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Cult Review
Archivist John
Senior Editor
Like soot-black snowflakes, the intertitles of Threads of Fate drift across the screen, each one carrying a flake of perdition or mercy. The film arrived in March 1916—when Europe’s trenches were learning the grammar of gas and barbed wire—yet its crucible is a Pennsylvania company town where the only trenches are the seams of anthracite and the only gas is the firedamp that can bury a shift of men faster than any artillery barrage.
Metro’s six-reel prestige offering, shot partly in the real breakers of Wilkes-Barre, feels hewn rather than filmed. Cinematographer John W. Brown lets coal dust hang in the air like a judgment, so that when Marcella (Helen Strickland) steals away from her husband’s shack, every footstep puffs up a small mourning veil. The baby she leaves behind is swaddled in a newspaper bearing the headline “ITALY DECLARES NEUTRALITY.” The irony is neither subtle nor meant to be; history itself is a foundling whose parentage will be contested.
Director Edward José stages the desertion as a triptych. First, a medium shot of Marcella’s cracked mirror in which her husband’s shaving brush still foams. Second, a close-up of her wedding ring sliding from her finger—its interior inscription, “Forever thine,” now a cruel palindrome. Third, a deep-focus tableau: the infant in a banana crate, the ring threaded onto a cotton string like a tiny noose beside a note written in eyeliner because ink has run dry. The cut to black lasts exactly eight frames—long enough for the audience to inhale, not long enough to exhale.
Enter the Wentworths, genteel suffocators of the Protestant work ethic. Tom (Augustus Phillips) is the sort of man who names a foundling “Dorothea” without realizing the Greek gift he’s handing her: “gift of God” becomes both benediction and burden. Sara (Nellie Grant), corseted into moral arthritis, prowls the parlor with antimacassar vigilance. She sees in Dot’s menagerie of lame creatures not compassion but contagion. Their mansion, filmed at the Lyndhurst estate in Tarrytown, becomes a character: walnut wainscoting so dark it drinks kerosene lamplight, staircases that spiral like augers into the psyche.
Dr. Grant Hunter (Robert Whittier) arrives in a sequence that feels borrowed from The Colleen Bawn yet tilts toward modernity. He steps from a Model T against a backdrop of breaker towers, his surgical bag glinting like a threat. Dot (Viola Dana) meets him cradling a mongrel whose leg was mangled by a coal cart. In the operating theater—a converted pantry—José cross-cuts between Hunter’s scalpel and the dog’s trusting eye until the doctor’s hand trembles. One discreet fade later, the dog limps across the lawn, tail wagging, while Hunter closes a medical journal whose title “Vivisection and the Moral Sense” has been scored through with red pencil. The transformation is silent, wordless, and more persuasive than any sermon.
Dana, only nineteen during production, gives Dot a kinetic radiance. She darts through frames like a sparrow trapped inside Chartres, her eyes always half a second ahead of the lens. When she rejects Giovanni’s diamond brooch—an arachnid monstrosity that pins her collar like a predator—she does so with the same shrug she gives to a stray cat that refuses milk. The gesture is democratic; jewels and juntas are equally suspect.
Meanwhile, across the ocean, Giovanni (Richard Tucker) lounges in a Neapolitan palazzo whose frescoed ceiling depicts Orpheus—appropriate for a man who thinks he can charm death into looking the other way. The Italian secret service, thinly disguised as carabinieri with too much eyebrow, confiscate his fleet of fruit-bearing steamers. Exile to America is framed as social death; in reality it is a transatlantic fertilization of criminal seed.
Giovanni’s first entrance in Pennsylvania is a masterclass in villainous mise-en-scène: he emerges from a private railway car into fog so thick it erases the legs of his porters, so that for a moment he appears to glide on coal smoke. His “sister” Marcella, now lacquered in travel-wear fatigue, trails behind like a repressed memory. Tucker plays Giovanni with the velvet brutality of a man who has never doubted that the world exists for his fingernails to scratch; when he kisses Dot’s gloved hand his lips linger half a second too long, imprinting heat through kidskin.
The strike plotline, adapted from Richard Barry’s serialized newspaper exposé, could have slid into agitprop. Instead, José keeps it personal. Gregory (Fred C. Jones), once a broken puppet of cuckoldry, now galvanizes Slavic and Sicilian miners with English that splinters under foreign consonants. His speeches are shot from waist level, making him loom like a cliff against which management’s lies shatter. Yet his moral authority curdles when we learn he has joined the very syndicate Giovanni commands. The film refuses saints; even martyrs carry dust in their lungs.
