A Film Canon

Tol'able David never quite fulfils the potential of its opening scenario - a bucolic rural existence exploded by criminals on the run, whose imprisonment of their hosts transforms home invasion into the first rudimentary hostage narrative that I have seen to date. Not only does this tend to preclude melodrama, it gestures towards an erosion of the very moralism upon which melodrama is founded, promising to replace it with a radical amorality whose logical conclusion is vigilantism. This trajectory seems all the more likely in that the young protagonist, David (Richard Barthelmess) requires the exact pretext to prove his manhood that is offered by the criminals' murder of his older brother, itself an uncharacteristically graphic, detached portrayal of violence for the silent medium, and all the more shocking for incorporating the stuff of bucolic life (stones, sticks) that, in the first act, has been integrated into a pastoral aesthetic that aspires to Wordsworth's Prelude. Unfortunately, King stretches out the narrative in such a way as to dilute David's vigilante instincts, imbuing the film's more transgressive elements with a hesitation that ultimately undermines them. Although this allows him to take advantage of his insistence upon shooting on location, it robs David of the kind of manhood that the narrative has promised to grant him (explaining his symbolic rape by one of the criminals in the final sequence) - or, alternatively, carries Barthelmess' adolescent screen persona to its logical conclusion.