The Sunbeam

The Sunbeam (1912) - This little melodrama has nice acting, and a few nice touches of humor, but one can’t seem to get over the maudlin effect of tiny Ynez Seabury, "Little Kathy" of The Miser’s Heart, witnessing her mother’s death, unaware as she is of what has occurred.

Griffith’s trick here is to take two individuals - in this case, an unnamed Bachelor and a Spinster who live across the hall from each other, and tie them together through a third - the "Sunbeam." The devices of editing are quite simple here and provide no difficulty either for the audience or the scenarist. Griffith’s intent is less technical than emotional here, as the division of characters and jump cuts in plot are much simpler than, say, The Miser’s Heart.

The aforementioned death scene is the very first one in the film, and the innocent reaction of the child to her mother’s pitiful demise, is to misunderstand, and place a finger to her lips, thinking she is only sleeping. The effect is truly heartbreaking, and no doubt Griffith meant for it to be. But the death serves the purpose of the scenario (credited to George Hennessey, who also wrote The Miser’s Heart), for the intent is to create a family from isolated, lonely people.

I suppose that the film makers justified the on-screen death by making us concerned for the child’s future welfare, thus giving us the requisite happy ending, but I, for one, do not feel satisfied. The opening scene is simply too cruel for the levity that follows, and the Sumbeam’s Mamma’s death hangs over the entire film like a shroud.

But to get on with the simple story, we first cut to a downstairs apartment in the same building, occupied by the prissy, uptight Spinster, played effectively by Claire McDowell, the blank-eyed haunted widow of His Trust. We cut to the hall, to see the entrance of the Bachelor (Dell Henderson, interestingly McDowell’s husband, Colonel Frazier from the same film, here sans moustache and swagger). He observes two pairs of charming couples in the hall, presumably with sad envy, before entering his small, lonely room. A title card tells us too much: "EVERYBODY HAS FRIENDS BUT HIM."

A cut back to the spinster’s room shows her exiting, then a following shot of both of them in the hallway reveals that they live directly across from each other. This is a nice economy of action, even if it is all too simple, and of course we know precisely what is going to happen. (Did Griffith’s audience anticipate the outcome? An interesting question.)

The two loners speak briefly in the hall, and the Spinster returns to her room, with her only companion, a sewing machine. McDowell plays the Spinster-ness of her character to the hilt. Her fastidious, jerking motions embody the way she is made up, in her stiff, too-high collar, her tightly wrapped hair, and of course her spectacles. This is already a stereotype character, but she fleshes it out well. On the other side, Henderson defines his character with slightly sorrowful looks and offhand gestures, his lonely boy persona punctuated by a big sweeping curl that swoops boyishly down to the middle of his forehead.

Back to the dead woman and the little girl, the child asking "Mama? Mama?" to the corpse is once again just too much, particularly as heavenly beautiful as the innocent angel is.

The empathy curve is too much for the next cut, which shows three older children gallomping down the stairs to play a practical joke. We can’t get the heartache out of our system quickly enough to enjoy their pranks, which will begin the next round of action in the film. The kids playfully tie the door of the Spinster and the Bachelor together, so that neither can open the door without the other one.

Of course, they both try simultaneously, and when the rope inevitably breaks, sending the frustrated pair hurtling back into their respective apartments, this sends them both into indignant confrontation with one another. These scenes are actually quite funny taken on their own, but the pallor of death lies too heavily for the audience to fully enjoy them, and some of the subtleties of the characters’ reactions get lost.

We return to the little girl who takes entirely too long to leave, staring forlornly at her dead mother, taking off her little apron and picking up her dolly. Finally the title card displays her inner mind: "BETTER GO OUT AND NOT WAKE MAMMA." Oh, could you possibly make us more miserable and depressed, Mr. Griffith?

