The Captive

Cecil B. DeMille helped establish Hollywood as the center of American filmmaking early in the 20th century. Long before he made his reputation with a series of salacious comedies and a number of grandly-mounted biblical epics, DeMille was busy cranking out a dozen films a year. One was The Captive, an hour-shy feature film that he produced and directed in 1915 from a play he wrote with longtime collaborator Jeanie MacPherson. Set in Montenegro during the Baltic Wars, it features early silent movie superstar Blanche Sweet as a Balkan farm girl left to tend the family farm and raise her kid brother after her elder brother is killed in battle against the Turks. House Peters plays a Turkish POW assigned to work her farm and defend her from invading Turkish soldiers. The simplistic drama recreates the Balkan setting in California and DeMille directs in a straightforward manner that essentially illustrates the intertitles. Sweet is charming as the plucky farm girl who teaches her captive to do laundry and plow a field, while House is handsome, chivalrous, and gentlemanly, the all-American boy as a Turkish aristocrat in a fez that looks as authentic as a Shriner's cap. File it under historical curiosity, an example of the unsophisticated storytelling that was old-fashioned within a year thanks to the impact of D.W. Griffith and even DeMille's own rapid evolution as a filmmaker. Optional. (S. Axmaker)