This is an early feature-length film starring Norma Talmadge; reportedly, it's the earliest that survives. By the following year, her marriage to movie mogul Joseph Schenck and the formation of her own production company would lift her to major stardom. In "Children in the House", however, Talmadge is undistinguished from the rest of the cast. She plays the suffering wife, with an adulterer husband who never shares a scene with her, and she regrets not having married her childhood sweetheart. One of the picture's more interesting sequences informs us of the situation early on in the form of an allegorical fairytale, which Norma's childhood sweetheart tells some children.
From there, the film grows rather uneven and recycles some clichés and generic formulas. It's mostly melodrama, with a bank robbery and a car chase replete with one car crashing off a cliff and a last-minute rescue from a burning building to pick up the action in the climax. The editing becomes fast-paced by the end, and there's a fair amount of cutting back and forth between plots throughout the film. Overall, "Children in the House" is competently made for its time, which is expected from a Fine Arts production: a couple overhead angle shots of passengers in cars standout. Yet, there isn't much of interest here. The motive for the film's second part and climax: the adulterer husband stealing from his father's bank to, apparently, pay for gowns for his girl on the side seems especially unconvincing.
(Note: The Grapevine DVD has a very dark picture.)
From there, the film grows rather uneven and recycles some clichés and generic formulas. It's mostly melodrama, with a bank robbery and a car chase replete with one car crashing off a cliff and a last-minute rescue from a burning building to pick up the action in the climax. The editing becomes fast-paced by the end, and there's a fair amount of cutting back and forth between plots throughout the film. Overall, "Children in the House" is competently made for its time, which is expected from a Fine Arts production: a couple overhead angle shots of passengers in cars standout. Yet, there isn't much of interest here. The motive for the film's second part and climax: the adulterer husband stealing from his father's bank to, apparently, pay for gowns for his girl on the side seems especially unconvincing.
(Note: The Grapevine DVD has a very dark picture.)