User Reviews

"Money Mad" was also a popular stage play by Steele Mackaye that debuted in 1880; with elaborate scenery, it was a meditation on the theme of "the love of money is the root of all evil" with numerous characters and situations. Although doubtlessly familiar with the property, D.W. Griffith had neither time nor budget to do justice to Mackaye's five-act panorama in this one-reel subject, and probably only worked from the most basic idea of it, if at all. But the title "Money Mad" would've struck a chord with his viewers, recalling the popular Mackaye play. One of the other reviewers here errs when he calls Inslee's character "a homeless man;" he has a home where he lives in squalor, but prefers to beg on the streets than to pursue an honest living and hoards the money that he accumulates or steals. The version I saw had not a single subtitle, nor even the front title, a condition that afflicts many Biographs that survive only in paper prints, filed sometimes before the titles were made, or containing flash titles only. In some cases, it can be difficult to tell exactly what is going on; that the miser is exchanging his ill-gotten cash at the bank for gold coin rather than making a deposit is unclear, and a title would have filled us in. There are two remarkable sequences; the first -- a scene where the miser is followed back to his squat by two Italian bandits from the bank -- indulges in some primitive cross-cutting and appears to modern eyes as a dress rehearsal for a far more famous scene in Griffith's later "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" (1912). The conflagration set up by the candle knocked over by the greedy old hag fills the whole frame with smoke so thick one wonders how Billy Bitzer kept the camera rolling in the face of it; this ends the brief subject with an abstract image, and a sense of total obliteration. Otherwise, Griffith's "Money Mad" is a broad morality tale with no sympathetic characters, still somewhat grounded in typical conventions of the stage.

A mad miser strangles a woman to get her money. Two thieves kill him for his hoard and later kill each other. When their landlady enters to find their corpses and the loot, in her greed she knocks over a lamp and burns to death.

It's not just the melodramatic story that a modern observer will notice and be repulsed by. It's the ridiculous overacting and bad sets. This was the 31st movie Griffith had directed and Biograph would release eight others that month. That was the pace that Griffith was working at: he had to choose the stories or write them himself, select actors, rehearse them, supervise the shoot and edit the results. Also he had to change the way everything was done. He had started January as a fledgling movie actor at Edison. His job was as ridiculous as the acting here.

Nonetheless, he was already making progress. The editing is clearly advanced for the era and the camera-work is startling, thanks to cameraman Billy Bitzer. There is a shot in which Charles Inslee walks down an alley, onto the screen, into closeup and out of range, followed by Harry Solter and George Gebhardt, who do the same. It is a paranoid and constricting shot and Griffith would build on it, most notably in THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY. In the crowd scenes, everyone does something individually and sensibly. Notice in the bank how Florence Lawrence feels the material of Jeanie MacPherson's dress. Also, Griffith has begun assembling his stock company; Mack Sennett and Arthur Johnson both appear in this movie. If the Biograph Right Wall is invisible in the shadows, the proscenium arch is gone.

More than a century later, we look at this movie and see its flaws. Griffith had to fight for each of the changes he made, whether he invented them, his collaborators came up with them, or he lifted them from others. His first film as director had been released in July. Five months later, he turned out this movie. It's not in itself a good movie, but it's still amazing.