Synopsis
Arthur Vincent (Pallette), enthralled with beautiful dancer Jane Courtenay (Carmen), neglects his wife Cora (Talmadge). Cora meets her spurned high-school sweetheart, Charles Brown (Hinckley), fairly frequently. He lives with Fred, his brother (W.E. Lawrence), and Fred’s family; Fred’s wife, Alice (Wilson), is Cora’s sister. One evening as Cora and her two children have dinner with her sister’s family, Cora and Charles attempt to hide their emotions. He still loves Cora, and she realizes that she made a mistake when she married Arthur.
Charles works in the bank owned by Arthur’s father. Arthur needs money to buy Jane clothes, and she and her confederate, Fellowes (Walter Long), convince him to help them rob his father’s bank. Arthur gives Fellowes the key to the bank’s safe, and Fellowes and three confederates loot the vault.
Returning to Jane’s apartment, the robbers’ car breaks down, and they hide in an old shack for the night. Arthur spends the night at Jane’s as they wait for their confederates’ return. With Arthur away, Cora asks Charles to visit her, and they admit their love, but find no chance for happiness. In the morning, the robbery is discovered. Charles, refusing to say where he was during the time of the robbery, is arrested.
Cora and Alice’s children, playing, climb through the floorboards of the old shack. The robbers seize four of the children, but the fifth runs off. The child tells his parents about the men in the shack, and although they do not believe him, his father returns with him and climbs through the boards. The robbers seize Fred too. The little boy runs back to his mother, and she phones the police.
Jane and Arthur arrive at the shack and pick up the robbers. One of the robbers sets the shack on fire to get rid of the witnesses. The arriving police see the robbers driving off, and chasing them, do not see the fire.
The police and the robbers carry on a gun battle as they drive at high speed up a winding road. Several policemen and robbers, including Arthur, are shot. A couple of the robbers fall out of the open car before it makes a spectacular dive off a cliff, killing everyone left in it. The surviving robber tells the police about the fire in the shack. They race back just in time to save the children and Fred.
Back in the jail, Cora wants Charles to tell the police that he was with her, but he refuses. She goes to tell them herself. As she starts speaking to the desk sergeant about her meeting with Charles, the sergeant gets a call informing him about the fate of the robbers, including Arthur. Charles is saved without Cora having to shame herself. Happy and relieved, Cora and Charles embrace.
Discussion
The melodramatic plot of The Children in the House, centering on a faithless husband and a betrayed, but still loyal, wife, is constructed with multiple converging story lines. Typical plots of the era were heavy and plodding. The actors overemphasized in gesture and facial expression. The social mores were constricting: a wife reluctant to divorce a faithless husband, shame associated with spending an evening alone with another man. The youthful leading actress with children was not uncommon at the time, but would have been highly unusual in the 1920s.
Car chases between police and criminals, a motif destined for a long history in film, had originated very early in cinema, and 1916 audiences were familiar with chase scenes by the Keystone Kops, and D.W. Griffith, who highlighted chases in many of his shorts.
In The Children in the House, the children provide the means of
identifying the robbers. These children, known as the
Fine Arts kiddies,
had been featured in short films produced by Griffith
and the Mutual Film Company (with which Griffith was associated in the early
1910s) and directed by sibling filmmakers Chester and Sidney Franklin. The
children and the Franklins moved to Fine Arts with Griffith. The
Fine Arts kiddies
had appeared earlier in 1916 in the popular
Let Katy Do It, directed by the Franklins. The core group consisted
of the five children (Violette Radcliffe, George Stone, Carmen De Rue, Francis
Carpenter, Ninon Fovieri) who appear in The Children in the House.
Despite their popularity with audiences, the Fine Arts kiddies
were out of
the film industry by their early teens.
Feature films had only superseded shorts for about a year when this film was made. Despite the multiple story lines and slow pace, the film barely manages to fill five reels. Filling the running time was a major concern for writers and directors. The superficial narrative and characterizations do not fill up much film. Not many screen writers or directors had developed depth of narrative or visual technique. Contemporary reviewers in Variety, Motography, and Motion Picture News nonetheless described the film as interesting and well-constructed.
