This is really a very old-fashioned film for 1915 and, when one compares it with the excellent short films Ince was producing in 1912-1913,really marks something of a regression. Designed presumably to appeal to New Yorkers' nostalgie de la boue with regard to their immigrant origins, the film sentimentalises everything. First we have the absurd pastoral picture of impoverished post-war Italy, then an almost equally sentimentalised view of the Italian quarter in New York (far from being remotely "neo-realist" this is simply the "picturesque poverty" that became a Hollywood trademark)up to the moment when disaster strikes during a heatwave.
Here the film turns abruptly to mawkish melodrama, fulfilling its principal intention to be a "facial", that is the much loved but by this time distinctly old-fashioned vaudeville act where a performer goes through the gamut of facial expressions. This is exactly what Beban had been doing in vaudeville, nearly always with an "ethnic" flavour (the Italian labourer mourning his dead child was already a long-standing speciality), and it is exactly what he produces here in his first film. (For more on the persistence of the "facial" see my note on A Great Love 1916). The film ends with a preposterous revenge-plot (savage grimaces, Mr. Beban) whose outcome can be seen coming a mile away (villain's heart melted by sight of helpless child), a nonsensical concoction required by the "facial" genre which depends for its effect on such rapid switches in emotional register.
Emigration/immigration was an important issue in the years between the outbreak of the First World War and the passing of the Emergency Quota Act 1921 (later revised as The Immigration Act 1924 designed to severely curtail immigration to the US especially "poor" immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The subject crops up in many comedy shorts, of which Chaplin's The Immigrant is the best and the best known. There is also a superb (and genuinely "neo-realist") Italian film L'Emigrante by Febo Mari which also came out in 1915 but which sadly only seems to survive in part. But as a contribution to the debate, this Ince/Barker film (unlike the Mari film or, for that matter, in its own way, Chaplin's comedy)has absolutely nothing worthwhile to say....
It is worth noting that this regressive tendency in US film is very clearly associated with techniques often quite wrongly identified (on simple-minded formalist grounds - "editing is good (even when it's bad)") as "progressive" - the fashion for sentimentalising close-ups most obviously but also the studio lighting techniques derived from glamour photography and the overuse of what might be called "the mini-flashback" (particularly irritating and ineffective in this film).
Here the film turns abruptly to mawkish melodrama, fulfilling its principal intention to be a "facial", that is the much loved but by this time distinctly old-fashioned vaudeville act where a performer goes through the gamut of facial expressions. This is exactly what Beban had been doing in vaudeville, nearly always with an "ethnic" flavour (the Italian labourer mourning his dead child was already a long-standing speciality), and it is exactly what he produces here in his first film. (For more on the persistence of the "facial" see my note on A Great Love 1916). The film ends with a preposterous revenge-plot (savage grimaces, Mr. Beban) whose outcome can be seen coming a mile away (villain's heart melted by sight of helpless child), a nonsensical concoction required by the "facial" genre which depends for its effect on such rapid switches in emotional register.
Emigration/immigration was an important issue in the years between the outbreak of the First World War and the passing of the Emergency Quota Act 1921 (later revised as The Immigration Act 1924 designed to severely curtail immigration to the US especially "poor" immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The subject crops up in many comedy shorts, of which Chaplin's The Immigrant is the best and the best known. There is also a superb (and genuinely "neo-realist") Italian film L'Emigrante by Febo Mari which also came out in 1915 but which sadly only seems to survive in part. But as a contribution to the debate, this Ince/Barker film (unlike the Mari film or, for that matter, in its own way, Chaplin's comedy)has absolutely nothing worthwhile to say....
It is worth noting that this regressive tendency in US film is very clearly associated with techniques often quite wrongly identified (on simple-minded formalist grounds - "editing is good (even when it's bad)") as "progressive" - the fashion for sentimentalising close-ups most obviously but also the studio lighting techniques derived from glamour photography and the overuse of what might be called "the mini-flashback" (particularly irritating and ineffective in this film).