Death's Marathon (1913)

Here’s a little potboiler that, while it falls short of Griffith’s best work of the period, is notable for the shocking effect of violence and some deranged acting from the bizarrely versatile Henry B. Walthall (the "Weakling Brother" of The Burglar’s Dilemma.) The plot, basically, is pure melodramatic hocum - the only thing that truly makes Death’s Marathon interesting is the unexpected shock ending - plus Walthall’s hammy, but weird, performance.

Walthall and the dashing young Walter Miller (the handsome Musician from The Musketters of Pig Alley), are business partners. They both have a love wish for the lovely Blanche Sweet (who is hardly given anything to do in the picture but sit around looking charming or pitiful.) Sweet rebuff’s Miller’s advances, but takes to the cocky Walthall. In a year, the couple are married and with child. Walthall, however, is bored with domestic life and would rather spend his evenings at the club, playing high stakes poker. On a losing slide, Walthall steals money from the company safe to go play, which is discovered by Miller, who tries to chase him down. Too late - he’s blown it all - and now he’s on his way back to the office, where he pulls out a revolver, determined to do away with himself.

Oddly, he calls his wife on the phone first. Arriving there in time for the call, Miller, along with Sweet, attempt to talk him out of it. Sweet stays on the phone with him as Miller races back to the office to stop him. All her tears and persuasion cannot dissuade him - even an emotional communication with their baby son cannot do it. Miller arrives, but too late - Walthall has blown his brains out.

The last scene shows Sweet, at home alone. Miller delivers roses to her, and their shared happy smiles are supposed to tell us that they will soon be together, living happily ever after.

The film’s structure, which is basically a chase in the second half, is pretty conventional by the standards of the day. Griffith uses his usual jump cuts to set up and intensify the tension leading up to what one expects to be Walthall’s rescue or change of heart. But there is no rescue - and there is no change of heart. I have to conclude that the climax was quite a shock for the audience in 1913.

One has to ask oneself what Griffith was thinking when he made this decision. The writing credit goes to a William E. Wing, a relative newcomer to film writing. But Griffith could certainly have changed the ending had he wanted to. There’s something just a little diabolical about Death’s Marathon - it’s as though Griffith had wanted to finally let the audience know that he would not always let them off the hook - thus returning credibility for suspense to a medium that might have been becoming a bit too predictable by 1913.

Whatever else can be said about Death’s Marathon, there’s a kind of sadistic fun at work in it, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Walthall’s long and strange performance over the phone to his wife and partner. One cannot tell what he is saying, but he is certainly taking his time about it. He grins evilly at the gun throughout the long conversation, knowing for certain it is what he is going to do. What he seems to relish is the torture that he is putting his wife through on his way to oblivion.

How can we explain this? Well, one suggestion is that Walthall is just a nasty guy - he certainly doesn’t give a hoot about his wife, and at one point in the film even threatens to slap her for wanting to go out with him. I suppose the ending implies that Sweet made the wrong choice at the beginning of the film with the two fellows - yet if she really didn’t fancy Miller then, why should she any more now?

One can say that Griffith is (rather heavy handedly) giving a warning about vices such as gambling. But that matter is so much on the surface and the subtext of Walthall’s strange performance and the agonizingly stretched out taunting of the wife (and the audience) suggests something a bit more sinister about the cinema.

Who knows how banal Death’s Marathon was when it was begun? Did Walthall’s crazed acting suggest a new direction during the filming? Perhaps it originally had a happy ending? This is just idle speculation, of course, but it would make sense of what we are seeing on the screen. Here, Griffith has taken good, old-fashioned Victorian melodrama and twisted it just enough to make something with a nasty little bite.

It’s important to note this tendency in Griffith if we are not to fall into the trap of oversimplifying him. Moral ambiguities in such films as The Painted Lady, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, and Death’s Marathon display something of more subversive depth lurking under the surface of the Griffith world, and it’s something to keep one’s eye on. It is this very subversive tendency, perhaps inherent to the film-making process itself, that will deliver some of its most iconoclastic character of cruelty.