Works featuring "falsely accused" (25)

Blind Justice

Intertitle: "...A new clue...those words had an ominous sound to Mr. Wilken". Then, about 15 seconds later, the next intertitle: "...A new clue...those words seem to burn". And it painfully drags on like this, every scene taking twice the time needed (when half the scenes were not needed at all) in this 100-minute remake of the 6-minute "Physician Of The Castle" (1908), that simply adds 94 minutes of bloated backstory.

The Silent Man

Surprise: this drops Hart's standard cowboy-changed-by-a-woman formula. Bigger surprise: it's a total mess...

  • 52 words of highfalutin prose on 3 title cards in the first 40 seconds to describe...nothing: Gee, the desert is awfully empty!
  • It gets worse. From the 90-second mark until 3 minutes in, there's never more than 6 seconds between title cards. Since the title cards are onscreen 5-9 seconds, most of time is spent reading, not viewing. The barrage of titles doesn't slow to a more reasonable pace until 5-6 minutes in.
  • But just when the titles let up, the action on screen in this video gets hopelessly muddled: the hero fights the villain, tries to escape, but somehow ends up out cold on the floor. The next time we see him, a fortnight later, he is followed by a man with a rifle who tells him: “You're turned loose, stranger,” - apparently, he's been jailed but we're not told why.
  • The hero's version of later events doesn't seem to agree with what is shown on screen.
  • When the hero next encounters the villain, he gets his revenge by forcing him to...do something that seems pointless and of no benefit.
  • Both the heroine's-little-brother subplot and the parson's-church subplot are never made to feel relevant - and are never shown to be resolved.
  • Worse of all, the resolution of the main conflict, between hero and villain, is the worst kind of script cop-out.
And then there is the biggest unresolved mystery: why is the hero called “Silent” when he is no more silent than anyone else in this silent film?

The Hayseed

A few goofy gags got me giggling (including the signs in the background) but, overall, this is considerably below the standard Comique had achieved up to this point. Could the much lower energy level be due to the absence of Al. St. John?

Of note, however, is the scene that subtly slips in a bit of political/social satire: the “death” of alcohol - presumably a reference to the ratification of the 18th Constitutional amendment earlier that year, paving the way for Prohibition. Just two days after the film was released, the Volstead Act enforcing Prohibition became law, thus threatening one of comics' most enduring characters - the drunkard - with extinction in the US.