This scene of insult and the confession scene, later in this film, moved me as similar passages in high drama would do; and their very rareness, even in the hands of photoplay masters, indicates that such purely dramatic climaxes cannot be the main asset of the moving picture.  Over and over, with the best talent and producers, they fail.

The boy and girl go to the party in spite of the uncle.  It is while on the way that the boy looks on the face of a stranger who afterwards mixes up in his dream as the detective.  There is a mistake in the printing here.  There are several minutes of a worldly-wise oriental dance to amuse the guests, while the lovers are alone at another end of the garden.  It is, possibly, the aptest contrast with the seriousness of our hero and heroine.  But the social affair could have had a better title than the one that is printed on the film “An Old-fashioned Sweetheart Party.”  Possibly the dance was put in after the title.

The lovers part forever.  The girl’s pride has had a mortal wound.  About this time is thrown on the screen the kind of a climax quite surely possible to the photoplay.  It reminds one, not of the mood of Poe’s verse, but of the spirit of the paintings of George Frederick Watts.  It is allied in some way, in my mind, with his “Love and Life,” though but a single draped figure within doors, and “Love and Life” are undraped figures, climbing a mountain.

The boy, having said good-by, remembers the lady Annabel.  It is a crisis after the event.  In his vision she is shown in a darkened passageway, all in white, looking out of the window upon the moonlit sky.  Simple enough in its elements, this vision is shown twice in glory.  The third replica has not the same glamour.  The first two are transfigurations into divinity.  The phrase thrown on the screen is “The moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”  And the sense of loss goes through and through one like a flight of arrows.  Another noble picture, more realistic, more sculpturesque, is of Annabel mourning on her knees in her room.  Her bended head makes her akin to “Niobe, all tears.”

The boy meditating on a park-path is meanwhile watching the spider in his web devour the fly.  Then he sees the ants in turn destroy the spider.  These pictures are shown on so large a scale that the spiderweb fills the end of the theatre.  Then the ant-tragedy does the same.  They can be classed as particularly apt hieroglyphics in the sense of chapter thirteen.  Their horror and decorative iridescence are of the Poe sort.  It is the first hint of the Poe hieroglyphic we have had except the black patch over the eye of the uncle, along with his jaundiced, cadaverous face.  The boy meditates on how all nature turns on cruelty and the survival of the fittest.

He passes just now an Italian laborer (impersonated by George Seigmann).  This laborer enters later into his dream.  He finally goes to sleep in his chair, the resolve to kill his uncle rankling in his heart.