Victor Seastrom

(On Cable TV, February 2022) As horrifying as it may sound to purists, the secret to enjoying silent dramas may be watching them in fast-forward. There’s a noticeable change in pacing that goes with the passage from the silent to the sound era, and having the text IN YOUR FACE as title cards rather than subtitles makes the fast-forward strategy quite viable even on less optimal viewing platforms. This is not necessarily recommended for comedies depending on physical humour, but dramas? Silent-era dramas are deathly dull—the pacing is off, the emoting is difficult to take seriously and the title cards barely summarize the action (in addition of further ruining the pace on their own). But slam The Scarlet Letter in fast-forward and the result becomes much more interesting, with a density of plotting that starts approaching sound-era standards. A classic of American literature, The Scarlet Letter has been made and remade many times, but this silent-era version has a few things going for it. Lilian Gish stars as a woman whose romantic indiscretion with the priest of her small New England community leads to further complications. There’s enough narrative substance to make it interesting once the story gets going, and it helps that the production values of the film were good enough. Director Victor Seastrom credibly re-creates a settlers-era small town, and some of the exterior shots are much, much better than we’d expect from films of that era—early in the film, there’s a rather amazing long tracking shot of two lovers walking along an outdoor path that seems far more modern than it is. In the end, I was not exactly bowled over by The Scarlet Letter—but thanks to the fast-forwarding, I didn’t waste as much of my time as I anticipated, and finally could be swept up in the increasingly dramatic nature of the plot as it went along.