The Unchanging Sea (1910): A Nickelodeon Tear-Jerker

Perhaps no genre gets more flak than the melodrama. Fans enjoy its strong emotions, all-or-nothing stakes, and reliable tropes. Detractors point to the genre’s unearned over-the-top emotions, predictable plots, and often preachy nature.

I don’t find melodramas, like any genre, inherently good or bad; yet, it’s a genre that I find has a very small margin of error. I can still enjoy a comedy with a poor story, given that a few laughs are sprinkled throughout, but once a melodrama loses my interest, it’s hard-pressed to get it back.

Perhaps no other filmmaker best exemplifies the tightrope walked when making a melodrama than D.W. Griffith. Bursting onto the scene in the days of the one-reel films constrained to ten to fifteen minutes of runtime, Griffith made dozens, if not hundreds, of short melodramas before switching to making feature films full-time in 1914 with varying results.

In his vast body of work at Biograph, Griffith holds claim to some of the most expressive and emotionally resonant films of the era; yet, he churned out plenty of overly wrought stinkers. With Victorian sensibilities that seemed outdated even in his day, Griffith sometimes leaned far too heavily into the saccharine. At his best, however, Griffith experimented with the evolving language of cinema to capture emotions in novel and impactful way that only cinema can achieve.

Diving into a couple of Griffith’s failures in the genre before looking at one of his finest in The Unchanging Sea (1910), we’ll nail down a couple of the ingredients that I find separate a good from a bad melodrama.

The One-Reeler Melodrama

Before critiquing a couple of Griffith’s subpar melodramas, I have to acknowledge the difficulty of creating a moving tearjerker with relatable characters in just ten or fifteen minutes. There’s a reason Griffith and many of his contemporary filmmakers were itching to tell longer stories.

The highly theatrical acting styles of the time didn’t help matters either.  Just as the early talkies struggled to use the spoken word to convey romance (I love you, I love you, I LOVE YOU), the Nickelodeon Era films often broke the illusion by playing to the back seats of the theater.

Let’s look first at A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909). An example of the then-popular temperance drama, the one-reeler follows a drunk father swearing off alcohol after his daughter takes him to an anti-alcohol play.

The wife laments her alcoholic husband’s brutish nature.

The film starts with a plastered husband returning from the bar to his worried wife and daughter. After the father sobers up a bit with a cup of coffee, his daughter drags her reluctant father to a play she has an extra ticket for.

We then watch a small-town theater’s dramatization of Emile Zola’s popular 1907 work L’Assommoir on the dangers of alcohol. The husband watches the play transfixed, recoiling in shame as the play’s alcoholic dies, leaving behind a similarly young wife and daughter. Our drunk returns home, vowing to swear off drinking before the family embraces happily sitting in front of their fireplace.

The not-so-subtle play hits the man right in the feels.

A Drunkard’s Reformation communicates its plot rather effectively using shot-reverse-shot to see the play and the husband’s reaction in real-time. What doesn’t work is the film’s ability to suspend our disbelief. The characters don’t act like real people, hitting plot points just because the director told them to. How are we supposed to believe a man living through the Progressive Era, when temperance movements were all the rage, had never heard about the horrors of alcohol?

It also doesn’t help that the play shown is played broadly, hitting its message on the head. The Lost Weekend this ain’t. I’m sure Zola’s original work is more moving and impactful than the clunky play-within-a-film we see onscreen. With how silly this play is, we don’t believe the man has had a strong enough emotional reaction to forever swear off the demon drink. His conversion feels unrealistic and forced on the character. Without a stronger connection to the character and a deeper look into his thought process, the film isn’t an engaging story but a surface-level, predictable Sunday school lesson.

Quitting the bottle proves to be easy enough and makes for a happy home.

Another Griffith melodrama that flew too close to the sun was 1909’s A Trap for Santa. A jobless, alcoholic father abandons his family shortly before his wife inherits a small fortune from a distant aunt. The next Christmas Eve, the father unknowingly breaks into his family’s new home looking to burgle. Having laid out a trap for Santa, the kids unwittingly catch their father in the act. When the mother happens upon her disheveled husband, forgiveness prevails as the now reunited family can celebrate Christmas together.

The father abandons the family after failing to find work.

A Trap for Santa strains even more credulity than The Drunkard’s Reformation. Events happen offscreen to merely move the plot forward. The family falls into unexpected fortune? Sure, why not! The wife forgives her alcoholic, thief husband who abandoned them without even asking him a few questions? I mean, we can’t let a couple of past grievances keep us from having a Merry Christmas!

