When the Earth Trembled
About When the Earth Trembled
Paul Girard Sr. cuts off his son for marrying Dora Sims, daughter of his business partner, and buys shares in order to ruin that firm. When the son learns the shares are about to be sold, he leaves Dora and their two children. His boat is wrecked and he is thought dead. An earthquake kills Sims and wrecks the business. Dora’s daughter falls ill. The grandfather offers to take the children. She refuses, then agrees. She later enters his house disguised as their governess. Paul, alive, comes home. She reveals herself, and the father takes her in. Harry Myers and Ethel Clayton star. Barry O’Neil directed.
Cast & crew
More about When the Earth Trembled
Edwin Barbour wrote it. Siegmund Lubin produced. The General Film Company distributed it. Wikipedia dates a San Francisco opening of 6 November 1913 and times the three reels at 48 minutes. The earthquake set took four months. A chandelier fell on Clayton during that scene. Lubin cut in some of its own 1906 newsreel of the aftermath. Most of that newsreel later burned in a vault fire. Motion Picture Story Magazine printed Henry Albert Phillips’s story version in September 1913.
Themes
Background
The disaster in the story is the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, staged seven years later at Lubin.
Making
O’Neil spent four months on the quake and nearly lost Clayton when the chandelier came down. The street wreckage includes Lubin’s own 1906 news pictures.
Preservation
Long treated as lost. In 2015 EYE Film Institute Netherlands restored it from three incomplete prints held at EYE, the BFI, and MoMA. The restoration premiered at Eye on 28 March 2015. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival showed it at the Castro Theatre on 29 May 2015.
Notes
- Peter Lang plays John Pearce, the friend who hunts for the children. Richard Morris plays Mr. Sims.
- Mary Powers and Layton Meisle play the girl and the boy. Mrs. George W. Walters plays Coffee Mary.
- Dora does not die in the quake. Sims does. She survives and comes back as the governess.
- Wikipedia says the film may be the first fiction picture of the 1906 earthquake.
- EYE restored it in 2015 from incomplete prints at EYE, the British Film Institute, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Scenes
- Paul Sr. buys the shares in order to break Sims’s firm.
- The earthquake kills Sims. Dora’s daughter is ill.
- Dora works in the house as the governess until Paul walks in.