October 11: J. Searle Dawley's Snow White (Highly Recommended!)

 

J. Searle Dawley is one of cinema's earliest and most prolific directors. In his directing career, that spanned almost twenty years, he helmed almost 200 films, many of them shorts, but he also made an impressive number of films that ran for an hour or more. More impressive still, was his embrace of a wide range of genres. He started his career in 1907 at Edison. From the start he distinguished himself at the company as the go-to man for any film subject and for his efficiency and speed of production; something that he excelled at, and yet, the end product did not suffer from it (Dawley had been in the directing business so long that he even directed D.W. Griffith in a role before Griffith himself became a director). His films included horror and, in fact, today his most famous film is Frankenstein dating from 1910 (the first known film adaptation of Mary Shelley's novella). As for genre's, he seemed to have a special flare for more fanciful stories (as the special effects in Frankenstein prove) and in 1916 he tackled the Grimm brothers' Snow White for Famous Players (as the contemporary poster above indicates, it was distributed by Paramount). The film starred Marguerite Clark as Snow White, Dorothy Cumming as the queen and Alice Washburn as a very impressive Witch Hex.  Running a little over an hour, it is feature length and was a big success at the box office (there is story that it was the first film Walt Disney ever saw, I have no idea if that was apocryphal or not, but it does demonstrate how wide and popular the release of the film was).  Part of that success may lie in that it was adapted from a popular Broadway production of the tale, but certainly Dawley's direction prowess was also key (Disney did admire the film enough that it inspired the inspiration for his own animated version in 1937).  The film is also one of Dawley's earlier feature length films that still survives intact and his been released in many editions for home viewing. It is one Dawley's finest and is a great edition to any silent Halloween film lineup.