D.W. Griffith packs for a trip and leaves. When he is gone, his wife, Linda Arvidson, dresses as a nun for a costume ball. Meanwhile, Griffith meets some friends. He dresses as Pierrot, goes to the ball, and flirts with Miss Arvidson. Recognizing each other, each decides to trap the straying spouse in this Wallace McCutcheon comedy issued on June 30, 1908.
It's a bit strange, looking at this nine-shot film. It is the plot basis of Charley Chase's classic 1926 short MIGHTY LIKE A MOOSE. Griffith's first movie as a director would come out two weeks later. It's even harder to believe because this Griffith and Arvidson show no ability as actors and the camerawork by Billy Bitzer is perfunctory. The editing is workmanlike, but that's about the best that can be said about this movie.
About this time, his bosses at Biograph would broker peace with the Patents Trust, bringing them within the ranks and opening up enormous profits. Some of those moneys would be spent on making their product better. Griffith was a marginal stage actor who needed a steady paycheck, which is why he took the job. Even more, he wanted respectability. He wanted to show those snobs in his disregarded profession of the stage, who looked down on him because he had to work in the flickers, that he was a man of vision and talent and ability. Eventually, he would succeed so wildly that the entire industry would follow him, then learn how to do what he did, do it better, and leave him in the dust.
None of which is to imply that he was the only individual in the movies who contributed, who saw that the movies had the potential to be a great and popular art. Griffith took techniques from the stage, like cross-cutting. He took techniques from earlier film maker like George A. Smith. He forced American movies into feature-length movies after seeing the success of Italian epics, he picked the brains of his cameramen, his actors, his writers.
But for ten years, Griffith was the face and reality of what was driving American movies forward. This movie is where they were when he began his ascent to that all-too-brief height.