Anthony O'Sullivan

Two gang members send a threatening letter to a butcher, demanding money if he did not want his shop to be destroyed and his daughter Maria kidnapped. When he is unable to meet their request, they take Maria away. The Black Hand is the earliest surviving gangster film.

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.

This one-reeler has been regarded as a classic example of a Griffith thriller. It engages with the Chinese White slave traffic from the perspective of a female detective, played by Marion Leonard, whose assignment is to expose and break the traffic ring. A fragment is widely available.

A mountain girl is seduced by a traveler from the valley. Her brother tracks the seducer down and kills him. In retaliation, the sheriff captures the brother and prepares to lynch him. Mother intervenes and, to save her son the disgrace of hanging, shoots him.

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.

Nellie flees her old life and goes east to become a nurse, where she marries a doctor. One of her old colleagues finds her and tries to blackmail her. When the blackmail plot is exposed, Nellie's husband expresses his complete faith in her.

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.

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

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.

All the young men in the mining camp flirt with Lucy. Bud, the youngest of them, doesn't stand a chance. At a dance, Bud dresses as a woman and all the men flirt with him and abandon Lucy. When his disguise is revealed, the other men are too embarrassed to approach Lucy, and Bud dances the rest of the night with her.

A young secretary is locked in an airtight vault by a robber. Only her boss knows the combination, and he is off on a journey. Can the boss's son locate his absent-minded father before it is too late for the girl?

A son leaves to seek his fortune in the city. Many years later he returns and checks into his parents' inn. They don't recognize him, but noticing his fat wallet, plan to rob him.

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.

William Thompson and John Smith occupied offices in the same New York skyscraper, and both being seized with an irrepressible desire to cut loose and paint things crimson, arranged it as follows in this Biograph picture. Thompson sent a message to his wife that his friend Smith was ill, and it was his duty to perform that spiritual work of mercy, "comfort the afflicted," hence he would not have her wait up for him as he might be late. Smith did likewise, using Thompson as the object of his humane consideration. This done, they start off to make a night of it. First they visit the gilded throne room of a temple of Bacchus, where they moisten their parched spirits with dry Martinis. They are soon in a most glorious condition. Smith suggests the show where "Amateur Night" is on. - Written by Moving Picture World synopsis

Mack Sennett appears as a man in the bar in this film produced by the Biograph Company.

Mack Sennett appears as a man in a bar in this film produced by the Biograph Company.

Mack Sennett appears as a policeman and waiter in this film produced by the Biograph Company.

The widowed elderly mother of three adult children, two sons and a daughter, wishing to relieve herself of the burden of care of her property, decides to divide it up among her children. To her son Charles, a wild but kind young fellow, she leaves a small amount, feeling that he will soon run through it. The good-hearted boy is perfectly satisfied, believing in the wisdom of his mother's actions. He assumes she will find a home with one of his siblings, who are married and settled. The old woman moves in with her married son, but is driven out by his wife over an argument about her young granddaughter. She is forced to move into a squalid apartment in a cheap tenement house, but is evicted for failing to pay her rent. Mack Sennett appears as a bartender in this film.

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.

Mack Sennett appears in this film produced by the Biograph Company.

Mack Sennett appears as a policeman in this film produced by the Biograph Company.

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 their childhood days. She succeeds in persuading him from his reckless life, and he determines to cut off from his old loose companions by going out West and making a man of himself. Bidding Ruth and her mother good-bye, he realizes that he loves his little preserver and promises to return worthy of her love and confidence. They plight their troth with their first kiss and a heart shaped locket, which Ruth wears, she breaking it in two, giving George one side while she retains the other, which symbolized the reunion of their hearts with his return.

An Indian comforts a dying prospector in his last moments. In exchange, the prospector tells him the location of his gold claim. A group of cowboys tries to get the information and go as far as kidnapping the Indian's wife.

A confirmed bachelor learns that he will inherit his late uncle's fortune only if he marries, which he does reluctantly. Shortly afterward he returns to his bachelor lifestyle but realizes he can't get his wife's face out of his thoughts.

