Something Different (1919) Review: Silent-Era Revolution of Love, Exile & Cuban Fire

Alicia Lea’s satin heels have never touched common ground; even the deck of the transatlantic steamer feels like a borrowed stage. When the camera first finds her—Grace Studdiford’s profile cut against a studio moon—she is already a woman in mid-revolt, a porcelain teacup rattling on the fault line of dynastic duty.

Kathryn Stuart and Alice Duer Miller’s scenario, adapted from a novella that scandalized Harper’s Bazar readers, refuses to behave like any society melodrama of its year. Instead of trembling on velvet sofas, the narrative rips its hem on coral rock and gun barrels. Director Crane Wilbur—doubling here as a slyly winking aide-de-camp—frames Cuba like a fever dream soaked in sugar and blood: palms slicing sun into prison bars, plantation corridors that yawn like catacombs. The island becomes a character, breathing humid moral ambiguity into every celluloid frame.

The mutiny sequence—shot on location in the crumbling Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca—still feels combustible a century later. Soldiers scramble across battlements while the ocean keeps clapping its indifferent applause; the handheld camera sways as if caught in the same volley of bullets. Intertitles vanish, leaving only the staccato percussion of hoofbeats and the hoarse whistle of a steam train. It is a visceral reminder that 1919 audiences, still raw from the Great War, craved not distant newsreels but immediate nerve-splintering sensation.

Ward Crane’s Don Mariano enters through smoke like a tarnished archangel: epaulettes askew, eyes ringed by sleepless conquest. Crane—often dismissed as a Valentino knock-off—here channels something colder, more self-loathing: a man who knows that every act of mercy is also treason. His first close-up, half-shadowed by a shako, lasts only three seconds yet etches the character’s entire arc: the moment he chooses desire over dynasty.

And then there is the ransom of tenderness: Alicia pleading for Luis’s life while thunderclouds bruise the sky above Morro Castle. The scene is lit only by cannon-flash and the phosphorescent spill of breakers below. Studdiford lets her voiceless contralto quiver through gloved fingertips; Crane responds with the faintest nod, a monarch toppled by empathy. The resulting bargain—her freedom for his disgrace—feels less like diplomacy than a pagan oath sealed in salt and gun-oil.

Back in Manhattan, the palette shifts to chromium and champagne. Exile has clipped Mariano’s epaulettes but sharpened his cheekbones; he prowls the Ritz bar like a caged jaguar, every white-jacketed waiter a reminder of lost platoons. Alicia—now sporting the bobbed hair and drop-waist silks that will define the coming decade—finds herself magnetized to the very force that once held her captive. Their reunion across a parquet dance floor, shot in an unbroken 72-second tracking take, is a masterclass in kinetic restraint: no embrace, only the centrifugal orbit of two bodies afraid to collide.

Critics of 1919 carped that the third-act amour felt “preposterous,” yet the film anticipates the psychologically knotty Wild Olive romances of the 1920s. Miller’s intertitles, flecked with epigrammatic wit, insist that love is merely politics writ small: “A kingdom lost at dusk may be regained at dawn—if hearts, like borders, can be redrawn by candlelight.”

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Something Different (1920) through its definitive frames.

The production history itself could fuel a miniseries: location permits revoked by a U.S. Navy nervous about Bolshevik optics; cameraman George Peters jury-rigging a rain machine from sugar-mill hoses; Studdiford contracting malaria yet refusing a stand-in for the final swamp trek. Such lore, preserved in the 1972 MoMA restoration notes, adds palimpsestic texture to every frame.