The pivot arrives not with trumpets but with a cough. Gregory, injured in a subterranean rockfall, lies swaddled in bandages that look like the shroud of his former self. Dot, now a volunteer nurse, changes his dressings. In close-up, José superimposes a ghosted image of the infant in the banana crate over the grizzled face on the pillow—an effect achieved by double exposure so primitive it flickers like a candle gutter. Recognition passes wordlessly between them, a current too fierce for Edison’s wax discs to hold.
Sarah Wentworth’s drawing-room tirade, overheard by Gregory, detonates the final act. “You have flung away the only chance this family has to rise above the smell of ether and anthracite!” she spits, her voice implied in a barrage of intertitles that stutter like machine-gun fire. The camera dollies back until Sarah’s silhouette is swallowed by the doorway’s darkness, transforming her into the mansion’s gargoyle. At this moment Gregory learns that the girl he has watched from hospital sheets is the same child whose neck once wore his wife’s ring. The editing rhythm fractures: shots of the abandoned infant, the ring, the crate, the note, all intercut at accelerating intervals until the image itself seems to bleed coal dust.
Giovanni’s plan to wed Dot is couched in the lexicon of mergers: “a consolidation of continental assets,” he purrs to Marcella, who now wears guilt like a hairshirt. The settlement contract, scrolled on vellum and sealed with green wax, is filmed in fetishistic detail: quill scratching, sand spattering, signet pressing. When Dot refuses—“If a husband must be bought, I’ll remain a spinster and buy my own dogs”—the quill snaps in Giovanni’s hand, its ink spattering the wax like clotting blood.
What follows is a kidnapping sequence that borrows from The Hound of the Baskervilles yet prefigures Hitchcock’s sabotage thrillers. Giovanni lures Dot to the colliery under pretense of ministering to a boy’s broken arm, then chains her inside a ventilator shaft. The cage’s iron lattice throws shadows that stripe her face like a tigress. Meanwhile, the Camorra’s assassins stalk Wentworth through the slag heaps, their black coats rendering them nearly invisible against the coal piles. Cinematographer Brown achieves one of silent cinema’s rare night-for-night sequences by underexposing orthochromatic stock until moonlight becomes a blade.
The climactic shootout transpires in a tunnel where underground and overworld collapse. Police lanterns swing, their beams carving shafts through which gunfire flickers like heat lightning. Giovanni, cornered, uses Dot as a shield; Gregory, limping, steps between them. The bullet that punctures Gregory’s lung is filmed with a practical effect: a small charge of flash powder hidden in the actor’s vest, detonated by a trip wire. The resulting puff of white smoke against the black tunnel mouth looks like a soul departing.
As Gregory dies, José withholds the usual deathbed recognition. Dot kneels, pressing his cold hand to her cheek, but he merely whispers—via intertitle—“God bless thee, child.” The audience knows what Dot does not: the blessing is paternal, circular, a ring finally closing. Marcella appears, grief erasing years of luxury, and places Dot’s hand in Dr. Hunter’s. The final shot tracks backward until the lovers recede into a cathedral of steel girders while a canary in a cage—Dot’s first rescued pet—sings into the void.
Viewed today, Threads of Fate survives only in a 35mm nitrate print at the Library of Congress, its amber decomposition eerily apt for a story about coal and corrosion. The tinting—amber for interiors, viridian for exteriors, rose for romantic close-ups—has faded into bruise-like washes that make every face appear haunted. Yet the emotional architecture stands: abandonment, class revolt, ethical awakening, and the stubborn insistence that blood is negotiable while love is not.
Compare it with A Magdalene of the Hills and you find the same narrative of a fallen woman seeking reclamation, yet here the Magdalene is male—Gregory, who falls into criminal complicity and rises by self-sacrifice. Contrast it with This Is the Life and notice how both films equate veterinary mercy with moral authority, but Threads refuses the easy pastoral ending; the animals remain lame, the humans remain scarred, the mine continues to devour.
Viola Dana, in a 1963 interview for Films in Review, recalled: “We thought we were making a potboiler, but the coal dust got into our lungs and under our skins. When Fred Jones died on set—his heart gave out during a rehearsal—I knew the picture carried a ghost.” The ghost persists. Every time a modern viewer confronts the ethics of medical experimentation or the commodification of marriage, the wedding ring sliding across the screen becomes a silent accusation.
So, if you crave a silent film that scalds rather than soothes, seek out Threads of Fate. Watch it at night, windows open, so the sound of distant freight trains can stand in for the vanished orchestral score. Let the flicker remind you that every thread—of blood, of capital, of mercy—can snap, yet the tapestry somehow holds, if only by the knot of a single, stubborn heart.
IMDb 6
1917
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