By the summer of 1915, 3-reelers had become standard for both Edison and Collins, who clearly enjoyed the creative scope afforded by the longer format. The Slavey Student is a particularly delightful example of the director’s visually inventive output at the time, and despite a plot that becomes rather more convoluted than necessary, Collins pauses the narrative in order to indulge in the kinds of pictorial pleasures one associates with Maurice Tourneur or even, a bit later, Lucio D’Ambra. For once, Edison’s advertisements weren’t empty ballyhoo: “It is such a play that lingers like a pleasant memory, delightfully refreshing to your patrons who have wearied of this procession of morbid and ‘blood-and-thunder’ stuff… Directed by John H. Collins who directs so well the drama of the home.” (The New York Dramatic Mirror, 11 August 1915)
When siblings John and Alma Picket (Pat O’Malley and Viola Dana) are left orphans, Sheriff Tom Bolles takes them in. John goes to New York to make a living, while Alma and her dog Jerry arrive at the Graven prep school, headed by stern-faced Miss Graven, where she offers to work in exchange for an education. Unfortunately for John, he’s framed by his boarding house neighbor and receives a two-month jail term when the police find burglar’s tools in his room.
Alma’s popular classmate Marjorie Welford invites her charming brother Harry and his friend Roy Ashton to the school dance – Collins imaginatively has each dancing couple pass before the camera – and while Harry and Alma hit it off, Roy lays siege to Marjorie. Unbeknownst to them all, Roy is the man responsible for John’s unjust imprisonment, and though clearly a cad, he convinces Marjorie to elope. Luckily John is released and arrives at Sheriff Bolles’ home just before the ceremony takes place, where he identifies Roy as the real thief.
According to contemporary reports, Collins took over the entire Edison studio during two nighttime shootings, allowing him to use an expanded stage for several truly delicious scenes in the school dormitory. In one, the girls (dubbed “Gravenites”) tease Alma by donning white sheets and pretending to be ghosts, leading to a delirious pillow fight that richly takes advantage of black and white contrasts. Even more of a stand-out scene occurs after the dance, when the happy girls fall asleep in their beds thinking about their beaus, who fade into the scene behind the bedsteads in their evening finery. As they dissolve away, the girls simultaneously turn in bed. It’s a magical moment, full of charm, but Variety’s Fred Schader was having none of it, complaining that the easily shocked Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock would certainly make the studio cut the scene.
Schader’s review was a rare negative critique (his only real praise was for Jerry the dog); almost everyone else was enchanted. Moving Picture World’s profile of Dana (11 September 1915) at the time of the film’s release singled out her work with Collins, which “typify the refining of the photoplay as the action is more mental, emotional, and requires a more refined art on the part of the player. In a word, Miss Dana’s remarkable growth of screen popularity is a tribute to, and a triumph of, her personality and a genius for expressing it on the shadowy stage, overcoming the loss of the powerful aid of the spoken word.” Modern audiences will enthusiastically embrace the lovely open-ended finale, though Variety sniffed that the film came to a close “in a most abrupt manner, without any point being arrived at.”

Jay Weissberg