During the American Revolution, a young soldier carrying a crucial message to General Washington is spotted and pursued by a group of enemy soldiers. He takes refuge with a civilian family, but is soon detected. The family and their neighbors must then make plans to see that the important message...
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...
Jean and Marise, young lovers forced from their homes, flee to Paris. Irrevocably separated there, their lives deviate into the slums and hard labor of low-class French society. All the while, the two desperately search for one another.
When Prince Danilo falls in love with American dancer Sally O'Hara, his uncle, King Nikita I of Monteblanco, forbids him to marry her because Sally is a commoner. Thinking she has been jilted by her prince, Sally marries wealthy Baron Sadoja. When the elderly man dies suddenly, Sally must be wooed...
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...
A famous opera singer lost her voice when her son was born, and has drowned her sorrows in drink. When a murder is committed near her house, she invents a story in order to get herself back in front of the public again. However, the story she comes up with results in her son being arrested for the...
This is not a Clara Bow vehicle, and yet it is clearly the aspect/asset of Clara Bow which elevates a fairly serious melodrama to a timeless and profound social statement. Opening the film on death row where the handsome youth awaits the chair, a stirring test of the legal system evolves after two...
This early Chaplin film has him playing a character quite different from the Tramp for which he would become famous. He is a rich, upper-class gentleman whose romance is endangered when his girlfriend oversees him being embraced by a maid. Chaplin's romantic interest in this film, Minta Durfee, was...
Mr. and Mrs. Hilton throw a New Year's Eve party. They agree not to drink the punch themselves, but as guests begin to arrive their resolve weakens, and soon they are both cavorting drunkenly. Next morning Mr. Hilton, feeling very sick, is conscience-stricken over his drunkenness and his behavior...
George Peabody is a young man who has been giving free rein to his inclinations, the principal one being drink. One might have concluded he was lost, but there was the chance which the hand of Providence always bestows in the person of pretty little Ruth King, who had secretly loved George since...
A small-town drama group's rehearsal is interrupted when one of their members receives a letter telling him his English relative is arriving for a visit. The Englishman turns out to be stuffy and humorless, and is the butt of several pranks. The drama group dresses as Indians and threatens him, but...
This might be termed a comedy of errors, for the overzealousness of a lot of good-hearted simple folks places them in a rather embarrassing position. Lillie Green, who keeps a boarding house, receives a letter from her old school chum, Polly Brown, whom sin hasn't seen in years, to the effect that...
Virginia Perry, a former movie star, leaves her family and returns to Hollywood to make a comeback, but age has taken its toll and she is cast in small character roles. Meanwhile, her daughter, Betty Ann, has won a beauty contest, and heads for Hollywood. They end up in the same, film, with Mom...
I.M. Mann, millionaire president of a large corporation, is known as "the man with the iron heart." James Boyd, cashier for Mann's corporation, is delayed one morning because of a dying mother, and is discharged. Then Boyd goes to Union headquarters with his story. The thousands of workmen employed...
A hard-working prospector enters the town of Bakeoven to stake his claim, only to have his rights stolen and his face on "Wanted" posters. He plans reprisal.
An old woman's memories are rekindled as she rereads her diary. She recalls her youth in England when she married a suitor over the objections of her parents and moved with him to the Wyoming frontier. They live a hardscrabble life there and suffered deprivation, hunger, Indian attacks, and the...
An experiment goes wrong and blinds a newly married chemist. The chemist's wife does not want to take on the burden of caring for the blind chemist, and her younger sister take her place.
