Author Archive: Retro

Frederick Ward is accused of cattle theft and sent to Cockatoo island for seven years. After he escapes he finds that his fiancée has died of grief. For revenge he undertakes a life of crime.

Portrays two teenage girls who are safeguarding money for their father and their reaction to a burglar’s attempt to steal it.

In this beautifully colored picture we see a dancing master in his studio playing the violin and giving instructions to a number of beautiful maidens. They go through a minuet, and suddenly their costumes change before our very eyes, seemingly without the aid of human hands. A fellow enters, and is very much interested in the dancing lesson, but casts a spell over the group, and instantly we see them disappear into space. The visitor is then transformed into Mephistopheles and takes the dancing teacher into a large laboratory, where stands a large caldron and into which he pours some sort of fluid from a number of bottles. Stirring up the mixture, flames soon begin to shoot out, and with them a long piece of marvelously colored silk. When the cloth is shaken out a beautiful girl in flowing silk robes steps forth and dances the serpentine. As she trips around, other girls appear, and [...]

Billy West moves briskly from one comic scene to another, cheerfully failing at each endeavor, in this rare comedy short. Will he wind up with the pretty young woman he rescues and then turns up with a pram while he’s fishing

Little Nora is called the madcap of the village. She was not vicious, but merely mischievous, with her heart in the right place. Her madcap nature is not to be wondered at, as she was allowed to run wild, her mother being dead and her father a laborer. The school commissioners write to her father insisting that she be sent to school, and she would have been happy there if the scholars had not made her the butt of ridicule. This she strenuously resents and in her unhappy, lonesome condition, she listens to the flattery of a traveling street fakir, who would have succeeded in taking her away with him had not the school teacher, who saw in her a diamond in the rough, prevented it.

A well-dressed woman leaves her home and takes a carriage to a department store. While she is in the store, she steals several items, and is caught by store employees. Meanwhile, a poor woman with two small children steals a loaf of bread out of desperation, and she is quickly caught and arrested. Both women are taken to the police station and then into court, to see what penalty each of them must face.