Concentration

A crime drama in which a police officer does everything possible to help his criminal younger brother.

On a whim, a greedy tycoon decides to corner the world market in wheat. This doubles the price of bread, forcing grain producers into charity lines and others further into poverty. The film contrasts the differences between the lives of those who work to grow the wheat and the life of the man who dabbles in its sale for profit.

Two lovers elope and expect to be pursued by her father. But the clever father has tricked them into running off, and celebrates their wedding when they return home.

In China, before leaving for America, Charlie Lee promises that he will never dishonour his family by cutting his pigtail. Later, as a laundryman in a California mining town, Charlie is tormented by local men but is finally befriended by a young woman and her cowboy sweetheart. One of Charlie’s tormentors is a well-dressed idler and, secretly, a bandit who robs the mail. The cowboy and the bandit become rivals for the girl’s affections. Suspicious of the bandit, Charlie follows him, observes him robbing a mail-carrier, and contrives to capture him, cutting off his pigtail to bind the bandit. Rewarded for the bandit’s capture, but disgraced in his own eyes for dishonouring his family, Charlie gives the cash reward to the young couple and surreptitiously leaves Golden Gulch.

"He was a regular boy and his father a switchman. The boy determined to be like his dad and spent his play hours around the switch-tower. Thus at the crucial moment he was able to save his father's honor as a switchman, when the struggle between love and duty came and later to come to the aid of his parents in the hands of the desperate counterfeiters, eventually causing their capture." —Moving Picture World synopsis.

Had the poor melancholy Dane, Hamlet, lived in this, the twentieth century, he would never have given voice to the remark, "Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew!" No indeed! He would have procured some of the mysterious fluid compounded by an erudite scientist by which things animate and inanimate were rendered non est, for ten minutes at least, by simply spraying them with it. In an atomizer, he sends a quantity, accompanied by a letter, to his brother. In the hope of his putting it on the market. The brother regards it as a joke, and, while toying with the atomizer, accidentally sprays himself. Presto! he is gone, to the amazement of the messenger boy who has carried the package thither. The boy reads the letter, and at once sees the amount of fun he can get out of it, so he nips it.

Nekhludoff, a Russian nobleman serving on a jury, discovers that the young girl on trial, Katusha, is someone he once seduced and abandoned and that he himself bears responsibility for reducing her to crime. He sets out to redeem her and himself in the process.

A young maiden is seduced by a charming traveling peddler who persuades her to steal from her host family in order to repay his gambling debts.

A contest is being held in Cremona for the best violin, with Giannina's hand in marriage as the prize. Filippo is secretly in love with her, but is also ashamed of being a cripple, so he switches his superior violin with that of another apprentice, Sandro, whom Giannina loves.

Two miners are fighting over a woman, and one is about to murder the other in his sleep. At the critical moment, the woman introduces her fiancé from the city.

Mary Rollins is torn between selfish depravity and righteous living. After she's coerced into helping with the burglary of her minister's apartment, she comes face to face with her misdeeds.

Soon after their engagement, Bill goes to sea, and Emily vows to stay true until his return. Unknown to her, Bill marries another woman from a different port. Emily waits faithfully for six years, finally becoming dangerously ill. When Bill suddenly appears in town with his family, Joe, who has loved Emily all along, forces Bill to make Emily's final moments happy by pretending he has returned to marry her.

Henry and Marion have a lover's quarrel and part in anger. They do not reconcile, and ten years pass without contact. Marion becomes a society girl and spends her time at parties with her friends. Henry has become very ill and wishes to see Marion one more time. He writes asking her to visit. When she recieves the note, she laughs and tosses it on the floor, but, later, on a whim, decides to take all her drunken friends with her to visit him. When they arrive, Marion finds Henry dead, clutching her portrait in his hand. She sends her friends away and falls to her knees in remorse. Mary Pickford's debut!

A pack of admirers won't leave a beautiful woman alone at a seaside resort, so she devises a plan. She appears in a leg-revealing swimsuit, but the stockings have been stuffed with cotton to make her limbs appear misshapen. All but one of the men is driven off, and regret it when she removes the misleading leggings.

A disfigured young woman with two beautiful sisters is courted by a blind man. Will he still love her when his sight is restored?

A new bride has made a batch of biscuits. Her husband pretends to like them, so she delivers the rest to his office. But one bite of these biscuits makes you violently ill, and soon all his visitors (he runs a theatrical booking agency), plus the workmen at home, are ill; when she shows up at the office, they all go after her.