatable as a lot of it was staged due to the realities of film making in 1922 and also represented the Inuit life as it had been, not as it was at the time of filming) - "Nanook of the North" - but I'll be honest, I wasn't ready to deal with hunt scenes and the life of polar dogs at the time.
Instead I called up a list of silent documentaries and picked "The Epic of Everest" without knowing what exactly it was about although it was not difficult to guess that it would involve mountaineering, a topic I'm not really interested in.
Of course I'm fascinated by the majesty of the Himalaya and Mount Everest - known as Sagarmatha in Nepal and Qomolangma in Tibet - how could you not be, but why someone would want to climb it, is beyond me and my strictly non-adventurous mind.
I had of course forgotten about donkeys and yaks carrying heavily loads, and a half hour into the film they had lost me when they showed a baby donkey born on the trail and said how many miles this poor baby allegedly had to walk. It hadn't signed up for this!

What to do now?
I went back to the list, but nothing sounded as if I was up for watching it.
Understandably, that was still the time of the great explorers and exploring something always involved animals, livestock or wild ones and therefore inevitably scenes I didn't want to see. Even those filmmakers who wanted to point out what humans did to wildlife used that same wildlife to stage situations for their documentaries - for example Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack of "King Kong" fame.
I know those were different times and therefore those films are interesting in more than one regard, not just for their content, but also why or how that content was collected, but my skin is not thick enough for it these days.

I will keep searching and have one movie on my list, but for this post I needed something short and quick now.
What I found was "Suspense" by Lois Weber from 1913 which is in the public domain and which you can watch here.

As this is a silent short film of 10 minutes, the plot is told rather quickly (spoilers as usual!).
At a remote house, a maid quits letting her employer, a mother with a small baby, only know by note. She leaves the key under the mat. When the mother finds the note, she locks doors and windows.
A tramp has seen the maid leaving, goes to check out the house and finds the key. When the woman notices him, she calls her husband who has to work late, but the tramp cuts the line.

The husband hurries to help her by taking the first car parked in the street and racing off followed by the owner and police.

While the woman has locked herself in the bedroom with her baby and put a dresser in front of the door, the tramp looks around the house, and the man gets held up when he hits a man standing in the middle of the road and helps him up again.
The tramp hears sounds from above, and armed with a knife, he breaks into the bedroom. Just then the cars arrive at the house. Shots aimed at the husband panic the tramp, he runs downstairs where he gets overpowered by the husband and police.
The man runs upstairs to find his wife and baby unharmed. He explains everything and is of course forgiven.

I have to admit that I had never heard of Lois Weber before, another example of not just an early maker of silent films, but a woman whose achievements had been forgotten.

Public domain

Actually, Weber was a pioneer in early film, the "first American woman to direct a feature film" and the "leading female director-screenwriter in early Hollywood", not to mention that she also acted, for example as the mother in "Suspense". Eventually, she even had her own studio.

This isn't supposed to be a post about Lois Weber (and her husband Phillips Smalley with whom she mostly worked until their divorce), though, especially as I haven't seen any of her other movies yet that have survived. She had a large output, but a lot is lost like so many silent films.
There are four links at the bottom if you would like to know more about her, and who knows, maybe she'll be turning up in another post of mine eventually.

To the movie now.
The title doesn't promise too much.
Like other films, "Suspense" was likely inspired by a French Grand Guignol play from 1902 - "Au Téléphone" by André de Lorde and Charles Foley - which didn't have a happy ending, though. The husband has to listen to his family getting murdered without being able to help.

Weber used different techniques to build up suspense, for example the split screen showing the three narratives - the husband at the office, the wife and baby at home, and the tramp breaking in.
In the car chase, there is the mirrored image of the pursuers coming closer.
You have interesting angles like when the wife looks out of the window and sees the tramp outside.

There is a lot more to say about the technical side of the film of course, but I leave that to the experts. Instead I want to tell you what I thought when I watched it a second time as there is rather a lot to see for a short of 10 minutes and you know me and my weird brain. I always have questions.

- The maid who contemplates announcing her leaving, but decides against it. Does she think she can't pull it through when she's looking the mother in the eye?
Without seeing her, the tramp might not even have got the idea to take a look at the house, and she unknowingly made it easier for him by putting the key under the mat. What did she do that for, anyway? Why didn't she just leave it on the table with the note?
And why does the mother not go and get the key from under the mat when she locks all the doors?

- The tramp eating the sandwiches, rummaging around a bit, not very convincingly, and then going for the woman. I've heard of people eating or drinking at crime scenes, but usually after the deed is done.
Why the sudden urge for making a "simple" break-in even worse?

- The husband hitting the man in the road. I find it rather nice that he doesn't just drive off, but gets out, pats him down, asks him if he's okay, but then he stops to look out for his pursuers twice (!) before getting back in the car and driving on. Oh, my wife is in danger, la-di-da ....

Does that make it sound as if I didn't like the movie? Not at all. Those are just things I started thinking about after watching it a second time.
Of course all of those things had to be just like this to increase the feeling of suspense which worked just perfectly.

From what I read, Weber's other movies often revolved around social issues, so "Suspense" seems to be an exception, and of course a lot of her work is lost, but I'm definitely putting her on my watch list for more.


Sources:

About "Suspense"
1. Fritzi Kramer: Suspense (1913) A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, April 24, 2016
2. Short of the Month: Suspense (dir. Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, 1913). On: Nitrateglow, February 11, 2022
3. "At the telephone" - English translation of "Au téléphone" by André de Lorde. In: "One-act plays for stage and study, second series, 1925, edited by Walter Prichard Eaton"

About Lois Weber:
1. Angelica Aboulhosn: Lois Weber: An Early Hollywood Filmmaker with Her Own Studio. In: Humanities, vol. 44(2023), issue 4
2. Shelley Stamp: Lois Weber. On: Women Film Pioneers Project. October 15, 2019
3. Lea Stans: "The Muse Of The Reel" - The Pioneering Work of Director Lois Weber. On: Silent-ology, January 25, 2018
4. Travis Lee Ratcliff: A History of Silence: The Cinema of Lois Weber. On his YouTube channel