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 wealthy, callous moneylender finds a terrifying way to learn about money's limitations.

With the family of Mr. Phlipp there is employed that wrecker of domestic serenity, a pretty French maid, whose trim figure and cherry lips are simply irresistible. This is all very fine for Phlipp, who is wont to bask in the radiance of her smiles and to sip the honey from her rose-leaved lips. But, alas! his bliss is short-lived, for, the perspicacious Mrs. Phlipp grows suspicious and surprises the erring couple in an osculatory diversion. The meretricious maiden is put to right, and the sinful Phlipp is assailed with most vociferous vituperative verbosity.

A poorly compensated bank clerk is, we may say, to that trying position of "Tantalus" in sight of tons of money but not a dollar of his own. This became more torturing as time went on, until at last, when the bank was arranging to ship a large quantity of cash to the West to relieve the recent money stringency, he made up his mind to heed the solicitude of that specter which had haunted him. Listening to the instructions given to the bank's messenger as to the shipment of the funds, he hustles off to a gang of crooks in whose company he had fallen.

A prospector in the Gold Rush days of ‘49 strikes pay dirt after a long struggle. He stakes the claim and stays to guard it while his wife and ten-year-old son hurry off to the claim office to register it. Two scoundrels observe the action, and go in pursuit. Arriving after the wife and her son, they trick her into leaving the queue waiting for the agent to arrive. A woman who pretends to faint is the accomplice who leads the wife to a cabin. The scoundrels lock the wife in, but she ties her son to a rope and lowers him out the window to bring help. She is rescued and manages to register their claim in the last moment.

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.

Hulda is a maiden fair to look upon. Her artless rustic simplicity, rivaling Hebe's gorgeous radiance, phlogisticates the susceptible hearts of the village swains. But alas, Hulda was a fickle maid, and seemed to have as many phases as the moon, with a smile for all and a frown for none. Her capriciousness was the cause of much unrest, both for herself and her lovers, for when her parents had departed for a visit, leaving her in charge of the kitchen, she received most effusively Jocular Jake, the village cut-up, only to hide him above stairs at the entrance of Previous-Hearted Pat, the hostler, who in turn is hidden in the Dutch oven at the approach of Handy Hank, the chore boy.

Ramona, residing on her wealthy Spanish adoptive mother's rancho in California, falls in love with the Indian Alessandro. When Ramona is denied permission to marry Alessandro, the lovers elope, only to find a life of great hardship and unhappiness amidst the greed and injustice of the white landowners.

Tom and Ethel separately decide to go bathing in a river. Pranksters switch their clothes and they each have to dress up as the opposite sex.

A young man with a beer budget learns a hard lesson when he takes out a young lady with champagne tastes.

Two eccentric Frenchmen argue for the hand of an eligible American girl, who finally discouraged both of them by introducing her betrothed.

Poor Hiram didn't anticipate the trouble laid out for him when he and his wife went for a stroll in the park.

A girl is being shipped off to Europe with her aunt to break up her romance. Her suitor dresses himself as the aunt and manages to fool everyone long enough for them to elope.

House painter Jim Brooks thinks his wife is cheating on him with his best friend John West. The intrigue is in fact a birthday surprise.

A shoe-factory worker puts a note in a shoe box offering to marry the lucky buyer. As a result, she is dismissed from her job, but her employer finds her so attractive that he suggests a new job for her, as his wife.

Mr. Jones jumps to the wrong conclusions when he sees a bouquet of flowers and a man's hat in the parlor.

Out-of-work, Tim steals a sandwich, then knocks out the policeman who chases him. He changes into the policeman's uniform, and is approached by a wife who needs help with her drunken husband.

A disfigured violinist mistakes a token of appreciation for a love bouquet. When he realizes his mistake, he loses his mind.

A woman is scarred in an accident and refuses to stand in the way of her lover's marriage to another.

Mrs. Kendrick borrows a jeweled necklace from a friend for an important social event. The necklace is stolen, and Mr. Kendrick goes into debt to replace it. The thief discovers it's costume jewelry, but the Kendricks never learns the truth; Husband and wife struggle for years to pay off the huge debt.

