The Better Man (II) (1912) User Reviews

Not bad...

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 29 July 2012]

This short can be found in the recently released DVD collection "Treasures of the West"---a collection of mostly short films from the earliest days of movies until 1938. Unfortunately, the very beginning and end are missing from this old print--something not very unusual due to the nitrate prints used up through the early 1950s. In its place, the film preservationists have used intertitle card to explain what has occurred as the film begins.

While the accompanying commentary track seems to indicate that this film confirms standing anti-Mexican sentiment in America, I don't think this is at all clear or even implied. Yes, the main character is a wanted bandit--Mr. Gomez clearly has done some bad things. However, when he meets a lady with a sick child, this bad man manages to overcome his natural inclinations (much like the guys in the classic western "The Three Godfathers") and he risks his own life to save the boy. Rather sweet if you ask me. Overall, well worth seeing and a decent early silent western due to its humanity and message.

The Better Man review

[JoeytheBrit · 6/10 · 3 July 2020]

Decent morality tale which sees Robert Thornby playing a wanted man with a price on his head who risks his liberty to help the mother of a child in urgent need of a doctor, only to be ambushed on his way to fetch him by the child's neglectful father.

The Good Samaritan

[boblipton · 8/10 · 12 April 2012]

The excellence of the films produced by Biograph in this period is well established in the modern mind. They had D.W. Griffith directing for them. Some interesting work from the Edison Company in this period has been made available on DVD. Likewise, French Gaumont has made a good deal of its work in this era available. However, Vitagraph, long the most successful of the Patents Trust companies, still turning out good movies when it was bought by the Warner Brothers in the mid-twenties, lacks exposure. Judging by the ones I've seen -- a few John Bunny comedies, some early women's pictures and this one -- it would be an eye-opener.

First, this is better scripted than a lot of Griffith's works. When you encounter a character in a Griffith piece, he acts pretty much as you expect him to. When there's a message of tolerance, it's that we should let other people alone.

In this one, a Mexican bandit breaks into a house where a woman and her sick child are waiting for her husband. However, the husband is out gambling and the bandit just wants something to eat. When he sees the child is sick, he immediately sets out to fetch a doctor. This sort of topsy-turvy playing with the audience's expectation is something Griffith rarely did. The story plays out in its its expected form, with the husband going after the bandit for the reward. However, the theme of this story is something that would rarely occur to Grffith: it's not who you are that matters, it's what you do. Griffith rarely recognized there could be any distinction between the two.

The editing is just as effective as the best of the era, with good cross-cutting for tension. The acting is subdued and telling. The photography is nothing to write home about; there's one pan shot, but it's all about efficiency and telling the story; there seems little effort at showing the beauty of the landscape this piece was shot in and the formal composition that ends the movie seems to use that composition solely to emphasize a neat end to the work.

Still, it gets the work done. In this obscure work which has barely survived the century since it was shot, we find evidence for the excellence of the rest of Vitagraph's library. If this was a standard piece, it must be a very high standard indeed.

Vitagraph excellence no surprise

[kekseksa · 15 August 2018]

As I have several times pointed out, the unduly high estimate of the work of D. W. Griffith's at Biograph was very largely due 1) to the much later importance that Griffith's techniques would have for European film-makers like Gance or Eisenstein (although used for a quite different purpose) 2) the fact that Griffith's films survived in large numbers due to Biograph's prudent disposal of paper print copies with the Library of Congress. Vitagraph, by far the best known and by far the most admired US company at the time internationally (we have the testimony of both Louis Feuillade and Victorin Jasset in this regard) lost all their stock in a disastrous fire. Now that efforts are at last being made to recover the heritage of the past and appreciate in a much broader way the achievement of early film, that illusion based on inadequate information and on a false critical consensus regarding "the grammar" of film, is gradually dissipating. as we discover more and more films of this period both European and US. Not only does this allow us to see the true importance of European films, still the most significant cinema industry in qualitative terms throughout the entire silent period but also to understand why, of the US producers, Vitagraph was such an admired film-company.

This is not an especially wonderful film (Vitagraph's writers were never really a match for its stylistic expertise) but, in technical terms, this film makes the majority of Griffith's shorts look pretty ham-fisted. Griffith's strength was that he was eventually able to organise himself a large degree of directorial independence, that he strove, at times at any rate, to seek out original subject-matter and that he learned, in his early years - from Vitagraph, from the French films that influenced him greatly and, latterly, from the pioneering work of Thomas Ince and was able to make up for some of his inadequacies in terms of mise en scène and gradually push Bitzer to develop the more expansive and fluent style that Vitagraph and Ince had pioneered. The expansiveness one sees obviously - and for the first time really - in Birth of a Nation (but clearly derived from Ince whose, alas lost, Battle of Gettysburg had appeared in 1913 and from the ground-breaking Cabiria of 1914) but the fluency is still rather lacking as the film jerks from episode to episode. That problem Griffith would only really master in Intolerance after which, alas, his learning curve reduced drasticaly as his eminence (and his drinking) increased.

Itis also interesting to note that, in liberating themselves from the oobsession with Griffith that their critical tradition has saddled them with, USians can actually form not a diminished but a richer, more wide-ranging view of their own cinema of this period as well as learning to appreciate that the cinema of the world did not, and does not, revolve, except to some extent in economic terms, around Hollywood. In the 1930s, in my view, the palm passed from Europe not to the US but to Japan. But therein lies another voyage of discovery.

Moral Story with Fine Performances

[Michael_Elliott · 7 January 2013]

The Better Man (1912)

*** (out of 4)

Good Western from Vitagraph has Jim Saunders (Robert Thornby) going away to gamble and leaving his wife (Anne Schaefer) and child home alone. Wanted bandit Miguel Gomez (George Stanley) breaks into the house for some food but when he notices the child is sick he agrees to go and find the doctor. Along the way he crosses paths with Jim who wants to kill Miguel for the reward money. THE BETTER MAN is at times pretty far-fetched but it's entertaining enough to where film buffs will certainly want to check it out. It really does seem as if the company is trying to copy D.W. Griffith here as that director quite often delivered morality tales with bad characters doing good things. Quite often the Griffith films were over-sentimental and that's the case here as well because not for a second do you ever believe a bandit would risk everything to help someone else. With that said, it's easy to get caught up in the story and the three performances are quite good. There's an interesting sequence where the two men are fighting on the edge of a cliff but the way this scene is shot it appears that a large hole was dug and the men are fighting by it. This is actually pretty unique looking even though the follow-up shots show how fake it is.