A young Charles Ray stars in this Civil War film production of Thomas H. Ince’s, made to capitalize on the success of The Birth of a Nation (1915). With the Civil War breaking out for the Confederacy, Ray must cope with feelings of cowardice amongst the outrage of family and friends.

This edition of The Coward (1915) has been mastered from an excellent but worn 35mm rerelease print — which is marred with a light amount of speckling and dust, occasional sprocket damage in the image area, and with more than the usual amount of vertical emulsion scratches (which has been supplemented with a footage insert from a good 16mm reduction print). The slightly windowboxed natural-speed video transfer is quite detailed, with a broad range of the source print’s graytones well-reproduced from deep but defined shadows to subtly-detailed highlights, to the point that this older DVD still looks great on high-definition equipment with the standard NTSC 480-line interlaced-scan signal upconverted to an HD 1080-line progressive-scan signal.

The film is presented with a music score performed on MIDI synthesizers by Eric Beheim.

Short of the release of a new high-definition transfer of this excellent source material, there will likely not be a better-looking edition of The Coward on DVD home video.

USA: Click the logomark at right to purchase a Region 0 NTSC DVD of this edition from Amazon.com.
Canada: Click the logomark at right to purchase a Region 0 NTSC DVD of this edition from Amazon.ca.

Other silent era Civil War films available on home video:
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Civil War Films of the Silent Era (1913-1915)
The General (1926)
Grandma’s Boy (1922)