User Reviews

In this D.W. Griffith comedy, W. Chrystie Miller moves into a rooming house run by Kate Bruce and her daughter, Mary Pickford. Soon the two older people are getting on like a house on fire (Miss Pickford obviously disapproves of these shenanigans). Miller, however, is embarrassed by his bald head. He writes away for a hair restorer. When he reads his mail to Miss Bruce, but withholds this, she thinks it a correspondence with another woman, and sticks a picture from a magazine in a frame to make him jealous.

It's a well shot, well performed, but slightly lugubrious comedy. Mr. Miller was the eldest member of Griffith's stock company at 68, suitable for support, background characters and occasionally a lead in films like WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR OLD? and THE OLD ACTOR. When Griffith left Biograph, he retired and died in Staten Island in 1922.

The copy posted on the Library of Congress' National Screening Room site is a bit jittery. Anyone who has looked at prints drawn from the Paper Print collection, restored in th 1960s and 1970s will recognize this as a registration problem.

As the title implies, the story is of the courtship of two persons no longer young, one, the man, even less so; not too old to act, though. Little Mary helps out in the play. Likewise is there a maid who contributes. There is a fine beach scene, where the estranged old lovers are marooned by the incoming tide. The estrangement had arisen over the failure of the old chap to show the widow a letter that had come to him. As the enclosure referred to a hair restorer and as he was particularly shy of any crowning glory, he naturally felt disinclined to reveal it. The widow took adequate measures to make him jealous, as she assumed the letter was from a woman. In the closing scene, following the reconciliation, the widow herself applies the hair restorer to her now affianced husband, to the marked disgust of the maid and the glee of little Mary. But previously she had had a look at that letter. - The Moving Picture World, July 20, 1912