Stage actor Wallace "Wally" McCutcheon was briefly pressed into service to cover for his ailing father as a director at Biograph. While in a sense we can be grateful for McCutcheon's failure in this task, as it opened up the opportunity for D.W. Griffith to undertake film direction for the first time, Griffith had to oblige the hapless Wally through helping out on a few of the latter's projects before he finally got his walking papers. "The Black Viper" may have been based on a true crime story from the newspapers: The Viper -- a hooligan and possibly a "black hand" -- waits outside a factory at quitting time for the workers to depart. He puts the make on the last woman out, and she rebuffs him, so he knocks her to the ground. Another gentleman rushes up, subdues the Viper, and escorts the lady on her way. The Viper shakes his fist at them, vowing to get even -- we assume, as there is not a single title card in the film, though with a Biograph of this date coming solely from a paper print, the titles may have been lost.
The Viper gathers a couple of friends, and the three sneak up on the lady and her beau in a horse drawn wagon, which they use to abduct the hero. She rushes to a police station to summon three detectives, and all rush after the bad guys. They begin to haul their quarry up the side of a steep cliff, casting stones from above to discourage the would-be rescuers, who find shelter under a stone protruding from the cliff wall. Once up top, the Viper and his crew plan to dispose of their victim by placing him in an empty house and setting it ablaze. But he gets loose inside the house, and the struggle continues up on the roof as the building begins to burn.
Even for 1908 standards, this is an extremely bad film; while the settings are all exteriors and are interesting in themselves, there are so many ways in which the film could also be interesting, and it is not so. Practically everything is in long shot, and action is so poorly plotted that often you cannot tell how many players are in a scene; not so good when your're only working with a cast of eight. Since there are three detectives, why couldn't they have spared one to go around to the other side of the bluff and meet the bad guys at the top? Why did the bad guys send away their wagon? Likewise, they could've taken it up the other side to the house and saved themselves a lot of misery. The detectives and lady friend do make it to the top within seconds of the villains, so why are they absent from all of the action which follows? The elder Wallace McCutcheon was a specialist at making chase films, and perhaps this was something he'd had on the drawing board when he took ill. Gene Gauntier and actress Kate Bruce have left reliable testimony as to just how incompetent "Wally" McCutcheon was as director. "The Black Viper" is yet another testimony to his un- talent; in this case, D.W. Griffith was just along for the ride.