Edgar Allan Poe (1909 American Silent Drama film)

Produced by the Biograph Company of New York and directed and co-written by D. W. Griffith. Herbert Yost stars in this short as the 19th-century American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe, while Linda Arvidson portrays Poe's wife Virginia. When it was released in February 1909 and throughout its theatrical run, the film was consistently identified and advertised with Poe's middle name misspelled in its official title, using an "e" instead of the correct second "a". The short was also originally shipped to theaters on a "split reel", which was a single reel that accommodated more than one film. This 450-foot drama shared its reel with another Biograph short, the 558-foot comedy A Wreath in Time. Prints of both films survive.

Plot
The film focuses on Edgar Allan Poe and his wife Virginia Clemm, who is bedridden and seriously ill. While Poe comforts her, a raven suddenly appears on a bust of Pallas displayed on a high shelf in her room. Inspired by the sight, Poe writes "The Raven", his greatest poetic work. He then leaves, hoping to sell the poem to a local newspaper or book publisher so he can buy much-needed food and medicines for Virginia. At a newspaper office, the first potential buyer rejects the creation. Desperate for money, Poe rushes to another publisher's office, where a man and a woman are busy editing. Initially, one editor dismisses Poe's poem, but the other one reads the work, likes it, and pays him for it. Poe then uses the money to buy a basket of food and other items for his wife. Virginia is still lying in bed when he returns home, where he proudly unfolds a new blanket, he also purchased, but as he places the blanket on her, he realizes that she had died while he was gone. Poe is devastated by her loss, and the film ends with him crying over her body.

Cast
Herbert Yost as Edgar Allan Poe
Linda Arvidson as Virginia Poe
Arthur V. Johnson as publisher at first office
Charles Perley as "Resident poet" at first office
David Miles as publisher at second office
Anita Hendrie as editor at second office
Production

The screenplay for this short was co-written by director Griffith and Frank E. Woods. The drama was shot using three interior corner sets at Biographs headquarters and main studio, which in 1908 and 1909 were located inside a renovated brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street in New York City. Filming by company cinematographer G. W. Bitzer was completed in just two days, although records differ as to those exact dates. Profiles on the film at the Library of Congress cite January 21 and 23, 1909, while Biograph production records, which are noted in the 1985 reference D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company, give earlier dates: December 21 and 23, 1908.

Lighting
The lighting of sets was invariably a collaborative effort between director Griffith and his cinematographers, most notably in his work with "Billy" Bitzer. Film historian and university professor Joyce E. Jesionowski in her 1987 book Thinking in Pictures: Dramatic Structure in D. W. Griffith's Biograph Films regards Edgar Allen Poe as a notable one in Griffith's early filmography, a production that illustrates his growing awareness of the power of set lighting in establishing mood and enhancing storylines that, unlike stage plays, relied totally on orchestrating visual elements within a silent medium:
Griffith's most theatrical use of a lighting effect, his most conscious use of light as atmosphere, occurs in a group of films that are less admirable for their construction than for the tone set by their lighting. Edgar Allen Poe [sic] (1909) is such a film, impressive in its pre-expressionist harshness of the contrast between light and shadow in the shots.

With further regard to the moody "harshness" of the lighting employed by Griffith and Bitzer in this production, in an introduction to a copy of the short preserved in its film museum, the EYE Institute in the Netherlands states, "Although there is little to distinguish [Edgar Allen Poe] now from its contemporaries, it had new and advanced lighting, notably the so-called 'Rembrandt lighting' or profile portrait-effect." Now a standard lighting technique in cinematography and studio photography, the use of such "Rembrandt lighting" in 1909 predates by six years its credited use in motion pictures, most notably by Cecil B. DeMille in his 1915 production The Warrens of Virginia.

Release and promotion

Split-reel promotion of the film with the comedy A Wreath in Time
Just days before the short's release on February 8, 1909, biograph marketed it as "a work of art" that the company produced to commemorate "this season of [Poe's] birthday centennial."