The Big Idea

The Misleading Widow is a 1919 silent film comedy starring Billie Burke as Betty Taradine. It was based on the 1917 stage play Billeted by F. Tennyson Jesse and H.M. Harwood. The film was produced by Famous Players-Lasky and distributed through Paramount Pictures. It appears to be a lost film.

A tramp cares for a boy after he's abandoned as a newborn by his mother. Later the mother has a change of heart and aches to be reunited with her son.

Aspiring filmmakers Mel Funn, Marty Eggs and Dom Bell go to a financially troubled studio with an idea for a silent movie. In an effort to make the movie more marketable, they attempt to recruit a number of big name stars to appear, while the studio's creditors attempt to thwart them.

When Gregoire and Lola go on a beach holiday to the idyllic Skagen, they don't know yet that the trip will be the end of their marriage. Gregoire may be wealthy, but he is many years older and several pounds heavier than his young wife, whose beauty makes all the male holiday guests turn their necks. Baron Plessen falls in love with Lola, and she quickly becomes fond of the idea of replacing her corpulent husband with a handsome nobleman. Together, they plan to push Gregoire out of the picture. The preserved material is a fragment.

Two old tars, retired from service, live alone in a cottage by the sea. They sail along on an even keel, until a buxom and comely widow projects herself on the scene when one old tar breaks one of their unwritten laws and falls in love with her. The other old fellow objects strenuously.

When her grandson is kidnapped during the Tour de France, Madame Souza and her beloved pooch Bruno team up with the Belleville Sisters—an aged song-and-dance team from the days of Fred Astaire—to rescue him.

A film projectionist longs to be a detective, and puts his meagre skills to work when he is framed by a rival for stealing his girlfriend's father's pocketwatch.

During America’s Civil War, Union spies steal engineer Johnny Gray's beloved locomotive, 'The General'—with Johnnie's lady love aboard an attached boxcar—and he single-handedly must do all in his power to both get The General back and to rescue Annabelle.

A gold prospector in Alaska struggles to survive the elements and win the heart of a dance hall girl.

After amusements working in a restaurant, a waiter uses his lunch break to go roller skating.

A pawnbroker's assistant deals with his grumpy boss, his annoying co-worker and some eccentric customers as he flirts with the pawnbroker's daughter, until a perfidious crook with bad intentions arrives at the pawnshop.

The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.

A tramp falls in love with a beautiful blind flower girl. His on-and-off friendship with a wealthy man allows him to be the girl's benefactor and suitor.

A young man gets engaged to a business competitor's daughter.

A bumbling tramp desires to build a home with a young woman, yet is thwarted time and time again by his lack of experience and habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time..

Using every known means of transportation, several savants from the Geographic Society undertake a journey through the Alps to the Sun which finishes under the sea.

Speedy loses his job as a soda jerk, then spends the day with his girl at Coney Island. He then becomes a cab driver and delivers Babe Ruth to Yankee Stadium, where he stays to see the game. When the railroad tries to run the last horse-drawn trolley (operated by his girl's grandfather) out of business, Speedy organizes the neighborhood old-timers to thwart their scheme.

Mr. Snookie steals an umbrella and then, while trying to help a woman to cross a puddle, the Tramp appears and intervenes.

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 the wife of fellow Keystone actor, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.

Pierre and Jacques are working as waiters at a restaurant where the cooks go on strike. When the two are forced to work as bakers, the striking cooks put dynamite in the dough, with explosive results.