User Reviews

Lois Weber came from a religious Pennsylvania Dutch family and had spent time working for a evangelical street group akin the the Salvation Army. She entered film as an actress in 1908 and in 1911 took the leap behind the camera, writing and co-directing with Edwin S. Porter. For this movie, she wrote, co-directed (with Porter) and starred with her husband Phillips Smalley.

Lois Weber lives in a small fishing village with her idiot brother, Charles De Forrest. Most of the other villagers like to torment the poor fool, but Smalley is kind. One day, Miss Weber gets locked in the ice house, and when her brother tries to get help to release her, they drive him off with blows.

Although it looks like the final third of the movie is missing, what survives is fine film making. The unnamed cameraman shoots the seashore quite beautifully, and the objects around them show their utilitarian grace; even the ramshackle wooden structures, and blocks of ice show their own beauty.

We can also see Miss Weber's god-fearing background; one of the titles refers to Mr. Smalley as a "Samaritan", and one shack has "Gallilee Club" painted on it.

Miss Weber would go on to become the shining director at Rex, which Porter had set up after he left the Edison Company. Later, Universal would absorb Rex, and she would be one of their most successful and innovative directors. Her career would falter in the mid-1920s and she made only one sound film.

Listed as a "fragment" on the Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers set, "On the Brink" seems to be a mostly-intact one-reeler and one of the first that Lois Weber directed (and wrote, produced and starred in--she did it all and was likely the major creative force behind this one rather than Edwin S. Porter, who was more of a production supervisor at this point, or her husband Phillips Smalley, for whom most including himself have acknowledged as the less involved of the supposedly-co-directing couple.) The only earlier film of hers I've seen and which is included on the same set is "From Death to Life," which was released a couple weeks earlier than this one in June 1911, and two more of her films were released between them--a busy schedule they kept up in those nickelodeon days.

More striking than anything else about the surviving print of "On the Brink" is that it's gorgeous--the location shooting, natural lighting and the tinting/toning. Even when the print gets scratchy it seems rather apt as it occurs by the crashing waves of the seashore. Indeed, the picture was singled out in contemporary press for its beauty and its tinting in particular (as quoted in Shelley Stamp's book "Lois Weber in Early Hollywood"). Perhaps, just as now, back then not all nickelodeon prints looked as good as this. And, it was this pictorial beauty, as well as a tendency towards supposedly higher-brow scenarios from Weber, that Rex productions built their reputation upon.

Dress "On the Brink" up as much you want as about the relationship of a woman (Weber) with her mentally-disabled brother or about romance, all as shot lovingly on location, the plot here still concludes with the then-popular last-minute-rescue formula. The same action-packed, race-against-time kind of scenario that would be later employed for her early masterpiece, "Suspense" (1913). D.W. Griffith was also well known for this genre. This one even features a rather ridiculous contrivance for the rescue, as Weber's character tails her romantic co-lead until accidently getting herself locked inside a freezer. Fortunately, Weber would prove to be much smarter behind the screen.