Collins followed up What Could She Do? with The Last of the Hargroves, his first collaboration with Louisiana-born Broadway playwright Lee Arthur, hired by Edison shortly before production began (they’re credited with making four films together). The subject is taken from America’s evergreen fascination with hillbilly feuds, long a well-mined source for theatricals and films, and there’s little to distinguish Arthur’s plot from similar variations of the Hatfield-McCoy theme (it’s worth stating that actress Gertrude McCoy is unlikely to have been related to that storied Kentucky family).
For the most part, The Last of the Hargroves is straightforward melodrama, the sort of thing one imagines being played over and over by second-rate stock companies in the provinces. The feud between the Buckners and the Hargroves begins banally enough, prompted by the shooting of an animal, and grows in enmity. Fifteen years later, Ben Buckner (Robert Conness), raised in the city to shield him from the deadly squabble, returns to his rural roots and falls in love with Virginia (McCoy), a wild girl of the forest. Of course neither is aware of the other’s surname, but when Virginia discovers he’s a Buckner, she recalls the voice of her dying mother (Helen Strickland), swearing vengeance on the rival family. Virginia’s implacable relative Lige (Frank McGlynn) goads her into shooting Ben, but fortunately the wound is slight and a parson arrives just in time to marry the contrite couple.
Moving Picture World (12 December 1914) wrote, “The photography of the mountain exteriors and the homely interiors of cabins is very creditable,” which is less than the highest praise, and in truth The Last of the Hargroves is not on a level with other Collins films of the time, such as The Man in the Dark, released one month earlier and screened at the Giornate in 2016. What is worth noting is the director’s compositional eye, and how he positions the actors to create some kind of dynamism out of what’s essentially a rather trite tale.
Robert Conness and his wife Helen Strickland (she was frequently billed as “Mrs. Robert Conness”) were an active couple in vaudeville, film, and on Broadway, appearing on stage through the 1930s. Perhaps his most notable performance was in the celebrated production of Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen, starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt.

Jay Weissberg