This half-silent, half-talking film is a combination gangster, prison, and love story with some music thrown in as well, and it handles this combination of disparate genres with great skill. No static long-winded film is this, in fact it is full of both action and tenderness that kept me quite engaged throughout.
Richard Barthelmess stars as gangster Jerry Larrabee, and Betty Compson is his best girl, Alice Gray. The two have great chemistry together, but they are torn apart when Jerry is sent to jail for wounding an innocent bystander during a shootout with a rival mob. Inside prison, Larrabee turns to music, he composes the title song "Weary River", and is soon known as "The Master of Melody". However, once released, he soon finds that people are more interested in his prison record than his musical abilities and he quickly loses his heart for reforming.
All the while, Alice who still loves him, keeps her distance. She does this after having been convinced by the prison warden that Jerry will only be able to go straight if he stays away from the people in his old life, including women like herself. Plus witnessing a hanging inside the prison rather drives the point home that Jerry's life itself may depend on it. Instead she waits patiently and admires his progress from afar. When he is released, she buys tickets to his performances, sits in the back out of sight, and is heart-broken when she hears the audience mutter "convict" during his recitals rather than marvel at his talent.
The end is a sweet one that even has the warden changing his mind about Alice as he enables their final reunion after she and the warden work together to keep Jerry from making a wrong-headed decision based on pride that could end with him going to the gallows.
This all sounds like a conventional gangster tale, and many parts of it have been done before, but this one really has heart, masterfully using both the mediums of sound and image. Its visuals include some great Jazz Age settings inside the night clubs that the gangsters frequent as well as a hanging done inside the prison where only the shadows of the prisoner, the witnesses, and the cleric leading the procession of the condemned can be seen. There's also a shootout in the dark with the smoke from the guns clearly visible and the sound of the bullets being heard maybe for the first time by the original audience.
I'd highly recommend this one to anyone interested in films of this era.
Richard Barthelmess stars as gangster Jerry Larrabee, and Betty Compson is his best girl, Alice Gray. The two have great chemistry together, but they are torn apart when Jerry is sent to jail for wounding an innocent bystander during a shootout with a rival mob. Inside prison, Larrabee turns to music, he composes the title song "Weary River", and is soon known as "The Master of Melody". However, once released, he soon finds that people are more interested in his prison record than his musical abilities and he quickly loses his heart for reforming.
All the while, Alice who still loves him, keeps her distance. She does this after having been convinced by the prison warden that Jerry will only be able to go straight if he stays away from the people in his old life, including women like herself. Plus witnessing a hanging inside the prison rather drives the point home that Jerry's life itself may depend on it. Instead she waits patiently and admires his progress from afar. When he is released, she buys tickets to his performances, sits in the back out of sight, and is heart-broken when she hears the audience mutter "convict" during his recitals rather than marvel at his talent.
The end is a sweet one that even has the warden changing his mind about Alice as he enables their final reunion after she and the warden work together to keep Jerry from making a wrong-headed decision based on pride that could end with him going to the gallows.
This all sounds like a conventional gangster tale, and many parts of it have been done before, but this one really has heart, masterfully using both the mediums of sound and image. Its visuals include some great Jazz Age settings inside the night clubs that the gangsters frequent as well as a hanging done inside the prison where only the shadows of the prisoner, the witnesses, and the cleric leading the procession of the condemned can be seen. There's also a shootout in the dark with the smoke from the guns clearly visible and the sound of the bullets being heard maybe for the first time by the original audience.
I'd highly recommend this one to anyone interested in films of this era.