The Straight Way

Belle Bennett plays as the widowed mother of seven children living in Sioux City, Iowa. She moves with them to Cambridge, Massachusetts in order to educate her children with culture and give them every advantage. Bennett, who is unversed in financial matters, soon faces poverty for herself and her children. She takes out a loan from an unscrupulous lender (played by Richard Tucker), who is so impressed by the charm and valiant spirit of Bennett than he neglects to ask her for collateral. Bennett, however, is only able to partially pay her creditors. Marion Nixon, Bennett's eldest daughter, is shocked by her mother's actions and attempts to sacrifice herself to Tucker in order to clear her mother's obligations, even though she is engaged to marry a well to do Harvard undergraduate, played by Rex Bell. This film is believed lost.

Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner now living on Long Island, finds himself fascinated by the mysterious past and lavish lifestyle of his neighbor, the nouveau riche Jay Gatsby. He is drawn into Gatsby's circle, becoming a witness to obsession and tragedy.

Singed Wings 1922

In the mountains of West Virginia, Alderson Cree is mortally wounded in an ambush by Kip Ryerson, after Kip's wife, Martha, seeks refuge at the Crees's home for herself and her stepdaughter, Eileen. Cree makes his young son, David, promise to avenge his death once he has grown into manhood. As David Cree runs for help, Alderson recants and instructs Martha Ryerson to release his son from his promise. However, to eliminate her brutal spouse, Martha Ryerson remains silent, and George Hedrick, the local storekeeper, leads a crowd to drive Kip out of town. Hedrick later announces Kip's death, relieving David of his obligation to his father. Years pass, and David, now an adult, is engaged to Mary Reddin. When Kip Ryerson returns to town, David's mother demands that he keep his promise to avenge his father.

Calvert's Valley

Henry Potter is the irresponsible playboy son of a New York millionaire. Fearing he will disgrace the family name if he stays in New York, the father sends him to San Francisco to work in the family shipyards and, to make a man out of him, he is told he will have to start at the bottom and work his way up. Henry decides this is not a good idea and resents it to the point he will indeed start at the bottom but will work his way down from there, and disgrace the family name in San Francisco.

A bee keeper does his best to help the army.

Silent film directed by Irvin Willat

Toyama wants to go to college in America but his alcoholic father won't supply the funds. He gets the money to go, however, from Sada, whom he has married in secret. But Sada has a secret of her own -- she told Toyama that she got the money from a relative, but the truth is that she has signed up to do a four-year stint as a Geisha girl.

In this lost film, Theda Bara took the role of spoiled, deceiving nymphomaniac "vixen" Elsie Drummond. She wooed Wall Street businessman Martin Stevens (A. H. Van Buren) away from his interest in her sweet sister Helen (Mary G. Martin). She continued to seek after rich men, eventually marrying young statesman Knowles Murray (Herbert Heyes) (again stolen from Helen) - but still willing to be unfaithful with Stevens who had since regained his fortune. (filmsite.org)

Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa was one of the most popular leading men in American silent films-this despite the fact that orientals were traditionally (and stereotypically) cast as villains at the time. In The Bravest Way, Hayakawa carries self-sacrifice to the nth degree. He is so devoted-in a perfectly platonic manner-to the widow of his best friend (Tsuri Aoki) that he loses the love of his American fiancee (Florence Vidor). Lost film.

"Damaged Goods" pictures the terrible consequences of vice and the physical ruin that follows the abuse of moral law. It is a stirring plea for a pure life before marriage, in order to make impossible the transmission of hereditary traits to future generations. This film is presumed lost.

No one suffered more magnificently in the early-talkie era than the inimitable Helen Twelvetrees. In Grand Parade, the actress is cast as Molly, the sweetheart of minstrel-show performer Jack Kelly. Rising to the top of his profession, Kelly plummets to the bottom thanks to his fondness for intoxicating beverages. Molly nurses and coddles Kelly back to health, giving nary a thought for her own comfort or happiness.

A convicted murderer has been sentenced to death in the electric chair. He decides to spill the name of the man who hired him, but just before he does he's killed by a poison dart. A police detective and a pretty young newspaper reporter team up to find out the identity of the man behind the killings.

A murderous gang of mysterious creepy killers mark a young heiress for death. They are led by a ghostly voice known only as the "The Mystery Mind."

A young South Seas native boy is sent to the U.S. for his education. He returns to his island after his father dies to try to stop a revolution.

A super-model begins to question her glitzy, frenetic lifestyle when she awakes after a all night party to find a strange man in her bed. She sees a surfer riding the waves below, follows him to his tented camp on the banks of a river. 'Leatherlip' earns a living making leather goods and roaming around on an extraordinary 'trike' with his worldly goods and surfboard strapped on an overhead rack. They fall in love and she abandons her previous life. Then inexplicably she disappears. Leatherlip sets off on a cross-country odyssey to find her, knowing only that her father lives on a boat on the West Coast...

Somehow Good

When Dorothy's Southern, aristocratic father Colonel Raleigh refuses to let her marry Forbes Stewart, a Northern gambler, the couple elopes. When Dorothy soon thereafter becomes pregnant, Forbes vows to reform, but authorities arrest him on a gambling charge, and he serves a year in prison. During that time, and just before the birth of the baby, a woman comes to Dorothy and claims to be Forbes' wife. Stunned, Dorothy returns to her father, but the colonel throws her out, and so, on her own, she has her baby, whom the community believes to be illegitimate. Convinced that she has sinned, Dorothy is about to kill herself when Forbes, just out of jail, finds her and explains that the other woman simply had been an ex-sweetheart trying to win him back.

Evelyn Dare is a butterfly of fashion. David Westebrooke, her fiancé, is an altruist interested in sociology. He has made his home in the factory town of Oreville, where he works as factory manager. He takes her to their home in the factory town and there orders his housekeeper to take away her useless clothes and to supply those befitting the wife of a factory manager. Trouble lies ahead.....