Viola Dana

The Show of Shows

Now hear this. The studio that gave the cinema its voice offered 1929 audiences a chance to see and hear multiple silent-screen favorites for the first time in a gaudy, grandiose music-comedy-novelty revue that also included Talkie stars, Broadway luminaries and of course, Rin-Tin-Tin. Frank Fay hosts a jamboree that, among its 70+ stars, features bicyclers, boxing champ Georges Carpentier, chorines in terpsichore kickery, sister acts, Myrna Loy in two-strip Technicolor as an exotic Far East beauty, John Barrymore in a Shakespearean soliloquy (adding an on-screen voice to his legendary profile for the first time) and Winnie Lightner famously warbling the joys of Singing in the Bathtub. Watch, rinse, repeat!

Naughty Nanette

The Jazz Age rages in this comedy film starring Viola Dana as the madcap title character madly dashing through a series of adventures.

The Girl Without a Soul

The story of two young sisters, one a somewhat demure musician who is in love with a scoundrel who's no good for her, and the other a wild, free spirit who is the object of a shy young carpenter's affections.

Blue Jeans

June, a young orphan, is befriended by Perry Bascom when he shares his lunch with her on the road to Rising Sun. They soon fall in love and marry, only to find out that a woman in Perry's past has come to town to make trouble. Teaming up with the local political bully, the schemers set out to make Perry's life miserable, but June sticks by her husband to the end.

Children Who Labor

The father of a working class family is having trouble finding a job, because the local textile mill is hiring only inexpensive child labor. Reluctantly, he allows his oldest daughter to work in the mill. Meanwhile, in New York, the wealthy businessman Hanscomb is being urged to speak out against child labor, but he declines to do so. Then, while Mrs. Hanscomb and her daughter are traveling, the young girl accidentally wanders away, gets lost, and is taken in by the working class family. To help them, she takes a job in the mill. While this is taking place, Hanscomb has initiated a search for the daughter even as he goes about building up his financial empire.

A Christmas Carol

Miser Ebenezer Scrooge is awakened on Christmas Eve by spirits who reveal to him his own miserable existence, what opportunities he wasted in his youth, his current cruelties, and the dire fate that awaits him if he does not change his ways. Scrooge is faced with his own story of growing bitterness and meanness, and must decide what his own future will hold: death or redemption.

Children of Eve

An illegitimate child of the slums comes to faith. Later, she chooses to labor in a canning factory in order to investigate its poor conditions, not realizing she has a significant connection to the cold-hearted factory owner.

Merton of the Movies

A wannabe film star journeys to Hollywood, but soon finds his dreams do not pan out. This film is lost.

Flower of the Dusk

Blind Ambrose North is tormented by the suspicion that his wife Constance committed suicide when their crippled daughter Barbara was only two, because she did not love him. Before her death, Constance wrote Barbara a letter to be opened on the girl's twenty-first birthday, but when Barbara opens it and learns that her mother killed herself to escape a doomed love affair with Lawrence Austin, she invents a different story for Ambrose, knowing that the truth would hurt him too deeply.

Some Bride

Young bride Patricia Morley's flirtatious ways at a summer resort keep her husband Henry in a state of continual anxiety. At an old-fashioned barn dance, Patricia enacts the role of a chicken breaking out of an egg, and Henry's wrath explodes. After accusing her of being in love with another man, Henry returns to New York and files for divorce. Heartbroken, Patricia sends her friend Victoria French to tell Henry that she is dying.

Gladiola

The Chorus Girl's Romance

When, on a prank, shimmy dancer Marcia Meadows visits bookworm Horace Tarbox in his Yale dormitory, Horace falls madly in love and follows her to New York where he and Marcia marry. Denounced by his wealthy father, Horace attempts to support Marcia through his writing, but all his manuscripts are rejected, and he is fired from every job.

Home Stuff

Stranded in the small town of Buckeye Junction young actress Madge Joy crawls upon a load of hay and falls asleep. Knocked unconscious when young farmer Robert Deep hitches up the wagon not realizing she’s inside she awakes in the Deep living room. "Ma" Deep takes to her at once, but old “Pa” Deep looks at her sternly. Claiming to be a runaway orphan rather than an actress she becomes a member of the family. Falling for Madge Robert confesses he dreams of being a playwright, that night his sister Susan, who has run away to be an actress, reappears. Pa Deep is furious when he finds out his daughter has been on the stage, but Madge reveals that she is herself an actress threatening to go away with Robert unless he makes up with his daughter. Eventually Madge finds fame in New York with Robert following with a play he knows is right.

