The Beat of the Year (1914)

—

Eugene Pallette | Sam De Grasse | John G. Adolfi (Director)

Rest of cast:

Frederic Hamen | Francelia Billington | Beulah Burns | Thelma Burns | Robert Livingston Beecher (Story)

—

—

A two-reel Reliance of decided merit, based on a story by Robert Livingston Beecher.

Reviewed by Louis Reeves Harrison.

Cast:
Joyce… Eugene Pallette
Greening… Sam De Grasse
Bruce… Fred Hamer
Helen… Francelia Billington

A well-constructed screen story of logical structure and careful treatment, The Beat of the Year, holds interest quite as much by ingenuity of plot and development as by its well-sustained suspense. It is really a detective story, involving the gradual unfolding of a crime mystery by a cub reporter of natural talent and a tendency to take the bit in his teeth and make the running. He is sent out on an assignment as an assistant to the star reporter, but he cuts loose on his own account, gathers a number of small clues and, through a process of reasoning that involves quick perception as well as infinite pains, he clears up a perplexing problem in time to make the scoop of the year.

The story opens with mystery and develops without any of that theatrical method which calls for enlightening the audience. It does not enlighten — it mystifies — and holds attention all the more on that account. There is apparently no clue to the perpetrator of a murder up to the time the victim’s clothes are shown to the star reporter and cub at the Morgue. The cub notices that one button on a vest is unlike the others and pilfers it. With that starting point he begins two lines of investigation, one starting with the manufacturers of the button and the other to ascertain who owned a deserted automobile figuring in the case.

The buttons are all shipped out of town, but that does not discourage the cub. Some employee might have used one to replace a button lost — are any of the factory hands absent? Two. Greening and Joyce. There is a group picture in which the latter appear and they are pointed out to the cub. When the young reporter has at last found the owner of the deserted car, he hires his services for the day and has him look at the group. The automobilist at once points out the man who hired the deserted car.

These clues are followed with activity and determination to the arrest of Joyce and the unfolding of his strange story, in which he accounts for all that might easily have been covered but for the cub’s strenuous detective work. Nothing is left to accident or chance in the cub’s work up to the discovery of Joyce: it is just what a photodrama should be in the assertion of a strong will against adverse circumstances, and fascinating on that account.

In The Beat of the Year is avoided a trouble very common in detective plays, that of exhibiting the problem by such a method that it is easily solved in advance. It has also a virtue of not depending upon coincidence or mere chance for its development. It is all right to let chance play its probable part in any story, but not so as to make the action hinge entirely upon it. There is a definite design in the mind of the cub reporter which is carried out to a logical end by plausible means.

—

Scene from The Beat of the Year (Reliance).

Collection: Moving Picture World, January 1915