The Transformation of Mike
R: David W. Griffith. B: Wilfred Lucas. K: G.W. Bitzer. D: Wilfred Lucas, Blanche Sweet, William J. Butler, John T. Dillon, Frank Evans, Kate Bruce, W. Christy Cabanne, J. Jiquel Lanoe, W.C. Robinson, Joseph McDermott, Grace Henderson, Gus Pixley, Robert Harron, John T. Dillon, J. Jiquel Lanoe. P: Biograph Company. USA 1911

“One version of this is shown the way the negative was developed (no editing between the scenes). Another version has the editing restored. However, since the edited version was lost, the editing was done according to numbers that Griffith placed on the side of the film negative. These numbers are visible in the unedited version of the film (both are of the same length and contain the same material, just in different order). Since the inner titles were also lost, the latest version of the film has beginnig titles added to give history to the film and introduce the editing problems/issues.”
IMDb

“When Blanche meets a hoodlum named Mike at a dance hall, she agrees to be his girl despite warnings from her friends. True to his old ways, Mike later sees an older man count his money and, not knowing he is Blanche’s father, breaks into his apartment to rob him. Blanche, hearing the noise from behind the locked door of a kitchen, sends her younger brother down a dumbwaiter to fetch the police. Mike breaks down the kitchen door, discovers Blanche, and is dumbstruck. He pleads forgiveness; she covers for him while he escapes the police.”
The Griffith Project, Vol. 5

“Griffith had been flogging this theme for the better part of three years. The Transformation of Mike recalls The Purgation (1910), where Gertrude Robinson turns cracksman Joseph Graybill around, and it amounts to a remake of The Thief and the Girl (1911), where Wilfred Lucas, as here, plays a crook who is coldcocked when he discovers the house he is robbing is occupied by a would-be sweetheart. (…) For us, The Transformation of Mike may feel like a rough draft of the better crime films to follow. Part of the problem is Wilfred Lucas who, with his doleful demeanor, looks less like a hoodlum than a constipated undertaker. Along with Blanche Sweet, he had become the chief beneficiary of the massive raids that robbed Griffith of what the trades were calling ‘the old Biograph Company’. It is as though Griffith was in a holding pattern, marking time with Lucas while awaiting the return of Walthall and the development of Bobby Harron and Walter Miller as leading players. In the meantime, Lucas was Griffith’s most important leading man, making a specialty of the forlorn, doleful miscreant. But he tends to illustrate the limits of the new Biograph school of acting that others were turning to such advantage. In his hands the quiet, understated, and introspective style becomes somewhat dull and lethargic. Despite an imposing and appealing physical presence, Lucas was probably the least resourceful of all Griffith’s leading men.”
Russell Merritt
The Griffith Project, Vol. 5

>>> Griffith 1911