The Lonely Villa

The Lonely Villa (1909)

A gang of thieves lure a man out of his home so that they can rob it and threaten his wife and children. The family barricade themselves in an interior room, but the criminals are well-equipped for breaking in. When the father finds out what is happening, he must race against time to get back home.

Date of release
1909-06-10
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (69)
Runtime
12m
Genres
Thriller, Drama, Crime
Director
D.W. Griffith

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Fort Lee

The Lonely Villa is a 1909 American short silent crime drama film directed by D. W. Griffith and starring David Miles, Florence Lawrence, and Mary Pickford in one of her first film roles. It is based on the 1901 French play Au Téléphone by André de Lorde. A print of The Lonely Villa survives and is currently in the public domain. The Lonely Villa was produced by the Biograph Company. It was released on June 10, 1909, along with another D. W. Griffith split-reel film, A New Trick.

Production

Filming took place on April 29–30 and May 4, 6 and 14, 1909, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and at Biograph's studio in New York City.

Griffith used cross-cutting to create tension. A series of alternating shots depicts the mother desperately defending her children from intruders, with shots of the frantic father returning at high speed to reach his imperiled family. Griffith, by incrementally shortening the length of each cross-cut "heightened the excitement" of the event.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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