The emotional impact the film is trying to convey feels largely unearned. We move from plot point to plot point without ever getting to know our characters. How can we feel for them in their plight if we just watch a parade of bad events befalling the family? I’m not overwhelmed with joy watching their reunion; I’m just left with so many questions, which I’m sure was not Griffith’s intended reaction.

From burglar to prodigal father to Santa in fifteen seconds.

These films show Griffith lean into one of his favorite stock stories: broken families reconciling before the film fades to black. Perhaps upon release, audiences saw themselves in these characters, but watching these a century later, their sentimentality is cloying. I don’t forget for a second watching these films that these are actors on a studio set, significantly lessening the chance of bonding with them. I’m not crying or even slightly emotionally touched. My eyes are just a bit tired from all the eye-rolling.

The Unchanging Sea (1910)

On paper, The Unchanging Sea has the same melodramatic plot as the previous two Griffith one-reelers, ending with a broken family’s reunion. In its execution, however, the film lands a hefty emotional punch.

The film starts with a young married couple spending time with each other before the husband ships out on a fishing trip. As the husband rows away, we see the young wife waving goodbye as the older wives leave the beach to go about their days. A title card WILL THEY EVER RETURN? flashes across the screen.

The lovers before the tragedy.

When news reaches the seaside village of the crew’s accident, the wife returns to the same beach she last saw her lover with the hope that he may still return.

Unbeknownst to her, her husband washes ashore in another place with his memory wiped away from the incident. Years pass. The husband continues his work as a fisherman, and the wife raises their daughter. The daughter grows up to be a young Mary Pickford who falls in love with a young seaman at the same beach of her mother and father’s love.

The years pass.

In his old age, the father stumbles across the very same beach of his accident years ago. The familiar sights restore his memory. He finds his wife longingly staring into the same ocean she has often visited in the decades following her husband’s disappearance. The Biograph logo heralds the film’s end as the couple embraces with the waves continually beating against the shore.

The emotional impact of The Unchanging Sea is a night and day difference between the two first examples. The plot still leaves a couple of questions, particularly about the husband’s amnesia—and how did they not bump into each other ever living so close?—but those don’t matter with the film’s successful appeal to pathos.

It can’t be overstated how much shooting on location on the California shore brings the film to life. No clunky sets that make the world feel manufactured. We feel much closer to real emotions and lived experience than to a bunch of actors surrounded by painted backdrops with a Biograph logo on the wall sticking out like a sore thumb.

(Left) A Drunkard Reformation’s clunky set (Right) The beautiful California coast in The Unchanging Sea.

The plot of The Unchanging Sea is also pared down so we are given more time to spend with our characters going about their everyday lives. Seeing the young couple embracing each other immediately endears us to them before their separation so we share in the loss our protagonist feels after her husband’s accident.

Griffith’s most impactful decision was to use the same framing each time we return to the sea. We see the wife longingly search the horizon at the same spot at the beach throughout the years still holding onto the hope of reuniting with her love even in her old age. Each time we return to the beach we are brought back to the first tender scene of our young couple enjoying each other’s company.

The acting is quite understated throughout the film as well. When showing the sea, Griffith almost always shoots his actors with their backs to the camera. There are no wild gestures to break the screen’s spell over our emotions. Title cards quoting stanzas from the poem throughout the film also help to add a somber tone to the film. I’m getting emotional just looking at the stills of the sea!

I’m not crying…*SNIFF* are you?

The Unchanging Sea is a great showcase of Griffith’s ability to bring to life an emotional story while working in the confines of the one-reeler (see also his classic dramas The Country Doctor and A Corner in Wheat, both from 1909). He uses on-location shooting, naturalist acting, and beautiful framing to immediately set up a strong emotional connection to our characters almost solely on the visual image.

Melodramas and tearjerkers work when they connect with our emotions. It’s why The Changing Sea works and The Drunkard’s Reformation and A Trap for Santa don’t. If we empathize with the characters—or even better see a part of ourselves in them—we’re much more liable to take the genre’s oftentimes incredulous events and impossible coincident at face value.

A tearjerker that fails to connect leaves you disinterested, annoyed, and taken for a sap. But man, if a melodrama lands, it can conjure up emotions that no other genre or art form can come close to replicating.

This post is a part of the Cry Me a River: Tearjerkers Blogathon run by the one and only Classic Movie Blog Association. Visit the blogathon’s main page for more great articles on melodramas and tearjerkers.