Author Archive: Retro

The orphan Dora is courted by two different gold miners.

A young girl who lives by the sea with her parents, is the object of one fellows affection. One day she meets a wily artist painting on the beach, he seduces the young girl and gives her a ring, with the promise of marriage. When the young admiring fellow comes to propose, she proudly announces her engagement to the artist. Shocked he leaves and her parents demand meeting her husband to be. She goes to bring him home, and finds he already has a sophisticated fiancée. Distraught she hurries home, and when her father realizes what she has done, he orders her out of the house. As she wanders despondent along the sea, the young fellow who has found out about her betrayal,immediately goes to see her. Finding she has been disowned by her father, he goes looking for her and sees her body floating in the sea. He now carries her lifeless body back [...]

Pippa awakes and faces the world outside with a song. Unknown to her, the music has a healing effect on all who hear her as she passes by.

At a political club, the members debate whose bust will replace that of Theodore Roosevelt. Unable to agree, each goes to a sculptor’s studio and bribes him to sculpt a bust of the individual favorite. Instead, the sculptor spends their fees on a dinner with his model during which he becomes so inebriated that he is taken to jail. There he has a nightmare, wherein three busts are created and animated from clay (through stop-motion photography) in the likenesses of Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republicans Charles W. Fairbanks and William Howard Taft. Finally an animated bust of Roosevelt appears.

The station at Lonedale is in charge of an old operator and his daughter. The young engineer who makes the run between Lonedale and civilization is the sweetheart of the operator’s daughter, and upon receiving his call on this particular day he escorts her to the station, where, finding her father suffering from a nervous headache, she takes his place at the key after bidding adieu to her engineer sweetheart as he mounts into the cabin of his engine and rolls away. As her father leaves he discovers that his revolver is out of order and takes it with him to fix it. The old operator has forgotten, however, that this is the first of the month, on which a large sum of money is expressed to the station from the city office of the Lonedale Mining Company for the payroll. The train pulls in and she receives the express bag of money. Two tramps [...]

Free adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s powerful novel. The subject opens with the return home of Prince Dimitri, who meets the maid Katusha, a little peasant girl, and is instantly charmed with her beauty. Young, artless and innocent, as pretty as a rose, she unwittingly fascinates the prince. His noble bearing likewise impresses her, and his little attentions flatter her, until at length she is unable to resist his advances. The poor girl is meted the usual fate. An alliance is out of the question. The disparity of their ranks even forbids it, and soon the prince must cast her aside. Five years later we find that the girl, who is now a loathsome sight, has learned the bitter lesson of the eternal truth, “The wages of sin is death.” It is death to the soul at all events. She has gone down to the lowest depths and is arrested in a low Russian tavern. As [...]

A young woman who is engaged to a millionaire she doesn’t love meets and falls in love with a rough sailor.

A thug accosts a girl as she leaves her workplace but a man rescues her. The thug vows revenge and, with the help of two friends, attacks the girl and her rescuer again as they’re going for a walk. This time they succeed in kidnapping the rescuer. The girl runs home and gets help from several neighbors. They track the ruffians down to a cabin in the mountains where the gang has trapped their victim and set the cabin on fire.

A king exacts vengeance upon his faithless mistress and her lover.