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Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Robert J. Maxwell It's always interesting to watch silent movies, if only to see how overdone the acting tends to be. With only a few scattered printed titles, the story depends on the actors' ability to project emotions. They usually give it their all. They certainly do in this film.It's the beginning of the Civil War and all the Southern men of Cotton Creek are enlisting except Charles Ray, who decides to skip the war and hide at home among the women, the darkies, and his rigid old man. No Achilles he. He's not sulking, just scared to death and he knows it, and soon everybody else does too. His proud father, an ex colonel, played by Frank Keenan, forces Ray to enlist at gunpoint. Keenan's performance is something to behold. With every move, every change of facial expression, he seems struggling to overcome an advanced stage of rigor mortis.The story itself could have come from an early John Wayne Western. Ray deserts the army but redeems himself, just as the Young Man did in "The Red Badge of Courage." The South wins, with the help of the loyal slaves who tend the Big House. There is really only one battle scene, and it looks as if the budget was generous but it's confusingly edited. We know the Confederates won because a title tells us so. Some of the scenes are really slowly paced. We get the point long before the scene ends.Southern values usually prevail in these movies, whether it's Buster Keaton or "The Birth of a Nation". When they fail, it's shown as a tragedy, as in "Gone With the Wind." Some regional resentment still exists in the South, unlike Germany, a country in which WWII never happened. The South was settled by Cavaliers, not the Puritans of the North, and the Cavaliers brought their culture of honor with them. When something happened, you settled the score yourself. You didn't go squealing to a central government.Jefferson Davis had a hell of a time ruling the Confederacy. There were so many challenges to duels that he had to be careful to post his officers far apart from their enemies. And he had to depend on states to provide volunteer troops. He couldn't draft anyone because the whole point of the Confederacy was states rights and a weak central government. That's what a "confederacy" is -- a kind of gentleman's agreement to cooperate.In the Northern state, Charles Ray would simply have been drafted unless his father was rich enough to pay a few hundred dollars for a substitute.

wes-connors In 1861, the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, Virginia's young men sign up by the hundreds to fight for the Confederacy. Plantation owner Frank Keenan (as Jefferson Beverly Winslow) wants to fight alongside handsome son Charles Ray (as Frank Winslow). Mr. Keenan is rejected as too old, but expects his son will enlist. Not so fast. Overcome with fear and dread, Mr. Ray gets cold feet at the recruiting station. Yes, he is "The Coward". So, disgraced war veteran father Keenan signs Ray up… at gunpoint!While on "picket duty" patrol, Ray is startled by wild animals, and goes AWOL. Running home to stately "Winslow Hall", he is comforted by gentle-mother Gertrude Claire (as Betty) and the family's domesticated slaves. When papa Keenan finds out his son has deserted the Confederate Army, he flies into a rage, exclaiming, "Why was I ever born to be the father of a coward?" while Ray shamefully sobs. Later, when Yankee soldiers invade his home, Ray gets a second chance to prove his mettle...With D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" (released earlier in 1915) setting box offices on fire, this shorter Civil War epic was made to order; it also resembled Griffith's "The Battle" (1911) and others. An acclaimed stage actor, Frank Kennan had his name above co-star Charles Ray. Both men became screen stars with "The Coward" - but Ray quickly shot past his illustrious elder. Ray's performance in "The Coward" is excellent, and was recalled as an example of the decade's best acting (it still is).Keenan (grandfather of character actor Keenan Wynn), Ms. Claire, and Patricia Palmer (as Amy) show degrees of "stagy".The "Quigley Poll" of top ten money-making stars for the year 1916 (which took "The Coward" into account) debuted Keenan at #10. In 1917, Ray debuted at #8, one above Keenan, who subsequently left the poll. From then on, Ray was found in the upper half of the exhibitors' list, complied by Quigley Publications from 1915 to the present. Ray was a million-dollar super-star until pouring his fortune into his own production company, which famously flopped with "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1923).******** The Coward (10/3/15) Thomas H. Ince : Reginald Barker ~ Charles Ray, Frank Kennan, Gertrude Claire, Margaret Gibson

Chrissie I watched "The Coward" because, as a huge Buster Keaton fan, I wanted to see a movie he'd likely been spoofing bits of in "The General". I don't know how it looked to audiences of 1915, but to a modern audience, "The Coward" often looks like a spoof itself. Charles Ray portrays Frank Winslow, the stately and handsome son of proud former Colonel Jefferson Beverly Winslow (Frank Keenan). The Colonel is an amiable enough husband, showing his wife genuine affection, but he's a steadfast old soldier as well, with no patience for those who don't eagerly rush off to battle. Frank, more a lover than a fighter, is scared witless at the idea of being cannon fodder. He tries to screw up the courage to enlist, like everyone else is gaily doing, but his nerve fails him and he goes home, confessing his fear to his white-haired mother. Dear old Dad considers this such a blow to the family honor that he pulls out a pistol and makes it pretty plain to Frank that the alternative to being shot at by Yankees on the battlefield is being plugged between the eyes by his father at home.To say the acting is overblown is understatement. Dad's reactions to his son look more like symptoms of neurological problems than they resemble human emotion -- alternating between clenched-teeth catatonia and a sort of standing petit-mal seizure. If he was a dog, you'd shoot him. It's fun to see the bits Keaton played with in "The General" -- the enlistment office scene, tossing away the picture of the disgraced young 'un, hiding under the tablecloth, stealing a uniform to sneak past the enemy. It's worth watching for that alone. And some of the affectionate moments between the Colonel and his wife were refreshing. But I'd not give it a second viewing.

mgmax The DVD "Civil War Films of the Silent Era" has three Thomas Ince productions on it-- the highly successful 1915 feature The Coward, starring Charles Ray and Frank Keenan (Keenan Wynn's grandfather, incidentally, and at times you can definitely tell), plus two shorts from 1913, Granddad and The Drummer of the 8th. The former is directed by Reginald Barker, who I daresay is the only director most of us could associate with Triangle (he directed The Italian, Civilization, several Hart westerns, etc.)It's pretty tough not to compare a 1915 film about the South to a certain D.W. Griffith film, and on the evidence Barker was highly capable and in some ways more fluid in his storytelling than Griffith, but didn't have Griffith's eye for the iconic actorly gesture that summed up character in a flash. There's nothing flashy about the on-screen agonizing that represents the delineation of character here, which is well acted for the period but takes literally a third of the movie to get across a fairly simple setup-- Dad (Keenan) is a proud Suthanah and gennelmun, Son (Ray) is a weakling who runs away from the enlisting office, and Dad orders Son to sign up and remembah that he is a Winslow, suh. There's a lot of knuckle-biting to get to that point.Once Ray deserts the movie picks up noticeably, and the action scenes are very nicely handled-- the manner in which Ray eludes capture in his own house is ingenious and nicely in character for someone who was a boy in the home, for instance. Watching it there are enough echoes of The General-- the enlistment opening, spying from beneath a table, etc.-- that you have to think that Keaton was drawing on memories of it, even if unconsciously. The battle scenes are fairly brief but impressively scaled (especially next to those in the shorts-- it's much like the difference in scale between the battle in The Battle of Elderbush Gulch and The Birth).But perhaps most interesting is what's missing-- The Birth's racial attitudes. This is much closer to Gone With the Wind's benevolent-paternalist view of master-slave relations, and while a definite air of Old South nostalgia/apologia fills the film, it feels right, for instance, that when Ray first sneaks into his home as a deserter, it's the servants who probably really raised him who take him in and try to ease the discovery of his action by his parents. (Of course, they may also have approved of desertion from the Confederate army...)