Molly the Drummer Boy (1914) User Reviews

Actress and director did their best with material of very small value

[deickemeyer · 29 September 2018]

A girl makes the dearest kind of boy, but the more kindly nature has endowed her, the less like a boy she looks to us plain folks out in the audience. Miss Viola Dana makes a delicious boy; she looks palatable, but how the officers are deceived into believing her to be the real thing will probably remain one of those profound mysteries which have baffled men of recondite erudition in all ages. She learns to drum by the womanly way, by intuition; she doesn't need any practice, and she is accepted at once as a member of that desperate band of soldiers from whom our Daughters of the Revolution and Colonial Dames are so proudly descended. She has hardly started before George Washington, the general, not the austere statesman and profound thinker described in history, assigns the drummer boy to a duty of great peril and high importance. Washington, pre-eminent among his contemporaries for great dignity, quite as much as for more splendid qualities, is represented by Ogle as naturally inclined to be a hail-fellow-well-met. The general who compelled the surrender of Cornwallis was as dignified in the field as while establishing the machinery of government, yet he becomes enthusiastic over an unwounded drummer boy, "wishes to see him immediately" and extends "the thanks of Continental Congress." When the war is over, comment is superfluous. Miss Dana does well enough to deserve a better role and the treatment of the story is all that could be given it. Actress and director did their best with material of very small value. Such plays are below the Edison standard of other years, and far below the best work of this year. - The Moving Picture World, June 20, 1914