Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

D.W. Griffith takes Edgar Allen Poe classics "Annabel Lee" and "The Tell-Tale Heart"; and, with some good and bad additions, creates a near-classic. Mr. Griffith creates a melancholy mood, right from the start, as the young protagonist gets an unfortunate start in life, after his mother dies; even as a baby, he looks forlorn. Quickly, the child grows up to be Henry B. Walthall; he is raised by his uncle, Spottiswoode Aitken. All goes well until Walthall begins to see "common woman" Blanche Sweet. Uncle Aitken does not approve; and, he orders Mr. Walthall to stop seeing Ms. Sweet. Desperate, Walthall considers murdering Aitken.The performances are terrific. Walthall is very impressive, in one of his best pre-"Birth" roles. Sweet and Aitken are outstanding. All rise significantly above the uneven material. The Griffith production company's supporting cast is, as usual, extraordinary. Robert Harron and Mae Marsh provide perfect contrast as a grocery boy and maid; and, you should note, their romance provides Aitken with a change-of-heart missed by Walthall's character. Eventually, the film loses direction; as Griffith tries to merge Poe with… well, see for yourself.Appropriately subtitled "Thou Shalt Not Kill".******* The Avenging Conscience (8/2/14) D.W. Griffith ~ Henry B. Walthall, Blanche Sweet, Spottiswoode Aitken, George Siegmann

Avenging Conscience; Thou Shalt Not Kill, The (1914) *** (out of 4)Feature from D.W. Griffith, which he quickly shot before he started filming on The Birth of a Nation. An uncle is constantly putting presure on his nephew (Henry B. Walthall) to spend more time on his work. When the nephew falls in love with a local girl (Blanche Sweet) the uncle demands that they call it off. When the nephew can't think of anything else, he decides the only way to keep the girl is by killing the uncle. This film is based on several Edgar Allan Poe stories with the second half of the film dealing mainly with The Tell-Tale Heart. You can tell this film was quickly made but there's still some nice direction, good performances and G.W. Bitzer's wonderful cinematography. There's some nice scenes dealing with devils and ghouls from Hell as well as a scene of Jesus. The special effects are quite nice for the era as well. Mae Marsh and Ralph Lewis have small parts. Due to the lack of copyright laws at the time, Griffith used all these short Poe stories without any credit being given.

Poe's psychological story "The Tell-Tale Heart" uneasily receives Griffith's trademark Victorian approach – turning the madman anti-hero of the original into a frustrated love-struck milquetoast! The broad gestures typical of Silent-film acting render the proceedings unintentionally comical now, especially where the ghostly apparition of the murdered relative is concerned – who, by the way, is fitted with an eye-patch throughout and, yet, no reference whatsoever is made to his all-important "vulture eye"!! Still, the various hallucinations at the climax – crude though they may be – are reasonably effective. Incidentally, the stilted presentation and moralistic overtones evident here also marked the other Griffith horror effort that I've watched – THE SORROWS OF Satan (1926); all I can say is that, in spite of the solid reputation THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE enjoys within the director's canon, personally I was underwhelmed by the film on a preliminary viewing.Other cinematic adaptations of the classic tale I've checked out – all of them relatively recently – are the interesting 1928 short (viewed on the very same day as the Griffith title), the so-so 1936 British feature-length version and a pretty good animated rendition of it from 1953.

'The Avenging Conscience' isn't the weirdest movie on DW Griffith's CV, but it's well up there. This is a drama of modern 1914, but it's firmly influenced by several stories of Edgar Allan Poe, who is referenced (by name and daguerreotype image) in the film.Henry Walthall plays a young man whose mother died giving birth to him, and who apparently has no father, so he's been raised since birth by his uncle (Spottiswoode Aitken, excellent performance). We see Aitken doting on the nephew as a child, then turning harsher (in convincing old-age makeup) as he tells his grown nephew to help him in his business affairs. Aitken's character wears an eyepatch over his left eye; this seemed entirely pointless, until Walthall as the nephew starts reading Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'. In that story, you will recall, the young narrator lives with an older man who has a defective eye ... and eventually murders him. Walthall is in love with the girl semi-next door over, well-played by Blanche Sweet. We're never told her character's real name (nor anybody else's in this movie), but we learn that Walthall makes a point of crying her Annabel. This is clearly from Poe's tragic poem 'Annabel Lee', but that makes little sense. 'Annabel Lee' (inspired by Poe's real-life marriage to his much younger cousin, who died in her teens) is about a child-like woman who dies far too soon. Why would any Poe devotee give this monicker to a more mature woman such as Sweet's character, unless he's hoping she'll die?SPOILERS COMING. Eventually, Walthall quarrels with Aitken, and kills him ... then bricks up the body in the chimney with laughable ease. From this point, the story becomes steadily less logical. For instance, Aitken's disappearance remains unsolved (Walthall claims he's left town), yet Walthall has no difficulty inheriting his absent uncle's estate, without a death certificate. And a detective (the under-rated Ralph Lewis) shows Columbo-like powers, somehow intuiting every detail of the crime ... even to noticing the brickwork in Walthall's inglenook. Walthall's house conveniently has a trapdoor escape hatch, but Lewis has just as conveniently rumbled it and nailed it shut. Then Aitken comes back as a one-eyed ghost to haunt Walthall, only it's clear that he's a manifestation of Walthall's guilty conscience rather than a genuine supernatural spook.There's an attempt to evoke the mood of 'The Tell-Tale Heart' ... in which the nervous murderer, feeling his own heart pounding in his chest, mistakes it for the still-beating heart of his victim. But this is a silent film, so -- instead of the sound of a heartbeat -- we see detective Lewis repeatedly tapping on the tabletop. Unfortunately, the rhythm of his taps doesn't match the steady iambic pulse of a heartbeat. More positively, there's a stand-out performance by George Siegmann as an Italian prole. Siegmann expertly emotes his prole role with just the right amount of Neapolitan gesticulation to make himself convincingly Italian, without indulging in 'mama-mia' exaggerations.Along the way to the ending, we see the ghouls mentioned in Poe's poem 'The Bells' (which had earlier inspired another guilt-stricken mellerdrammer: a stage play by Leopold Lewis, staged by Sir Henry Irving). We also see the pagan god Pan (who has little or nothing to do with Poe) accompanied by some ridiculous nappied acolytes. BIG SPOILER NOW: Oh, it turns out that the whole pesky murder (and everything that came after it) was just a dream, so Walthall is reconciled with the unmurdered Aitken, who accepts Sweet. The set dressing in Sweet's bedroom vaguely resembles a human face, but I think that's unintentional. A weird movie but definitely an interesting one, and its basic implausibility makes this story work better as a silent. My rating: 8 out of 10 just this once, but ... nevermore!