D. W. Griffith | Billy's Stratagem / 1912

playing indians

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Hennessy (screenplay), D. W. Griffith (director) Billy's Stratagem / 1912

 

This film, the final work I could find available in which Edna Foster played a young boy, we return to the character name of “Billy”; and Billy once again becomes an adventurous and witting young man who saves the day as he did in The Adventures of Bill, A Country Cupid, and A Terrible Discovery.

     This time, he’s the son of frontier settlers, once more nameless, played by Wilfred Lucas and Claire McDowell. Billy also has a younger sister played by Ynez Seabury, another wonderful child actor, important in this work seen mostly through the children’s eyes.

     Indeed, this film might have been one of Griffith’s most exiting movies of the early period did it not share the common racist views of indigenous people of the day. And even then, had its writer George Hennessy and Griffith concocted a myth of a serious Native American Indian tribe who in righteous opposition to the settlers, struck out to destroy them, Billy’s Stratagem might at least have a veneer of horror in the manner of John Ford’s powerful early scenes of The Searchers (1956). From the children’s point of view in this short film, in fact, the Indian attack is every bit as real as the deadly raid in Ford’s movie.

      The Native American Tribe near this family seem to be basically peaceful until after their exchange of a few pelts for brandy, when they become drunk, and go on a fraternity-like hoot. We don’t know what the intentions are of these Indians or whether they actually intend to harm the children they attack, but Griffith’s presentation of them as drunken wild men on the search apparently for more booze is truly disgusting to watch.

 

     The film begins with a seemingly normal frontier family, the two children playing games, although Billy seems to be armed with a real rifle, near their wooden cabin. The father, rather inexplicably has just traded white men some furs for two large kegs of gunpowder. Whether that suggests that he needs to use it for self-protection or simply for hunting is not established. In any event, the mother calls in the children and their grandfather for dinner and, after serving them, leaves the grandfather in charge as she takes up another dinner to deliver to her husband who is felling a tree in the nearby woods.

      The grandfather allows the children out of the compound as long as their stay nearby. Griffith’s busy camera, however, moves in the indigenous tribesmen, portrayed by regulars of the Biograph company (including J. Jiquel Lanoe, Christy Cabanne, Charles Hill Mailes, W. C. Robinson, and Alfred Paget), who are simply looking for their Saturday night fix. They quickly find it, get drunk, and run off to make trouble.

      When they first spot the children at play, they seem as shy and tentative as are Billy and his sister who suddenly stop their play and ponder their situation. Billy, clearly terrified, grabs up his sister and runs to the wooden fence fortress build around the cabin, awakening his grandfather who in the sudden terror of it all has what appears to be struck by a heart attack and dies.

      The fortress wall is not strong enough to hold the invaders, so the children have choice but to run indoors and pull down the large wooden lock. Billy probably further agitates the natives by shooting at them through a crack in walls, apparently killing or wounding one. Almost immediately the Indians, perhaps just for the challenge of it or angered by the boy’s violence, begin to attempt to break the door down, 

 

     Inside, the wide-eyed brother and sister contemplate their possibilities, retreating to yet another space. Spotting the kegs of gunpowder, but unable to move them by himself, Billy turns over one of them, and sprinkles a trail of wood shavings and paper to work as a wick, and lights it, as he and his sister escape out a back wall open space, evidently put there for just such a reason. As the children run off, the Indians break through the door, entering the cabin at the very moment that fire reaches the powder, blowing up their cabin and setting everything on fire.

      In cartoon-like representation, it appears that most of Indians survive the blast, running out the cabin and into the surrounding area just as the parents and other settlers, hearing the explosion rush back to check on their children. Obviously, the find the clever Billy and his sister safe; but clearly they will now have to rebuild their cabin and bury the granddad. And perhaps they will now face truly hostile battles with the local tribe.

     This film seems to be the last of the so-called “Billy” movies, although Foster appears again as a boy in D. W. Griffith’s The Misappropriated Turkey of 1913 as a “striker’s son” in danger of being blown up in another explosion, this one involved with in a turkey delivered to the wrong house. In the remainder of her films listed on Wikipedia, she plays girls or acts in very minor roles.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).