User Reviews

When some enterprising burglars are out a-burgling, they spot Tom Moore putting a wad of cash into his safe. They call in Alice Joyce, well known as the best burglar in the town. When Moore surprises Miss Joyce at her work, she is ready for the handcuffs, but he offers her some money to go away. She refuses the money and bolts.

She explains to her co-conspirators that Moore was nice to her, so she won't see any harm done to him. They begin to express their displeasure with this unprofessional attitude in a vigorous manner, whereupon Moore is on them. When they are beaten off, Moore and Miss Joyce collapse and are taken to a local hospital. They call in an Oriental hypnotist because.... well, of course they do. He observes them talking his own language in their sleep, and he starts to tell an old story of his Oriental country.....

It's a pretty good three-reel movie on its own terms, with some fine camerawork (including a dramatic moving shot that begins and ends the story within the story. The actors are fine, but dagnabbit, the movie as it exists, at 30 minutes, is not complete. There's an Ancient Curse in operation and that curse must be reversed before the story is done. Cutdown version? First of a two-parter? Whichever it is, there needs to be more.

This story would have seemed to have fascinating potential, and still is compelling, but it seems like the spark couldn't generate a flame. It's about reincarnation, but we get there rather at random. I can see that possibly a back story might have been present at one time, but we have none in the film's present state.

A girl burglar robs a rich man's house. He catches her but seems incredibly forgiving, lets her go and just hands her his money. For his trouble, he's held up by her two male companions outside, but then, he just collapses. Why? Then for no apparent reason, she falls to a dead faint, too! What gives? The two are raced to a hospital, as the very real possibility of Sleeping Sickness was present a century ago. Nothing works. Now silly as it may seem, they decide to call in a Hindu mystic, famed for his hypnotic powers. He does his stuff and gets from the victims a story that in the murky past, in some weird India/Egypt/Babylon someplace, (going by the mishmash of costumes and art) the rich man in his earlier incarnation is on the slave market block, a prize because even then, he was a white man. He's bought by a wealthy guy with a turban and a palace, and a collection of wives. The big taboo is for a slave to get too chummy with said wives, but our hero falls for one of them, who's the ante-carnation of the little burglarette.

This all comes out and the two are sentenced to be killed and entombed together, and are. Then they snap out of it back 1914, the Hindu spilling the whole story, and everyone's happy to just let the couple hug in private, the last shot superimposes their long ago mummified bodies back in the tomb over their embrace.

This really should have been fleshed out a bit more. It would seem the random chance that in all time and space, these two carriers of long lost souls would come together then and there, all right. But what's with the strange paralyzing comas all of a sudden? Why was hypnotism the way out? In fact, just how would Hypnotism work? Who knows? It's just all spooky stuff that comes to miraculous aid in incomprehensible phantasy situations.

Noting the date of this film, surely the men who produced the 1932 film The Mummy could have seen it, and might've given a more serious thought to what would happen to ancient star-crossed lovers returning to the world in the Twentieth Century, and maybe not so seriously, in a lighter vein in Professor Beware (1938).

This long short (it is half an hour long) is an excellent little mystery story by Doty Hobart and Kenean Buel, full of little surprises. First of all there is the initial double-take - a crook spies a man putting money into his safe and gets together a gang to do the burglary. But this is not what the film is about at all; it merely sets the scene. Second little surprise - one of the crooks is a woman (Alice Joyce). Since she is treated in a friendly fashion by the owner of the house (Tom Moore) who catches her in the act, she breaks with her two confederates. But in the middle of all this both the man and the woman-burglar faint (quite separately) and fall into a mysterious coma. Third little surprise, we see what appears to be a male black nurse in a private clinic treating white patients. The doctors are completely baffled by "the sleeping death" and call in an Indian hypnotist who, after examining them, recounts a legend that will explain the mystery. Fourth surprise - an no so little - as the story commences we have, just a few months after the film Cabiria had been shown in the US, a superb "Cabiria shot" (zooming in on the temple door). Segundo de Chomón, main cameraman for Pastrone's great epic in 1914, had introduced the use of a dolly to not merely produce lateral and vertical panoramas (which weer already in use) but also to provide movement of the camera towards and away from the scene which had very rarely been done before (there is an example in a 1913 film of Yevgeny Bauer) hence in the US it was known as "a Cabiria shot". This genuinely mobile use of the camera became very important in European film but remained (until very recent times) little used in the US where operators and directors were completely wedded to cross-cutting (which could provide a kind of illusion of mobility). However there are at least two examples I know of of Cabiria shots being used very effectively in US films at this time - and the use in Cabira is actually quite tentative: this is one and the other (even more radical) occurs in two places in Allan Dwan's 1915 film David Harum.

In the story within the story, African Americans are employed in more customary roles as servants to the bronzed-up white actors who play the upper-class Indians (the princess is Alice Joyce again) and the slave she falls in love with (Tom Moore again). So we have two parallel stories (one modern, one ancient) with the same actors of the kind that would later be used by Cecil B DeMille in the US and by Michael Curtiz (Mihály Kertész) in Austria and the US (in 1914 he was still in Hungary). And there is another little surprise here too. The story is not entirely told consecutively and there is a linking frame which constitutes a kind of flashback within the flashback, another very rare occurrence in early film (at least before Sjöström's Körkarlen in 1921).

The solution of the mystery I shall leave you to discover for yourselves.....