I’ve been reading a lot of vintage comic books lately, most made between the 1940s and the ’60s. By the current standards of the medium, they’re pretty silly: Characters are broadly drawn, in both the literal and figurative sense, and the stories are predictable. But the pages are also bold and colourful; the language strident; the enthusiasm for every implausible event clear and unapologetic. And that’s just fine. In these old, well-loved tales, everything deserved an exclamation mark.
The Ice Flood is like that. It delivers with gusto from start to finish, and director George B. Seitz (who specialized in action serials) even shows some artistic flair along the way. I bet you’d like it.
This post contains spoilers. It must, or it wouldn’t be very long.
Behind the Door isn’t very long itself. A healthy chunk of it is lost; what remains has been pieced together from several sources; the still-missing material now accounted for, onscreen, by a series of text explanations, inserted into the film by the Library of Congress, to whom we are, of course, grateful. Behind the Door is a rare one, after all—unavailable on video or almost anywhere else. (I saw it at Cinefest 33, in Syracuse, NY, in mid-March.) But it’s not the film’s rarity that makes it so interesting, or really, worth writing about at all—lots of silent films are lost, and lots of silent films are better than Behind the Door. What sets this film apart is the way it ends.
The best scene in Three Women is the very first one. That’s not to say that what follows it falls short of it—just that it establishes facts and truths that enrich everything after it. It is a scene about choice. And that choice concerns grapefruit.
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