Now Playing on Harpodeon

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

Auld Robin Gray (Vitagraph, 1910)

Poor Jaime goes to sea to earn enough money to marry Jenny, where he is believed to be lost. Left to support her parents, Jenny is persuaded to marry old Robin Gray.

Starring Florence Turner and William Shea
Directed by Laurence Trimble

Shades of Enoch Arden in this one, although the poem it’s based on is considerably older than Tennyson’s. Seems to be intact, aside from the obviously replaced opening title card.

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

The Egyptian Mummy (Vitagraph, 1914)
An antiquarian is willing to pay handsomely for a mummy and so Dick bribes a filthy old bum into pretending to be one.

Starring Billy Quirk
Directed by Lee Beggs

Not exactly a horror film but it’s sort of got a mummy and that’s Halloween enough. Love Joel Day in this. He makes an excellent mummy.

[donnie]

This is a good one! Thanks for posting. Yes, I love Joel Day, an excellent mummy indeed, and a good comic actor.

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

A more seasonally appropriate short playing now, a short comedy-horror released by Vitagraph in 1907:

The Haunted Hotel (Vitagraph, 1907)
On a dark and stormy night, a traveler takes a room at a spooky hotel in the forest. As soon as the proprietor leaves, the room comes alive with ghosts and poltergeists who torment the man as he tries to unpack, eat, and go to sleep.

Starring William V. Ranous
Directed by J. Stuart Blackton

[Kitty]

I love this one. It's a spooky classic with all its camera tricks and stop motion. Amazing.

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

A Tale of Two Cities (Vitagraph, 1911)
Lucy falls in love with a man who is secretly the nephew of the aristocrat who condemned her father to decades of imprisonment in the Bastille.

Starring Maurice Costello and Florence Turner
Directed by William Humphrey

This is the complete three-reel film and not the more common two-reel abridgement.

[donnie]

Very enjoyable! Well-made, and an excellent print. This seems very advanced picture-making for 1911. Also, it was my first opportunity of seeing the famous Maurice Costello in anything longer than a clip. Excellently assembled score, as well. Thanks for posting!

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

Yes, there’s not too great a deal of Maurice Costello material available on video, and not much more on film. We’ve only got three available at the moment. Might have more we’ve not digitized yet, but I’m not sure of that.

The Doll-House Mystery (Reliance, 1915)
When a stack of valuable bonds go missing from the Grant household, suspicion falls on little Carmen Grant’s playmate Georgie, whose father is a poor ex-convict trying to go straight.

Starring Georgie Stone, Charles Gorman, and Carmen DeRue
Directed by Chester M. Franklin and Sidney A. Franklin

I’ve neglected to say on any silent film forum, but out holiday sale is on. 25% off everything using the code YEAREND.

[donnie]

I really enjoyed that one! A good story, well-directed and paced. The camera work seemed excellent, too, with some good closeups. I especially liked the concluding "On the way home" scene; that was really effective, and beautifully lit. Nice score, there, too. Thanks for posting!

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

It’s a film I’m very fond of myself, both story-wise and in its technique. I particularly like the extreme wide shots of the shack where they have their showdown and how well they suggest Jim’s increasing isolation.


Ben Hur (Kalem, 1907)
Jerusalem is in a state of rebellion against its Roman overlords. During a Roman procession, Judah Ben Hur wounds Valerius Gratus when he accidentally shakes loose a roof tile and it falls on the procurator. Messala — once Ben Hur’s friend, now a Roman legionary — betrays him and he is sent to the galleys. The ship he is enslaved on sinks. Ben Hur survives and also rescues the ship’s captain, Quintus Arrius. In gratitude, Arrius adopts him as his son. Messala challenges Ben Hur to a chariot race, which Ben Hur accepts — competing not only against Messala, but against Rome itself.

Starring Herman Rottger and William S. Hart
Directed by Sidney Olcott, Frank Oakes Rose, and H. Temple


We’ve released this in the past but this is a new video. It was sourced from two places. The first is the same 16mm print that video releases have always used. (From Em-Gee, unless my memory fails me, but who on earth knows where they got it? A number of their titles were copied from 9.5mm prints but I’m confident in saying Ben Hur 1907 was never released on 9.5mm.) It’s not abysmally bad but it is bad. In remastering it, I think I’ve coaxed out as much detail from it that exists to be coaxed out. The second source is a fragment held by the Library of Congress that I recently had digitized, representing most of the chariot race scene. It’s also only 16mm but it’s in markedly better condition. It was not derived from the same 35mm source, as its footage and the Em-Gee material is similar but not identical. Plainly, they come from different takes.

There is very likely a scene missing. A title card references Ben Hur being sent to the galleys and another card reports on his rescue of Arrius and subsequently being freed from slavery, but there is no footage of that, and contemporary synopses at least imply that Hur’s galley episode was portrayed.

William S. Hart is frequently credited as playing Messala and that credit is frequently disputed. Quite impossible to say from the Em-Gee print but the Library of Congress one is clear enough that, while I won’t say conclusively that it is him, I will say I’ve little reason to doubt it.

Nosferatu is the famous example everyone knows about but Ben Hur is notable for establishing in the US that film adaptations of copyrighted material (which Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur still was, at the time) had to be licensed from the rights holder. There were legally-doubtful films that came before (Happy Hooligan, for one) but I know of none that met with litigation.