The boy is taken with the dreaded intermittent pains in the back of his head.  He is painting the order that is to make him famous:  the King’s portrait.  While the room empties of people he writhes on the floor.  If this were all, it would have been one more moving picture failure to put through a tragic scene.  But the thing is reiterated in tableau-symbol.  He is looking sideways in terror.  A hairy arm with clutching demon claws comes thrusting in toward the back of his neck.  He writhes in deadly fear.  The audience is appalled for him.

This visible clutch of heredity is the nearest equivalent that is offered for the whispered refrain:  “Ghosts,” in the original masterpiece.  This hand should also be reiterated as a refrain, three times at least, before this tableau, each time more dreadful and threatening.  It appears but the once, and has no chance to become a part of the accepted hieroglyphics of the piece, as it should be, to realize its full power.

The father’s previous sins have been acted out.  The boy’s consequent struggle with the malady has been traced step by step, so the play should end here.  It would then be a rough equivalent of the Ibsen irony in a contrary medium.  Instead of that, it wanders on through paraphrases of scraps of the play, sometimes literal, then quite alien, on to the alleged motion picture punch, when the Doctor is the god from the machine.  There is no doctor on the stage in the original Ghosts.  But there is a physician in the Doll’s House, a scientific, quietly moving oracle, crisp, Spartan, sophisticated.

Is this photoplay physician such a one?  The boy and his half-sister are in their wedding-clothes in the big church.  Pastor Manders is saying the ceremony.  The audience and building are indeed showy.  The doctor charges up the aisle at the moment people are told to speak or forever hold their peace.  He has tact.  He simply breaks up the marriage right there.  He does not tell the guests why.  But he takes the wedding party into the pastor’s study and there blazes at the bride and groom the long-suppressed truth that they are brother and sister.  Always an orotund man, he has the Chautauqua manner indeed in this exigency.

He brings to one’s mind the tearful book, much loved in childhood, Parted at the Altar, or Why Was it Thus?  And four able actors have the task of telling the audience by facial expression only, that they have been struck by moral lightning.  They stand in a row, facing the people, endeavoring to make the crisis of an alleged Ibsen play out of a crashing melodrama.

The final death of young Alving is depicted with an approximation of Ibsen’s mood.  But the only ways to suggest such feelings in silence, do not convey them in full to the audience, but merely narrate them.  Wherever in Ghosts we have quiet voices that are like the slow drip of hydrochloric acid, in the photoplay we have no quiet gestures that will do trenchant work.  Instead there are endless writhings and rushings about, done with a deal of skill, but destructive of the last remnants of Ibsen.