Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Coward (1915)

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 Blu-ray Disc edition has been mastered from the Photoplay Productions digital restoration prepared by Patrick Stanbury from an excellent 35mm source print of the American rerelease version of the film. Missing footage in the main print has been restored with a footage from a good 16mm reduction print. Digital image stabilization has been performed as has a tremendous amount of defect clean-up. One need only compare this edition to the Film Preservation Associates edition noted below (which utilized the same source print) to see the vast amount of restoration work done on the picture. Some very light dust, speckling, scuffing and evidence of print cupping remain, but the overall clean-up results are spectacular.

The film is accompanied by a music score arranged by Rodney Sauer and performed by The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, presented in lossless 2.0 stereo sound. Another pleasing score performance by one of the leading practitioners of silent film accompaniment.

Supplemental material includes the 1930 sound version introduction to The Birth of a Nation, featuring a staged conversation between D.W. Griffith and actor Walter Huston, mastered from an excellent 35mm print (6 minutes) and the intermission and the introduction to the second part of the film with Griffith and Huston from a very-good to excellent 35mm print (2 minutes); four additional Griffith Civil War films, including a complete presentation of The Coward (1915); outtakes and camera tests from the production of The Birth of a Nation from the Library of Congress (silent, 39 minutes); “The Birth of a Nation Score Recording Sessions,” documentary footage in 5.1 audio (21 minutes); D.W. Griffith’s 1936 appearance on Lux Radio Theater with Cecil B. DeMille (4 minutes); “The Birth of a Nation: The Legacy,” a featurette by John McCarty (18 minutes); “The Clansman: From Stage to Screen,” a featurette by Daniel Griffith, with historian David Mayer (17 minutes); a text essay “We Can Never Censor the Past” by Kevin Brownlow (9 screens); a text essay “The Birth of a Nation: The 2015 Restoration” by Patrick Stanbury (5 screens); a text essay “Fighting Back: Responding to The Birth of a Nation” by Ashley Clark (8 screens); a timed still photograph and advertising materials gallery (73 images, 14 minutes); and an 8-page insert booklet with an essay on The Birth of a Nation by Julie Kirgo.

This is our highly-recommended home video edition of The Coward. Huzzah!

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.

This DVD edition of The Coward (1915) has been mastered from an excellent but worn 35mm rerelease print — which is marred with a significant amount of speckling and dust, occasional sprocket damage in the image area, and with more than the usual amount of vertical emulsion scuffing and scratches (which has been supplemented with a footage insert from a good 16mm reduction print). The full-frame, natural-speed video transfer is quite detailed, with a broad range of the source print’s greytones 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. As usual, some of the synthesizer settings make it hard not to wince and set your teeth on edge.

Previously recommended, this edition has been surpassed by the out-of-print Twilight Time Blu-ray Disc edition noted above (itself now out-of-print).

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.

The film is likely accompanied by a soundtrack compiled from preexisting recordings.

Not likely to be worth a damn in the wake of the other editions noted above.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is available directly from . . .

Other CIVIL WAR FILMS of the silent era available on home video.