The Counterfeiters - Black and White - Silent Film - 1905

The Counterfeiters - Black and White - Silent Film - 1905 - Film converted into Digital Format by http://linktr.ee/TheBeltwayBandits

This is an enormously complex and well mounted production -- for 1905. Purportedly the story of a group of counterfeiters, caught, and then escaping from prison, a story in more than twenty-six shots is nigh unto fantastic for an American production for 1905 -- at the time, only Nordisk in Denmark was doing anything comparable.

However, this was, at least temporarily, a dead end for cinema. Lubin, although it survived into the 1920s, basically owed its strengths to its photographically advanced techniques. Sheltered by the oligopoly of the Patents Trust, it hung on for almost another twenty years, the next to last of the Trust companies to go under -- outlasted by only Vitagraph, which was absorbed by Warner Brothers.

But looking at this piece, while we can admire the scale of work involved in 26 set-ups, we can also see that the acting is primitive and the sets are clearly cardboard. Nor does the cutting serve to push the story along. Lubin would remain the most conservative of the majors through the end of the Trust Era, always following others' advances but rarely initiating them. Perhaps that willingness to follow where others led never made it reach the heights of creativity that, say, Biograph did under Griffith -- but it survived Biograph by half a decade.