The Beast of the City

After graduating from a fashionable finishing school and touring Europe with her father, Selina Peake returns to the United States, where her father is accidentally killed after losing his fortune in a gambling den. Selina is reduced to teaching in a high school in the Dutch community at High Prarie near Chicago. She boards in the farmhouse of Klass Poole, a dull-witted market gardener, and finally marries Pervus DeJong, a poor and backward farmer. She shares the drudgery of her husband's futile life and finds happiness only in their small son, Dirk, whom she calls "So-Big."

Kathleen, the daughter of a poor tenant farmer, dreams of her wedding with her beloved Terrence. The dream is interrupted when the Squire of the estate takes an interest in Kathleen and forces her father to allow him to marry her to forgive the father's debt.

Laline, a pretty young woman, falls in love with Dion, a young sculptor, but her mother wants her to marry a wealthy Englishman. Laline and Dion are visiting the gravesite of Laline's brother with a priest, and a cave-in traps the three in some long-abandoned underground barracks.

This first cinematic version of the classic book is a part-talkie, although the only surviving print is silent (housed in the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY). It is a straight-forward telling of the intermingled lives of a group of strangers doomed to die in a collapsing bridge accident. The Art Direction, paltry and unremarkable, surprisingly won an Oscar over the far more remarkable work nominated in THE IRON MASK. The special effect scene of the lovers plummeting with the bridge into the chasm is unforgettable and remarkably done.

Silent drama with two different New York stories. One tells of a good man led astray until a dream causes him to change his ways. The other is about a man whose despair over his love marrying another is lifted through increasingly unlikely events.

"Mismates" is the story of a wealthy youth who, against his mother's wishes, marries a poor girl and is disowned. At first determined to support himself and his wife, he soon craves the accustomed luxury and deserts his wife and child. On false information provided by the boy's mother and substantiated by himself the wife is sent to jail and the child kidnapped by the husband. This is where the drama kicks in.

Bryce Cardigan struggles to protect his Redwood inheritance from a railroad-owner, who is also the guardian of the woman Bryce loves.

An honest, talented and well respected attorney defeats a corrupt incumbent U.S. Senator. After a very good start he has to face the subtle temptations and innocent looking traps of Washington.

On a yacht sailing from Shanghai to the United States, the sailors, led by the megalomaniac steward, revolt and take control.

After a brief view of Edgar Allan Poe's family background, his grandfather, David Poe, Sr., an Irish immigrant to America, and his father, David Poe, Jr., the poet's life is depicted from the death of his mother and his subsequent adoption by John Allan, to his own tortured death in 1849. Expelled from the University of Virginia for incurring too many debts, Poe nonetheless courts and marries Virginia Clemm but is disowned by his foster father. While residing in Fordham, New York, Poe tries to earn a living as a writer but meets with little financial success. Overwhelmed by their impoverished state, Virginia dies and Poe sinks into a profound depression. Always a victim of alcohol and subject to hallucinations, Poe first imagines that his neighbor, Helen Whitman, is Virginia, then plunges himself into an elaborate delusion in which his wife's spirit, various other spectres and a raven finally drive him to his own death.

Here with the Edison Company -- most notably Charles Ogle as the usurer -- we see a 'typical' case of the victims of usury. Although offered as a 'realistic' view of the effects of usury, it veers frequently into melodrama.

A postulant falls in love with a flamboyant singer from a cafe next door to her convent.

The villainous Dr. Fu Manchu races against a team of Englishmen to find the tomb of Ghengis Khan, because he wants to use the relics to cause an uprising in the East to wipe out the white race.

A horse with great potential is reluctantly sold by the breeder and by chance passes through multiple hands who do not treat him well.

Elam "Burning Daylight" Harnish is a prospector who makes a million dollars in the Dawson, Alaska gold rush and loses the million dollars in Dawson. He journeys to San Francisco, makes three million dollars and loses it in San Francisco. He returns to Alaska and eventually finds his treasure.

In this brutal prison drama a hen-pecked husband is sentenced to prison after getting caught with his hand in the company till. He is sent to a high-rise facility in LA. It seems the fellow was only following the instructions of his domineering, constantly nagging wife who, as soon as he is put away, takes up with a more successful businessman. This causes her new lover's ex-lover to get insanely jealous and kill the conniving wife.