The most successful motion picture drama of the intimate type ever placed
before mine eyes was Enoch Arden, produced by Cabanne.

Lillian Gish takes the part of Annie, Alfred Paget impersonates Enoch
Arden, and Wallace Reid takes the part of Philip Ray. The play is in four
reels of twenty minutes each. It should have been made into three reels
by shortening every scene just a bit. Otherwise it is satisfying, and I
and my friends have watched it through many times as it has returned to
Springfield.

The mood of the original poem is approximated. The story is told with
fireside friendliness. The pale Lillian Gish surrounded by happy children
gives us many a genre painting on the theme of domesticity. It is a
photographic rendering in many ways as fastidious as Tennyson's
versification. The scenes on the desert island are some of them
commonplace. The shipwreck and the like remind one of other photoplays,
but the rest of the production has a mood of its own. Seen several months
ago it fills my eye-imagination and eye-memory more than that particular
piece of Tennyson's fills word-imagination and word-memory. Perhaps this
is because it is pleasing to me as a theorist. It is a sound example of
the type of film to which this chapter is devoted. If you cannot get your
local manager to bring Enoch Arden, reread that poem of Tennyson's and
translate it in your own mind's eye into a gallery of six hundred
delicately toned photographs hung in logical order, most of them cosy
interior scenes, some of the faces five feet from chin to forehead in the
more personal episodes, yet exquisitely fair. Fill in the out-of-door
scenes and general gatherings with the appointments of an idyllic English
fisher-village, and you will get an approximate conception of what we
mean by the Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture, or the Intimate