Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

mukava991 "The Coward" should be seen in order to disprove the oft-made point that film acting in the early 20th century was overdone. The young and fresh-faced Charles Ray, who steals this Civil War melodrama from then-veterans Frank Keenan (a dead ringer for Mark Twain) and Gertrude Clair, was one of the most naturally appealing young male actors of his time, and recognized as such by contemporary audiences and critics. Few of his films have survived, and luckily this rather well preserved relic contains generous helpings of his talent and magnetism. Sadly, his career petered out in the 1920s.There is little of general interest, however, in this simple but overly drawn-out Civil War story of a young man (Ray) whose soldier father (Keenan) forces him at gunpoint to enlist in the Confederate Army for the sake of family honor, if nothing else. There follows a melodrama of desertion, heroism and redemption which could have been told in about 30 minutes if some of the close-ups had been kept to a realistic length, but this was 1915 and cinema audiences apparently needed 60 seconds or so to identify an emotional state from an on screen face.Some of the indoor scenes bear the telltale sign of having been shot outdoors to take advantage of the natural light (in a parlor scene Keenan's cigar smoke rushes away from his face and the dining room table cloth flutters in the breeze).Keenan's performance, mostly slow-motion gestures and smoldering glares, seems bizarre by today's standards, but it can't be his fault because the camera and editing are obviously cooperating.As usual for the era, house slaves are played by white actors in blackface.

Robert J. Maxwell It's always interesting to watch silent movies, if only to see how overdone the acting tends to be. With only a few scattered printed titles, the story depends on the actors' ability to project emotions. They usually give it their all. They certainly do in this film.It's the beginning of the Civil War and all the Southern men of Cotton Creek are enlisting except Charles Ray, who decides to skip the war and hide at home among the women, the darkies, and his rigid old man. No Achilles he. He's not sulking, just scared to death and he knows it, and soon everybody else does too. His proud father, an ex colonel, played by Frank Keenan, forces Ray to enlist at gunpoint. Keenan's performance is something to behold. With every move, every change of facial expression, he seems struggling to overcome an advanced stage of rigor mortis.The story itself could have come from an early John Wayne Western. Ray deserts the army but redeems himself, just as the Young Man did in "The Red Badge of Courage." The South wins, with the help of the loyal slaves who tend the Big House. There is really only one battle scene, and it looks as if the budget was generous but it's confusingly edited. We know the Confederates won because a title tells us so. Some of the scenes are really slowly paced. We get the point long before the scene ends.Southern values usually prevail in these movies, whether it's Buster Keaton or "The Birth of a Nation". When they fail, it's shown as a tragedy, as in "Gone With the Wind." Some regional resentment still exists in the South, unlike Germany, a country in which WWII never happened. The South was settled by Cavaliers, not the Puritans of the North, and the Cavaliers brought their culture of honor with them. When something happened, you settled the score yourself. You didn't go squealing to a central government.Jefferson Davis had a hell of a time ruling the Confederacy. There were so many challenges to duels that he had to be careful to post his officers far apart from their enemies. And he had to depend on states to provide volunteer troops. He couldn't draft anyone because the whole point of the Confederacy was states rights and a weak central government. That's what a "confederacy" is -- a kind of gentleman's agreement to cooperate.In the Northern state, Charles Ray would simply have been drafted unless his father was rich enough to pay a few hundred dollars for a substitute.

Cineanalyst At most, this might lead you to appreciate the watershed brilliance of "The Birth of a Nation". Another 1915 feature-length film set during the American Civil War, "The Coward" is an isolated melodrama, in lieu of scope or scale, with only one or two comparatively small skirmishes, affecting, in whole, neither interest or controversy. Most similar between the two films is probably their theatricality--the staginess of camera placement and missing walls, the way of storytelling and the histrionic acting. There are a few rather nice looking shots in this film, actually, but the entire picture is poorly crafted and choppy at times. The story of a father forcing his coward son at gunpoint to enlist for the Confederate army--and so on--is forgettable. Perhaps suitable on stage, Frank Keenan's rigor mortis stances and facial contouring are so out of place its laughable. Poor commemoration for Ince.(Note: The print I saw is in poor shape in parts--possibly causing some of the choppiness.)

mgmax The DVD "Civil War Films of the Silent Era" has three Thomas Ince productions on it-- the highly successful 1915 feature The Coward, starring Charles Ray and Frank Keenan (Keenan Wynn's grandfather, incidentally, and at times you can definitely tell), plus two shorts from 1913, Granddad and The Drummer of the 8th. The former is directed by Reginald Barker, who I daresay is the only director most of us could associate with Triangle (he directed The Italian, Civilization, several Hart westerns, etc.)It's pretty tough not to compare a 1915 film about the South to a certain D.W. Griffith film, and on the evidence Barker was highly capable and in some ways more fluid in his storytelling than Griffith, but didn't have Griffith's eye for the iconic actorly gesture that summed up character in a flash. There's nothing flashy about the on-screen agonizing that represents the delineation of character here, which is well acted for the period but takes literally a third of the movie to get across a fairly simple setup-- Dad (Keenan) is a proud Suthanah and gennelmun, Son (Ray) is a weakling who runs away from the enlisting office, and Dad orders Son to sign up and remembah that he is a Winslow, suh. There's a lot of knuckle-biting to get to that point.Once Ray deserts the movie picks up noticeably, and the action scenes are very nicely handled-- the manner in which Ray eludes capture in his own house is ingenious and nicely in character for someone who was a boy in the home, for instance. Watching it there are enough echoes of The General-- the enlistment opening, spying from beneath a table, etc.-- that you have to think that Keaton was drawing on memories of it, even if unconsciously. The battle scenes are fairly brief but impressively scaled (especially next to those in the shorts-- it's much like the difference in scale between the battle in The Battle of Elderbush Gulch and The Birth).But perhaps most interesting is what's missing-- The Birth's racial attitudes. This is much closer to Gone With the Wind's benevolent-paternalist view of master-slave relations, and while a definite air of Old South nostalgia/apologia fills the film, it feels right, for instance, that when Ray first sneaks into his home as a deserter, it's the servants who probably really raised him who take him in and try to ease the discovery of his action by his parents. (Of course, they may also have approved of desertion from the Confederate army...)