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.

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.

A dance hall girl is converted to a religious life by a phony evangelist. But can he, himself, be saved?

Papa is proud of his new birthday present, a shotgun. Mary's boyfriend arrives for a visit and she is anxious to introduce him to Papa. When Harry sees Papa walk in with a shotgun he misunderstands and departs in terror. Harry continues to encounter Papa everywhere and runs away, baffling the old man. At last Papa hauls Harry back home for an explanation and a reunion with Mary.

A 1911 short starring Marion Leonard and James Kirkwood. It is believed to be a lost fim.

The evils of drink cause a man to separate from his family. In time he becomes sober and prosperous. Then he meets and falls in love with a young woman, and they become engaged. Unbeknownst to him this young woman is his own daughter.

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 with another woman. He fears to face his wife until he discovers that she feels just as guilty herself.

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 a saloon in a Mexican border town, a group of cowboys, including a Mexican named Pedro, play poker. One man is discovered cheating, and is shot dead by Pedro, who is wounded as he attempts to escape. Pedro is followed home by the local sheriff, who proves the next victim of Pedro's quick temper and pistol. Pedro's wife, Juanita, is thrown into jail, but he manages to break her out. They head for the border, unaware that a posse is waiting for them.

Two sisters want to know whether there is romance in their future. One sister pulls the petals off of a flower, while the other has her fortune told by a gypsy. When the gypsy tells the fortune so as to serve his own purposes, complications soon develop.

The Goddess, the prettiest and best-natured girl that ever graced that little mining town, meets the tenderfoot prospector and leaves him another worshiper of her. His chances, however, are slim for Blue-grass Pete has won her affections, he having at an opportune moment saved her from the fangs of a snake which was about to attack her. Pete's affections turn to the Goddess's sister, while Pete's friends plot to rob.

The children of a household attempt to capture Santa, but they catch something else entirely.

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 as Lillie has never seen her little darling daughter, she will send her for a few days' visit, asking that someone meet the child at the 3:40 train. Lillie's boarders are a bunch of kind-hearted bachelors, who at once prepare to give the "Little Darling" the time of her life, buying a load of toys, etc., for her amusement, also procuring a baby carriage with which to meet her at the train. You may imagine their embarrassment when they find that Tootsie, instead of being a baby, proves to be a handsome young lady of seventeen, whose tastes run rather to garden gates, shady lanes and quiet nooks, than toys. (Moving Picture World)

"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.

Chaos reigns in Louise Fazenda's kitchen as the cat stalks and consumes the bird in the cuckoo clock and the baby paints its face with jam. In her next job in a restaurant kitchen, Louise scrambles up her powder puff and her biscuits. The cook orders her to lighten them up. She blows them up like balloons, but they come out like rubber balls and so she is bounced out of that job. In her next position as housekeeper to a rich family, she throws a party for her friends when the family goes on vacation and they turn the house topsy-turvy.

One of the members of a suicide club learns he has inherited some money, but only after he drew the fatal lot and is expected to kill himself. Presumed to be a lost film.

Under police espionage, Crooked Joe is living with his wife and baby when Norris, his former pal, tries to interest him in a job. He refuses, and subsequently earns his old pal's animosity when Norris makes advances to his wife. Norris "frames" Joe, and he is sent to prison on a charge of robbing his employers.

A man leaves his wife and two daughters for work in a carpentry shop. At work, he initially refuses a beer with lunch, then gives in. After work, two friends take a little while to convince him to go for a refreshing malt beverage, then to have another and another....

Two spinsters on their way to church, are accosted by a couple of burly tramps. When Mabel is called to the church meeting with her mother, she sends Muggsy a note asking him to meet her after the service so he may walk home with her. Muggsy is there on time, however, the old ladies are afraid to make the return trip unaccompanied. The pastor asks that a man escort them home. Poor Muggsy gets chosen, and when the trio reach the deserted part of the road, the tramps again appear.

An old colonel is proud as a peacock: his son leads a group of volunteers in the American Civil War. Untill one day his son returns home as a deserter.