A remarkably sophisticated offering for 1917, although I have the feeling that the surviving 60-minutes version is actually the Kodascope cutdown and not the original length at all. Some scenes seem truncated and it's hard to believe that a director as sophisticated and acute as William Desmond Taylor would go out of his way to cut scenes off in mid-stride as it were, even though all the pertinent points had been made. This makes the flow of the film somewhat jerky. It would be nice to get hold of the original orchestral music score and find out how long it played. Anyway, for once, Alpha has provided a really good score for the DVD version. So many of Taylor's films have disappeared, it's good to have this one, especially as Jack Pickford so brilliantly overcomes the fact that he's actually too old for the title role. I'd put this down as Jack's best surviving performance.
Review of Tom Sawyer
