Alice Guy's US career produced relatively few really good films but Guy was a great searcher after ideas and would from time to time, as she had done in her French career, come up with a good one. It is excellent news for instance that her "race film" of 1912, A Fool and his Money has now been rediscoveerd and restored and let us hope that one day her In the Year 2000, a more sophisticated remake of her earlier Résultats du féminisme, will also be rediscovered. She has also a very good instinct for topical subjects. Her Making of an American Ciitizen, again 1912, if rather crudely presented, was a sharp-witted repsponse to the controversy over immigration tht preocupied the US in these years. Here similarly she has taken the subject of the "white plague", tuberculosis, a disease known thoughout history but considered in the nineteenth century to be the mal de siècle, and produced a typically modern account (cinema custiomarily allied itself with modernity in this way) that rejected the romantic fatalism of nineteenth-centiry accounts. It is clever idea to privilege her Frenchness - picked up by the Moving Picture World review - by a reference to the best known example, Murger's Scènes de la vie de Bohème, and, as it were, reverse the magnets. So it would be quite inappropriate for the girl to die in this film. While "the beautiful death" of Mimi is accepted as a fatality (an aspect even more strongly emphasised by the theatrical and operatic versions), here the doctor's fatalism is shown as being out of tune with the times when advances in medical understanding of tuberculosis and the establishment of specialised sanatoria were rendering it perfectly preventable and treatable (emphasised in a series of films of the subject made by Edison at this time for the in assoication with the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis). The "miracle cure" of Dr. Earle is a bit false and glib (again a rather typical crudity in Guy's deveopment of her ideas) and attracted criticism but unlike the Edison films (which were more or less public service films), this is intended more as a fable of outr time. No more Mimis. It also sows hw well Guy understood the optimistic US conviction about the value of progress and the "optional" nature of death.
Review of Falling Leaves
