Although Edison was putting Viola Dana into as many films as possible in 1914 and early 1915, she was still largely known for her starring role in Eleanor Gates’s play The Poor Little Rich Girl, which opened on Broadway in January 1913 and made the 15-year-old actress, already a stage and screen veteran, the toast of the Great White Way. Cinema however seemed to suit her (or her mother, the formidable Mary Flugrath) best, and in January 1915 something special happened: she met John H. Collins. He first directed her in The Stone Heart (believed lost) and then The Portrait in the Attic, a superb example of how Collins was able to take standard Victorian melodrama and find in it an essential emotional core.
When her father (Robert Conness) and his new wife (Miriam Nesbitt) return from their honeymoon, Thelma (Dana) struggles to be more than just polite to the woman meant to take the place of her deceased mother. Instead she finds refuge in the attic, gazing at her mother’s portrait. Following her birthday party, Thelma heads up to the attic, but the rope for the stairs breaks once she’s under the eaves, and she’s trapped. While asleep her mother (Margaret Prussing) appears in a vision and tells her, “Love me always, but love her also, for father’s sake.” Luckily her clever dog Jerry alerts the family as to her whereabouts, and once rescued, Thelma embraces her stepmother.
Richard Ridgely’s script avoids the obvious clichés – at last, a non-wicked stepmother – and Collins treats it with respect, staging the narrative with straightforward, warm-hearted clarity. Especially notable are the lighting effects at the birthday party and again in the attic, with the director using chiaroscuro to heighten the emotional tenor of the scenes in more than a merely picturesque manner. Given Collins’ earlier experience as a set designer, it’s tempting to credit him with the terrific art direction, such as Thelma’s enchanting bedroom with animal frieze wallpaper, and with choosing the stunning clothes worn by Nesbitt and Prussing.
Following Dana’s triumph in The Poor Little Rich Girl, journalists kept asking her to analyze her approach to acting the part of a child, and one can imagine that the training provided by this constant inner exploration helped hone her later performances when she continued to play characters much younger than herself. Contemporary reviews for The Portrait in the Attic gave special praise to the teenage lead: “Although somewhat older than the right age for the character, Miss Dana brings out the different moods of the willful little miss with skill, and makes her surrender at the finish with charming conviction. It is rather difficult to understand, however, why the portrait of a man’s first wife should have been lugged up into the attic and thrown into a corner, just because he is going to bring home a new wife.” (Moving Picture World, 20 March 1915).

Jay Weissberg