
One of a series of inexpensive rural pictures directed by D.W. Griffith aimed at recouping the losses he suffered when the enormously expensive Intolerance failed to catch the same lightning in the box-office bottle that The Birth of a Nation, True Heart Susie is the story of a long-suffering and true-hearted country girl (Gish) who loses her childhood sweetheart to a "painted and powdered" city girl, only to win him back at the end when the city girl suffers a timely bout of pneumonia.

It's a rather slight comedy that hinges mostly on Gish's ability to make befuddled self-delusion and virginal reticence charming, and I have to say it's not one of Gish's or Griffith's best. Griffith was a reactionary in the classic sense of the word—wanting to dial the clock back to an earlier time, in this case the 19th century Kentucky of his birth, a bit of problem since by then even Kentucky had moved on. He took the morals of his tales seriously, but increasingly his audiences didn't, and before you say, yes, but it was ninety years ago, what do you expect, I'd remind you that Picasso was already two years into his Cubist phase, Robert Weine was in Germany filming the groundbreaking Expressionist film, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was just a year away from publishing This Side Of Paradise. World War I was over and like it or not, the 19th century had been washed away in rivers of blood, never to be seen again.

True Heart Susie is worth seeing, though, beyond the curiosity factor that attaches itself to any work of Lillian Gish, for the supporting work of Clarine Seymour as the city girl.
I saw this movie as a download from Netflix—the second reason I'm writing this post. This whole download thing (which computer wiz Katie-Bar-The-Door set up for the hapless Monkey) is a real boon to movie nuts such as myself. For a minimal subscription price (roughly $10 a month), you can stream at no extra charge hundreds of movies directly to your computer (or if you have the right equipment, to your television).
At a time when hundreds of Blockbusters are closing and Warner Home Video is changing its business model (selling most of their film library now on a mail order on-demand basis rather than spending speculative up-front money to stock store shelves), it's clear that the industry at least believes streaming and downloading is the future of movie viewing and that soon enough we'll one day look at all our DVDs the same way we look at those VHS tapes lining the shelves in the basement, as candidates for a landfill.

Not that I'll stop collecting DVDs and Blu-Rays in the meantime. You think I'm going to stop watching movies for the next five years just because the dawn of the download age is upon us? Not a chance.
But still, something to think about ...