Love and War (1899)
*** (out of 4)
This Edison film is certainly going to look silly by today's standards but for 1899 it's actually pretty ahead of its time. The "story" has a boy leaving his parents to go fight in the war where he becomes a hero and comes home with a Red Cross nurse as his wife. It takes about three minutes for that story to be told and as you can tell, it's really nothing great or something that's going to be confused with Shakespeare. However, this was released nearly four years before THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY so it's interesting to see an earlier picture trying to tell a story. Without title cards it's rather hard to fully figure out what's going on, what war they're fighting in and there's no explanation on how the soldier and nurse fell in love. The film is rather sloppily made and this includes one battle scene that no one is going to mistake for D.W. Griffith. The battle scene has a couple groups of people firing back and forth at one another and some of the action that happens is quite silly but at the same time you have to remember when this was made. Silent film buffs will certainly find this one interesting.