Watch Kathleen Mavourneen

An adaptation of Dion Boucicault's popular stage play "Kathleen Mavourneen; or St. Patrick's Eve," though with significant modifications. Much of Porter and McCutcheon's Irish melodrama was shot as if the audience could understand the absent dialogue. Likewise the collaborators used conventional theatrical blocking in most of their scenes, notably in the opening, for which the expansive landscape was treated as a stage. With nine major characters in the film, audiences would have had difficulty sorting out the narrative unless they already knew the play and/or received assistance from missing intertitles, or a lecture. The Edison Company nonetheless sold more than 70 copies of this film during the first year of release.