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Warner
Oland menaces Elsie Ferguson in this posed publicity still from The
Witness for the Defense. In this scene they are on a hunting trip, camped
near the edge of the Indian jungle. (Detail from an original 8x10 glossy photograph,
printed in sepiatone.)
Elsie
Ferguson on the cover of a 1919 Theatre Magazine
Big
game hunter Henry Thresk (Wyndham Standing) intervenes on behalf of Stella
(Elsie Ferguson) when her husband Captain Ballantyne (Warner Oland) becomes
violent and disoriented. (From an original 11x14 lobby card, printed in brown ink and selectively
hand-tinted.)
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Presented by Adolph Zukor
Directed by George Fitzmaurice
Starring Elsie Ferguson, Warner Oland
Released September 14, 1919 in five reels.
Played at the New Grand (now the Empire) November 10-11-12, 1919
While neither the
star nor the play are well-remembered today, in 1919 The Witness for the
Defense fit perfectly into its studio’s policy of filming famous players
in famous plays, and the production was accorded the honor of release under
Paramount’s “Artcraft” banner. The prestige marquee value of its “Special”
status and its female lead perhaps led to its choice as the film to open
Grand Forks’ New Grand Theatre two months after the film’s national opening.
Based on a 1911
stage play and 1913 novel of the same title, this romantic melodrama follows
the adventures of a young Englishwoman (Elsie Ferguson) who moves to India to
be with her ailing and impoverished father. He demands that she forget her
childhood sweetheart and marry a wealthy British official (Warner Oland), who
turns out to be an alcoholic brute. An affluent English adventurer, also in
India, urges her to leave her husband and go away with him. When the husband
is discovered murdered, she is put on trial for the crime, and still more
complications follow. Through the high melodramatics runs an interesting
subtext dealing with early 20th-century attitudes about class bigotry,
alcohol abuse (just before Prohibition), spouse abuse, social and sexual
double standards, exploitation of assumed racial prejudices, and justifiable
homicide.
The film, which
runs approximately an hour, often shows its stage origins but is nicely
directed by George Fitzmaurice, with attractively-lit cinematography by Hal
Young. A number of dissolves and superimposed image effects add interest to
scenes showing characters’ hallucinations and memories. Warner Oland is as
flamboyant and menacing as ever (in his pre-Charlie Chan days). Miss Ferguson
is obviously a stage-trained actress with a charming if quaint Delsarte style
of emotive gestures. She was 36 when the film was made but is attractive
enough to carry off the role of a young woman in her twenties.
About
the cast
Elsie Ferguson (1883-1961) was the only child of a
wealthy New York lawyer. In 1900, at age seventeen, she decided to go on
stage. Starting as a chorus girl, she quickly graduated to speaking roles,
and was a major Broadway star by 1909. She looked down upon movies and
rejected numerous offers, but could not resist a lucrative contract by Adolph
Zukor in 1917 to make eighteen films over the next three years at $5000 per
week. Most of the titles were adaptations of famous plays of the time,
including A Doll’s House.
The Witness
for the Defense was her
fifteenth picture and is the only one of her two-dozen silent films known to
exist. Long thought lost, a copy was discovered to survive in Russia at the
Gosfilmofond Archives, Moscow. Her only sound film, Scarlet Pages
(1930) is preserved at the Library of Congress.
Warner Oland (1880-1938) was a Swedish actor, set
designer and translator of Strindberg who entered movies in 1912. He was a
familiar character actor and was usually cast as a villain, often as an Asian
due to his oriental facial features. Oland became best known as the
Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan in a series of numerous films during
the 1930s. Oland, coincidentally, is a distant relative of Grand Forks
resident Sheryl Smith, who served as executive director of the renovated
Empire Arts Center until mid-2002.
DOWNLOAD quicktime movie files
(Warning—very large--long download times with phone modem connection):
2—Longer trailer with
the same scenes and more, B&W, orchestra score (17.4 MB)
Various scenes
that provide a brief synopsis of most of the film
-- NOTE —“teaser” .mov file
compatible with Windows media player and Quicktime player
-- Longer trailer and “JungleClip”
.mov files require Quicktime player 3.0 or higher
The original
nitrate print of The Witness for the Defense was transferred to PAL
VHS tape by Gosfilmofond Archives, Moscow. Acquisition of the tape was made
possible through the efforts of Nathan Jacobson and Hal Gershman, with
special thanks to Jon Mirsalis for identifying the print’s location. The
original print has “flash” titles, with only two or three frames for each
title card and inserts of letters, newspapers, etc. A digital conversion to
American NTSC video was done by the University of North Dakota’s Center for
Instructional Learning Technology. Video freeze-frame restoration of all the
titles and inserts, color tinting and music synchronization were done by
Christopher P. Jacobs. The music on this clip is by prolific silent film mood
music composer J. S.
Zamecnik, performed by Rodney Sauer (piano) and his Mont Alto Cinema Orchestra on their CD
of selections from Zamecnik’s works. The piece accompanying the teaser
trailer is “Hurry” music composed in 1913 and the piece used with both the
longer trailer and the jungle search film clip is “Storm Music” composed in
1919, the year the film was made, and may well have been heard with the
picture during its initial release.
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