Year 1908 - 7

1908 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès, which is currently presumed lost.

Nell, the boss's daughter, uses Sherlock Holmes' detective work, to choose between the two suitors at her dad's broker's office.

Pathé's version of José Zorrilla's play, Don Juan Tenorio.

A group of people take roller skating too far.

Renée Carl stars in this lively slapstick silent short as a beautiful lady who causes distractions and accidents among the male population as she walks though the streets of Paris.

Adaptation of a poem written by Thomas Hood.

This French film isn't that well known today but it will mainly appeal to those film buffs with a thing for early cinema or those wanting to see some fantasy sequences but those there will probably be disappointed. The film runs just a few seconds short of four minutes as several women are dressed up as bees dancing around their hive. The "Queen Bee" goes to take a nap and she's attacked by a spider. The spider sequence is what gets this film a mention by fantasy fans but sadly this scene takes place around the 3:13 mark and lasts just a few seconds.

A young woman (Linda Arvidson) is kidnapped by a band of opportunistic Chinese slavers, led by devious Pong Lee (Harry Solter). A resourceful female police operative (Marion Leonard) is determined to rescue her, and tracks the mastermind of the kidnap plot, Hendricks (George Gebhardt). Though successful in her rescue effort, the rescuer ends up being made a prisoner herself. The slavers plan to make her the victim of a pistol shot to be triggered by the hands of a clock. The heroine is rescued by police seconds before the hands of the clock reach the "fatal hour".

In this comedy we see a fellow giving orders to the cook to put plenty of garlic in his food, and she complies with his wishes by giving everything an extra dose of the unpleasant ingredient. The first victim of the fumes is a dog that is seated beside the table, and when the fellow blows his breath on the animal he falls over unconscious from the effects. Next he prostrates a street cleaner and a painter perched on a ladder, as well as a woman in charge of a newsstand. They all succumb and fall over unconscious on the ground. He enters the subway and meets a man coming up the stairs, and when the latter gets a whiff of the garlic he too, goes down in a heap. Entering the car in the underground road he proceeds to waft the strong odor over the passengers, with the effect that each in turn goes down and out on the floor of the coach. When he reaches the next station he alights, leaving the car looking more like a hospital than anything.

Who killed this man to rob him of his money in this notorious neighborhood of Paris? The usual local scoundrel such as the one that has almost been lynched by the mob and arrested by the police? Not at all. In fact the poor man is innocent, even though appearances are deceiving. The real culprit is a respectably-looking man who, to divert suspicion, has put some blood of his victim on his fingers and some of the stolen money in his pockets while he was asleep.

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.

A pesky fly and the determination to get it.

A Saturn film directed by Johann Schwarzer.

At the beginning of this film two women come onstage dressed in Oriental fashion. They present a shadow play theatre.

Irving Robertson, a successful playwright, has just received a message from out of town to witness the initial performance of one of his plays. As he is about to leave, Henderson, the manager, calls to pay a sum due him for royalties. At the same time, Frank Wilson, a friend of the family, drops in.

A woman who is filled with romantic ideas is making no secret of her eagerness to find a husband. Her father decides to help her by pressuring and threatening an eligible bachelor, who reluctantly allows wedding plans to be made.

Stable hostler Joe loves his wife Annie, but she leaves him and their child for a wealthy gentleman, only to die destitute in London, where Joe's enduring love brings her solace in her final moments.

This picture is an illustration of the story of Beatrice Cenci, the young woman who planned the murder of her guardian, in Rome, in the year of 1599.

A man gets cajoled into working as a sideshow wrestler.

The first scene presents before the astonished eyes of the spectators a solid piece of marble, which the minute it is placed on a table seems to take life, and one can follow a snake-like line branding on the polished face of the stone the name of the house of Pathé Frères. As soon as this stone has been engraved, as by magic, a handsome young lady appears with a huge lump of clay covered with a cloth. As soon as the cloth is removed from the soft mass it starts whirling and turning as if stricken mad, and one is asking one's self what all the contentions are going to lead to, when the vague shape of an animal not yet discernible seems to appear, and before one has time to make one's mind as to the category of brutes to which it belongs one sees the form of a remarkably well made orang-utan modelled out of the clay, who calmly smokes his pipe. Then the statue is removed by the same winning young lady and another covered block of the same substance is carried forward.