The Children in the House was produced by Griffith's Fine Arts Film Company and distributed by Triangle Motion Picture Company, organized in 1915 by Henry Aitken. Aitken, a wealthy Wisconsin insurance man, was instrumental in forming the Mutual Film Company in 1912. He partnered with D. W. Griffith in 1913 and made a fortune off his investment in The Birth of A Nation (1915). Aitken used his wealth to bring Griffith, Mack Sennet and Thomas Ince, all top-tier film producers, to the newly-formed Triangle (named after its subdivision into three production units, one for each of the producers) in 1915. Although Griffith's Fine Arts Film Company found immediate success hiring stage actor Douglas Fairbanks to a long-term contract, Triangle as a whole did not prosper. After little more than a year, the three producers left the studio. The Fine Arts unit was disbanded in March, 1917.
During its brief existence, Fine Arts Film Company had an impressive roster of directors and actors, many of whom were destined for successful careers, including Fairbanks, Tod Browning, Allan Dwan, John Emerson, Sidney Franklin, Erich von Stroheim, Norma and Constance Talmadge, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Eugene Pallette, and Alma Rubens.
Although only in her early twenties, Norma Talmadge looks mature, even matronly, in The Children in the House. The cameras of the 1910s, not to mention the dowdy makeup, clothes, and hairstyles, were not flattering. Talmadge made her first film at age 16, and was a member of the Vitagraph Film Company from 1909-15. She appeared frequently with Vitagraph star Maurice Costello, who was 17 years her senior. Talmadge joined Fine Arts in 1916 and made seven films for the company. In 1917, with her husband Nicolas Schenck, she formed the Norma Talmadge Film Company to make her own films. She remained a star through the silent era. However, her popularity declined after the lack of success of her two talkies, and she retired in 1931, age 37.
The fat, pompous comedian he was to become is virtually unrecognizable in the
young and slim Eugene Pallette, playing a straight dramatic role. Pallette began
his career in stock companies at an early age. Entering films as a juvenile, he
made over sixty shorts from 1913-15 before signing with Fine Arts. He has an
important role in the France, 1572
episode of Griffith's
Intolerance (1916). After serving in the Aviation Corps in World War
I, Pallette played character and comedy roles — often small or uncredited
— through the 1920s. A role in The Canary Murder Case (1929)
first revealed the gravelly voice and blustery persona that were much appreciated
by movie audiences of the 1930s and 1940s. His most notable film roles include
Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Mr. Pike in
The Lady Eve (1941).
Jewel Carmen, who signed with Fine Arts at age nineteen, had leading roles in four of Fairbanks's Triangle-Fine Arts films, including The Half-Breed (1916). In 1917, she signed with Fox Films and was soon receiving featured roles. In 1918, she attempted to break her contract with Fox. The subsequent litigation between Carmen and William Fox virtually ended her career. She made only three films after 1918 and had disappeared into obscurity by 1936.
William Hinkley entered films in 1915 at age 21 after a brief stage career. He played supporting and leading roles for Fine Arts in 1916, and appeared in several features with Marguerite Clark at Famous Players Film Company in 1917. Hinckley became ill in 1917 and died after an operation in early 1918.
The Franklin brothers, Chester and Sidney, were co-directors on a number of films
in the 1910s. They had been signed by Griffith in 1915 to direct a series of
one-reel kiddie
comedies. With Fine Arts in 1916 and with Fox Film Company
in 1917, they continued making films with the same children. The brothers
co-directed until 1919 before separating. Sidney Franklin had an important career.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he directed star actresses, including Norma and Constance
Talmadge, Marion Davies, and Norma Shearer. Later
in his career he directed the Oscar-winning drama
The Good Earth (1937) and produced several major films for MGM,
including Random Harvest and most of Greer Garson's hits. Chester
Franklin continued directing through the silent era. In the early 1930s he
directed several alternate-language versions of MGM films and a few programmers
for poverty row studios. He concluded his career with two relatively low budget,
somewhat unusual, films for MGM: Sequoia (1933) and
Tough Guy (1936).
Further Reading