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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Picture nitrate reels hissing through a carbon-arc beam and you’ll still fail to imagine how fiercely The Devil’s Riddle burns—its title a tarot card flipped by Fate’s frost-bitten fingers. The film, shot in late ’22 and released the following spring, belongs to that trembling moment when silents had perfected grammar yet could already taste the salt of sound. Director Ruth Ann Baldwin—newswoman turned scenarist—co-scripts with Edwina LeVin, and together they lace a frontier survival tale with the tremulous hothouse logic of a three-act melodrama. The result feels like Moondyne dragged through a Manhattan loft party, or The Eye of God stripped of mysticism and left to shiver.
The Montana storm isn’t backdrop; it’s omnipresent protagonist. Cinematographer Alvin Knechtel (imported from newsreels) drags his Debrie camera into ankle-deep drifts so that crystals smear the lens—each flake a ghostly fingerprint. When the lens flares, the cabin hearth becomes a Caravaggio: faces carved from umber shadow, cheekbones glazed by firelight. The flicker achieves what CGI never could—weather that feels expensive, morally corrosive. One overhead insert of Jim’s sled tracks being effaced by fresh powder lands like cosmic erasure: the universe, indifferent, casually deletes human intention.
Claire McDowell—already a veteran of Griffith’s stock company—gifts Esther a porcelain stoicism that cracks only in two-shots: watch her pupils dilate when the stepfather’s belt buckle jangles off-screen. The restraint is surgical; she underplays so fiercely that the flick of a gloved hand against Jim’s shoulder feels pornographic. Opposite her, Tom Bates (billed here as “The Man Who Would Be Doctor”) has the physique of a varsity oarsman but the haunted gaze of a man who’s memorized Gray’s Anatomy yet still cannot locate the soul. His collapse in the snow isn’t stuntwork—it’s a slow ballet, knees folding like wet parchment. You feel the moisture wick from his lungs.
At the 28-minute mark the film jumps its own tracks. Esther, now under pancake and kohl, joins a barnstorming troupe whose repertoire is never specified—an opacity that heightens unease. The camera, once horizontal and pastoral, tilts into canted compositions that prefigure noir by two decades. A jealous trouper (Louis Natheaux, oily hair shellacked into devil horns) frames Esther for philandering with the cigar-chomping manager. The accusation lands via a single intertitle: “Her footprints stray, Sir, beyond the proscenium.” It’s pre-Code insinuation at its most venomous—sexual without showing flesh.
This pivot from tundra to footlights risks tonal whiplash, yet Baldwin corrals the chaos through visual rhyme: the flutter of backstage curtains mirrors earlier blizzard gusts; greasepaint pots resemble the tin cups from which Esther once sipped melted snow. Geography becomes psychology—every mile she puts between herself and the cabin thickens the scar tissue around her heart.
Though monochromatic, the film bleeds color suggestion. Esther’s cabin shawl—dyed ox-blood—returns as a stage cloak, now threadbare, a spectral reminder of frontier blood oaths. Jim’s city coat, dove-gray when he arrives in Manhattan, darkens to charcoal once jealousy corrodes his arteries. The costumer, uncredited in surviving documents, understood that grayscale is merely suppressed color, and the picture throbs with hues the eye invents.
Editors snip years the way a rancher severs steer sinew: abruptly, yet with purpose. A match-cut from Esther’s trunk slamming shut to a locomotive piston propels us eastward; the screen stays black for eight frames—just long enough for the audience to exhale. Later, a montage of playbills (each bearing Esther’s ascending name) flutters like wounded birds, compressing half a decade into twenty seconds. The device predates the mid-’20s Soviet theories of intellectual montage, suggesting that provincial American cutters were experimenting in parallel, not merely lagging behind.
Though released silent, many big-city houses accompanied The Devil’s Riddle with a compiled score—Borodin strings for snow, snare-drum rolls for theatrical intrigue. Modern streamers often tack on generic piano, which flattens the film’s sonic archaeology. If you’re lucky enough to catch a 16 mm print with live accompaniment, notice how the musicians elongate the beat between Jim’s discovery of the accusation and his exit: the vacuum swells until you hear your own pulse, a phantom heartbeat that the characters themselves lack.
Stack it beside contemporaries and the singularity sharpens. Into the Primitive luxuriates in jungle exoticism; Riddle domesticates wilderness into moral crucible. A Girl’s Folly satirizes backlot artifice; here, theater is lifeboat turned cage. Even The Picture of Dorian Gray (’16) drowns in moral decrepitude, whereas Baldwin’s film clings, almost religiously, to the possibility of redemption—though it makes you trudge knee-deep through guilt first.
For 1923, the picture’s sexual politics skew surprisingly progressive. Esther’s body is commodified—by stepfather, manager, painter fiancé—but the narrative repeatedly returns her volition. She chooses flight, chooses engagement, and ultimately chooses reconciliation on her own terms. The camera, often coded as male gaze, relinquishes authority in the final reel: Esther blocks Jim’s exit with a hand to the chest, occupying 70 % of the frame. The compositional dominance signals authorship reclaimed.
Two reels remain missing—presumed dissolved in ’53 warehouse fire—accounting for a rumored opium-den sequence in Chinatown. Contemporary reviewers mention “lurid green lamps” and “Esther’s pupils blooming black,” imagery that would have tilted the film into full-blown expressionism. Even truncated, the surviving 58 minutes feel miraculously complete, the way shattered Greek marble still conveys divinity.
Is it a masterpiece? By canonical yardsticks—narrative cohesion, thematic sophistication—perhaps not. Yet its imperfections exhale a brittle humanity that pristine “classics” sometimes suffocate. Like ice glazing barbed wire, beauty here depends on the threat of rupture. The film will not change your life; it will, however, lodge a snowflake behind the sternum, an inexplicable chill that three-course dinners and central heating never quite dispel.
Where to watch: Milestone’s 2021 2K restoration tours cinematheques intermittently; stream via SilentSorcery platform (subscription) or snag Kino’s out-of-print Blu-ray—prices absurd on eBay, worth every cent for the booklet essay alone.
If this review thawed something, slide down the rabbit hole of Swedish erotic farce or wallow in gritty urban disillusion. Each silent era shard refracts the same question that haunts Esther’s cabin at 3 a.m.—whether love is salvation or merely another storm we choose to walk into, coatless and craving.
IMDb 6.3
1924
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