Bruce Loeb on Piano At release in 1915, Moving Picture World hailed this now completely forgotten feature as "one of the three most notable productions of the screen." (They seem to have assumed we would know the others; guesses will be accepted at tonight's screening.) Its narrative has the wild leaps of early features, and at the then-remarkable length of ten reels, there are plenty of leaps. At center is the titular hero (Wheeler Oakman), "football hero and man about town," son of a Manhattan multi-millionaire, who falls drunken victim to a switched identity scheme. He finds himself shipped off to Panama and disinherited, but inspired to reform his ways by "the magnitude of the Panama Canal," then just reaching completion. The locations-along the canal, on islands in the Gulf of Panama, and on New York City streets-have gained historical fascination and one wishes for more. The "ne'er do well" is ensnared in romantic complications with his older benefactress (Kathlyn Williams), a diplomat's wife with too much time on her hands. But there are also sufficient fires, murders, and political intrigues swirling around our hero, known to one Panamanian as "the American pig." U.S. dollars eventually muscle in on Central America: "Release my boy or I'll smash you and your dinky little government!" As entertainment and social document both, The Ne'er Do Well survives better than the more commercially successful film to which it was a follow-up, The Spoilers (1914), adapted from another Rex Beach novel and with many of the same personnel behind and in front of the camera. The Library of Congress preservation print is marred by slight deterioration in the nitrate original, but for anyone intrigued by early filmmaking, tonight's public screening-the first outside the Library of Congress in nearly seventy-five years-is not to be missed. Scott Simmon