Finally exiting the death chamber, the little girl descends the stairs and is rebuffed by both an adult and a child alike. The Spinster returns down the stairs and attempts to shoo the little waif away from her door as if it were a pesky cat. Entering her room again, this time followed by the lonely tyke, she becomes hilariously exasperated. She does not quite know what to do with this little intruder, so she begins trying to chase her off with a feather duster, which only delights the child, thinking it is a game, and running circles about the room. Finally, they stop, and when the little ray of "Sunshine" plants a tiny kiss on her own hand, then places it on the Spinster’s, the woman becomes completely undone with the unexpected expression of love, stunned to the point of immobility, even dropping the duster, which is a lovely touch.

Maternal feelings having been awoken - actually just "human feelings" - the Spinster struggles to react properly. Her awkward, halting gestures as she attempts to pick up the little girl and hold her in her lap demonstrate wonderfully the vulnerability beneath her wall of enclosure. Even her glasses are gone now, as she cradles the smiling girl in her arms, first staring, completely puzzled, before her face gives over to the self-shocking onset of overwhelming emotion. It is truly beautifully acted.

Once again, these subtleties come so quickly that perhaps Griffith is piling on more than his audience can absorb. These notes are written with hindsight and the benefit of a remote control with stop and rewind features to which the original audience had no access, and I am convinced that a lot of this gets lost, especially in the overwhelming presence of the dead mama upstairs.
Suddenly, policemen appear in the hallway, and after their exit, our three little scamps enter to play another joke. They are in possession of an official-looking ‘SCARLET FEVER" sign, display it to themselves for the camera, then run off laughing down the hall.

Meanwhile, the little girl exits the Spinster’s room, crosses the hall, and repeats the same gambit with the arriving Bachelor, who impatiently shoos her away before disappearing into his own room. Once inside, she quickly melts his heart as well. Inevitably, the Spinster joins them (in search of a hair puff). Once they are all inside, the mischievous children in the hall tack the "SCARLET FEVER" sign on the closed door, and summon a policeman. Forced to accommodate the little room by the authorities, this nascent family begins their thaw, as it dawns on them how lovely family life would be, and both adults drop their protective guards.

A higher-ranking police officer is summoned, and the children’s trick is discovered. Free to leave the room now, they both return to the little girl’s room, where they find the mother has expired. Realizing the only way to save all their problems, the Bachelor proposes marriage and adoption, to which the Spinster readily agrees.

As the final shot fades, the new family of three huddles happily on the floor on the right side of the frame, while the dead mother’s body stretches across the left side. I suppose this is a "happy" ending. Perhaps, in Griffith’s day, death (especially among the tenements) was so common a sight that this resolution really was a relief to the audience, and the residual horror that we feel today would not have been nearly as pronounced.

In all, The Sunbeam features many wonderful elements: Griffith’s sentimentalism is moderated by both stark realism, as well as the elements of comedy. A central theme is emerging of the individual breaking down barriers constructed by modern life to reach humanistic values. If this formula seems a bit too simplistic and contrived today, one must keep in mind the progressive nature of Griffith’s vision in 1912. Here, no one calls on the re-establishment of a just social order - the answers to the modern world’s dilemmas are found rooted in the human heart. That Griffith’s vision straddles two worlds: the old Victorian and the new modern landscape of alienation, he can obviously be criticized for an inadequate response to the latter by use of the values of the former. It would be a mistake, however, I believe, to criticize this great early modernist too severely for his naivite’, simply because he was a humanist.

No, Griffith was not the intellect, nor did he have the capacity to grasp the dark ironies of life that someone like, say, Jean Renoir would, some twenty years later. But that takes nothing away from this ground-root establishment of the art of cinema as a place where modernity collides with humanism. In essence, this may be as good a definition of the art and history of cinema itself as any, and in constructing such films as The Sunbeam, it can be argued that D.W. Griffith was laying the very foundation for the movies’ subsequent moral and aesthetic dialectics, every bit as much as it was its technical vocabulary.