The Fourteenth Lover

Vi Marchmont (Viola Dana) is a spoiled rich girl who has thirteen lovers. Her Aunt Letitia (Kate Lester) wants her to halt her flirtatious ways and has picked Clyde Van Ness (Theodore Von Eltz) as the right one out of the bunch -- not that Vi agrees. Aunt Letitia sends her off to the country, along with Van Ness and the gardener, Richard Hardy (Jack Mulhall). Vi winds up falling for the gardener, much to her aunt's horror, and in spite of the class differences, he becomes her fourteenth lover.

The Microbe

Happy O'Brien, called "The Microbe," or "Mike" for short, a female street urchin who sells newspapers dressed as a boy to avoid harassment, is saved from arrest for fighting other newsboys in Chinatown by wealthy author DeWitt Spense. DeWitt, there to purchase drugs, is so moved by Mike's pugnacity, that he takes her to his mansion for literary inspiration. When DeWitt learns that Mike is a girl, he resolves to educate her. As Mike blossoms, DeWitt's attentions turn to love, to the dismay of Judith Winthrope, who wants to marry him, and his friend Robert Breton, who, with Judith, convinces Mike that DeWitt's writing is suffering because of her.

Don't Doubt Your Husband

Kosher Kitty Kelly

The story is a variation on the Abie's Irish Rose theme, detailing the marriage between an Irish Catholic and a Jew.

Glass Houses

When a wealthy young lady loses her inheritance, she decides to apply for work in disguise. In prim and proper working girl attire she becomes the respectable companion of a woman looking to reform her wayward nephew.

Open All Night

Therese Duverne (Viola Dana) is bored with her even-tempered husband, Edmond (Adolphe Menjou). Isabelle Fevre (Gale Henry) suggests that Edmond go to the bicycle races and stay out all night. Then she takes Therese there and introduces her to manly Petit Mathieu, one of the racers (Maurice B. Flynn). Since he has just quarreled with his sweetheart, Lea (Jetta Goudal), he is glad to have Therese's attention and offers to run away with her after he wins the six-day race. Lea, meanwhile, is spending her time with Edmond. Therese eventually decides she doesn't care for brutes like Mathieu, and Edmond gains a temper and wins his wife back. Lea and Mathieu are reunited, while Isabelle goes back to helping her own alcoholic sweetheart, Igor (Raymond Griffith), break into the movies.

The Heart Bandit

A kindly old woman named Mrs. Rand takes in wayward girl and petty crook Molly O'Hara, known as "Angel Face" to her gang. Mrs. Rand eventually gets Molly to see the error of her ways and she reforms. However, it her son John that has strayed from the straight and narrow and is part of a big money bunco. It's Molly's turn to help out the old woman, by reforming John as he falls in love with her.

Aladdin's Other Lamp

Aladdin's Other Lamp is a 1917 American silent fantasy-comedy film directed by John H. Collins.

The Willow Tree

After Ned Hamilton is rejected by his girlfriend, he travels to Japan where he hears an old legend about the Willow Tree Princess, who kills herself so that her lover will go off to battle. When he makes a purchase from Tomotada, an image maker, he meets his pretty daughter O-Riu, and they recreate the events of the legend.

Bred in Old Kentucky

Katie O'Doone is left a worthless, run-down estate and a thoroughbred race horse. She mortgages the property in order to get the money needed to enter her horse in the Derby. Dennis Reilly, a wealthy sportsman, also has a horse in the race and his jockey accidentally runs Reilly's horse into Kate's horse, causing her horse to lose. She swears vengeance on O'Reilly. She is forced to go to work for a crooked bookie, Jake Trumbull, and a crooked competitor of Reilly's,Tod Cuyler, who plan on switching a dead-ringer horse for Reilly's favored-to-win horse, and clean up betting against Reilly's horse.

Nursery Favorites

Nursery Favourites (1913) is an Edison Kinetophone short featuring performers miming to a pre-recorded nursery song, synchronized with a commercial phonograph record. It stands as an early example of Edison’s experiments with sound-film technology.

Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow

A series about the life, career and works of the movie comedy genius.