User Reviews

Death (Oreste Grandi), in the form of a bearded old man wearing a black robe, whisks away the baby son of a young mother (Mary Cleo Tarlarini). However, the mother isn't prepared to accept her son's demise and bribes a witch into leading her to Death's lair. Something of an oddity from Italian director Arrigo Frusta, who not only creates a pleasantly ominous atmosphere to accompany the mother on her quest, but also fashions an unexpectedly downbeat ending.

Some time ago this company released an extremely poetic picture entitled "The Snow Maiden." It seems not improbable that the same author and producer built this picture; but though it is a fantasy in some ways like the former, it has a very different, a brutal quality and is very much poorer art. In the first place the idea behind it is pessimistic, not quite normal. It is usually left for some officious idiot to comfort a mother's grief by telling her that if her child had lived he might when he had grown up have been a cause of grief to her. The picture of Father Time's big clock room is as unreal as somebody else's dream; yet it was a very good idea to show the pictures that the mother saw, under a thin film of rippling water; the effect is weird. These brutal scenes, which were shown as possibilities, comforted the mother, so the picture shows, and made her glad that her boy lay dead. She wanted him dead. - The Moving Picture World, August 19, 1911