Acting
Runaway Girls is a lost 1928 silent film drama directed by Mark Sandrich and starring Shirley Mason and Hedda Hopper. It was produced by Harry Cohn and distributed by his Columbia Pictures, then a fledgling studio.
In her sixteenth year, Wing Toy learns how as an infant she was brought to Wong, a Chinese laundryman, by a former convict known as The Mole and that her father was Chinese and her mother American. Later, to give her a better home, Wong pledged her in marriage to Yen Low, a powerful and unscrupulous underworld figure, when she would come of age. Yen Low plans to divorce his American wife, White Lily, and marry Wing Toy. The intervention of reporter Bob Harris leads to the release of Wing Toy; Yen Low is killed by White Lily; and Wing Toy's engagement to the reporter becomes possible when it is revealed that she is the daughter of the district attorney.
Now hear this. The studio that gave the cinema its voice offered 1929 audiences a chance to see and hear multiple silent-screen favorites for the first time in a gaudy, grandiose music-comedy-novelty revue that also included Talkie stars, Broadway luminaries and of course, Rin-Tin-Tin. Frank Fay hosts a jamboree that, among its 70+ stars, features bicyclers, boxing champ Georges Carpentier, chorines in terpsichore kickery, sister acts, Myrna Loy in two-strip Technicolor as an exotic Far East beauty, John Barrymore in a Shakespearean soliloquy (adding an on-screen voice to his legendary profile for the first time) and Winnie Lightner famously warbling the joys of Singing in the Bathtub. Watch, rinse, repeat!
George Thorne is a young army lieutenant at a border post. He is in love with Mercedes Castanada who, in the lawless life about the fort, is always in danger of falling into the hands of Snake Landree's bandit gang that is the terror of the region. Into the life of the post comes Dick Gale, a man from the East who is soon engaged in a battle for the heart of the girl, whom he has quickly come to love. He aids her in a battle with the desperados. They escape onto the desert and are lost in a sandstorm. They are rescued by the lieutenant, whom, the young woman confesses to the other man, she loves. The Easterner accepts his defeat in the struggle for her affections. According to silentera.com the film survives while Arne Andersen Lost Film Files has it as a lost film.
Mark Russell, captain of a ship sailing from the South Seas to San Francisco, is an innocent victim of a pearl-smuggling scheme by Harry Gibson, and when the pearls are discovered by customs inspectors, Russell takes the blame because of his love for Gibson's sister Eve and to shield her of being disgraced.
Jack Trevor, an automobile salesman who takes the place of the recently deceased heir, Horace Barney, after a train crash. Trevor, who has a striking resemblance to Barney, finds himself at the mansion where he falls in love with Barney's cousin and rightful heiress, Helen. He must then expose the fraudulent scheme of Barney's guardian and his accomplices to save the estate and win Helen's love.
Young Jim Hawkins is caught up with the pirate Long John Silver in search of the buried treasure of the buccaneer Captain Flint, in this adaptation of the classic novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.
So This is Love? was another early Frank Capra production for fledgling Columbia Pictures. The hero, dress designer Jerry McGuire (William Collier Jr.), is tired of being considered a wimp. After business hours, Jerry secretly takes boxing lessons, enabling him to knock the stuffings out of his burly rival Spike Mullins (Johnnie Walker). Jerry's newfound pugilistic skills wins him the affections of store clerk Hilda Jensen (Shirley Mason), who's just car-razy about "cave men." Filmed in a fast three weeks, So This is Love? was completed before Frank Capra's Matinee Idol but released afterward. Leading lady Shirley Mason was the sister of Viola Dana, who starred in Capra's initial Columbia effort, That Certain Thing.
Let-It-Rain Riley (MacLean) is a devil-may-care Marine sergeant who falls in love with a girl (Shirley Mason) who he assumes to be rich. His rival for the girl's affection is his pal, Kelly (Wade Boteler). The guys find out that the object of their affections is but a modest switchboard operator but she proves to be invaluable when she deciphers a code and discovers that a mail train is about to be robbed.
The Edison Quartet perform songs as blacksmiths. This was one of 200 projects produced using the Edison Kinetophone system. The Kinetophone was a fairly complex mechanical means of creating talking pictures. Unlike previous systems, in which actors would be required to lip sync to preexisting recordings on camera, the Kinetophone was one of the earliest film technologies to record sound at the same time as the image.
Ann unwittingly goes through a bogus marriage ceremony with a thief and is held by the police as an accomplice to his crimes.
When a pretty small-town girl with no talent goes to Hollywood, what could go wrong? She could get Stranded!
No description available.
Miser Ebenezer Scrooge is awakened on Christmas Eve by spirits who reveal to him his own miserable existence, what opportunities he wasted in his youth, his current cruelties, and the dire fate that awaits him if he does not change his ways. Scrooge is faced with his own story of growing bitterness and meanness, and must decide what his own future will hold: death or redemption.
Orphaned Gertrude "Gertie" Flint is rescued by lamplighter, Trueman Flint, who raises her with faith and virtue until she grows into a moral woman and finds love with a childhood friend, overcoming hardships like her blind mother's separation from her and near-fatal fire incidents, ultimately leading to happy reunions and an engagement.
In early 19th century England, ambitious and ruthless orphan Rebecca Sharp advances from the position of governess to the heights of British society.
During World War I, Herr Dresser, a German-American professor from West Hoboken, New Jersey, invents a "mustache fixer," which stiffens the whiskers, making the wearer look very fierce. Much to the consternation of Dresser's daughter Elsie, a patriotic American, Kaiser Wilhelm calls them to Berlin to begin mass production of the tonic for the German army. Elsie's boyfriend, Teddy Swift, is particularly disturbed by this turn of events and decides to earn enough money to follow her to Germany. When the United States joins the war, Teddy is among the first to enlist, and soon he finds himself in Berlin trying to help Elsie escape from prison. After several narrow escapes, the two make their way to the mustache factory and blow it up. Brought before the Kaiser, they are rescued when American troops storm the palace, and the Kaiser loses his mustache and the war.
Besse Belwin works as a stenographer for district attorney John Mobley. It doesn't take long for Mobley to fall in love with his cute little employee and he proposes. Besse doesn't reveal that her father has a criminal past which he has since renounced.
Rose Rosetti, the orphaned daughter of a New York gangster, and Danny Lewis, another orphan, have been brought up by Sara and Abraham Kamisnsky, an elderly Jewish couple with an artificial-flower shop on the lower East Side. Rose works in the shop and Danny, after defeating the ward-bully in a fight, joins the political gang.
After discovering that his bride has married him only for his money, Philip Dorset journeys to Africa in hopes of putting the past behind him. In the jungle, he teams up with a party of American circus men on an elephant hunt. Their expeditions take them to a native village where they discover Joan, an orphaned white girl whose missionary father has recently died.
