Thirty Days at Hard Labor (1912) watch online HD

This is a pleasant, funny adaptation of an O. Henry story, providing good entertainment while making a simple point or two. The technique is pretty standard for its time, relying mostly on a series of fixed shots plus a little parallel editing to tell the story, but it is solid and sound in its composition and in pretty much every other respect.

The story follows the efforts of a young man to win the approval of his girlfriend's father through hard work. His futile efforts in that direction are occasionally quite funny, and the climactic sequence is both amusing and agreeably offbeat.

The story-telling is a little more straightforward than that of O. Henry, who used to save things up for the maximum effect, and thus this movie version has a little less punch to it. But it works well in its own right, as an enjoyable story that treats its characters in a light-hearted but thoughtful fashion.

This Edison short from 1912 is based on an O. Henry short story: a son of the idle rich falls in love with the daughter of a self-made man and, in order to gain her father's permission to wed her, offers to work at unskilled labor for thirty days. This being an O. Henry story, you can expect a sharp snapper at the ending. In the meantime, until you get there, there are some some good comedy gags. You do need to get used to the Edison style of editing, which was very short of title cards but which is very well edited for understanding -- despite, to the modern eye, the occasional abrupt transition. Or perhaps not, given MTV techniques.

The interesting historical fact about this movie is that it was directed by Oscar Apfel. Mr. Apfel directed from about about 1911 through 1928, then just gave up and spent his last ten years as an actor. During his directing phase, however, he co-directed Cecil B. Demille's earliest films, basically teaching C.B. how to do the job. Why did Apfel give up directing? Was his technique out of date? Maybe. It was a common issue with several directors who vanished at that time. But here in 1912, he and his company are in fine form.

A comedy that makes use of an old situation. It is well acted and has some good photographs of interesting backgrounds. There is freshness in its incidents and in the way the story is worked out. The young son of the idle rich undertakes to earn his bread for thirty days by the sweat of his brow. It is to win a girl and is a condition imposed by her father, a self-made man. At first the young man attacks the problem in the simplest way, gets a job, several, in fact, at day labor. He finds that it doesn't go, souses his wits and lands a soft snap as halberdier in a German restaurant in New York. At about a half hour before his time is up, the girl comes to the Reinschloss Restaurant. The self-made man recognizes the youth, but he quickly pulls down his visor and the girl doesn't see him. It's a good light comedy, a good program filler. - The Moving Picture World, January 20, 1912

. . . a story with the pedigree of having been written by famed author William Sydney Porter, NOT to be confused with the notoriously misogynistic Edison film director of the same period, Edwin S. Porter, who had such a bad rep in civilized circles that W.S. Porter decided to write under the pseudonym of "O. Henry." This 16 minute, 17.21-second short THIRTY DAYS AT HARD LABOR was the 10th of 226 film adaptations of his work for which Bill has been give a writing credit so far. While certainly not among the best of such treatments, it is somewhat of a relief that it is fairly watchable (given that if Edison Manufacturing had done a film version of the Holy Bible, it would have consisted of the stories of Cain & Abel, Noah's bender, Sodom & Gomorrah, Lot's Daughters, and Salome's Dance). Harold Shaw as the tender-handed Jack Deering was no doubt a "hero" close to old Tom Edison's heart, as he is able to evade the "hard labor" of the title and waltz off with the prize (in this case, Beatrice) based mostly on good luck. The only thing that's missing from Edison's own life story are patent lawyers and an elephant electrocution.