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1910Thanhouser Company1,000 feetComedy

An Assisted Elopement

No copy you can watch online. No print is known to survive. What follows is what does: the release, the cast, the story, and what the trade press said at the time.

The story

“Glade and Sears are next door neighbors and old friends. Glade has a daughter, while Sears has a son. The young people have never met, being away at school while the old folks have been cementing their friendship. As the two men own adjoining places, they believe that the best thing for the younger people to do is to get married. So they try to bring this about. Gladys Glade and Charlie Sears meet on the train while they are returning home and start a flirtation. Perhaps they would have married in the end, if the old folks hadn’t ‘butted in.’ As it is, they lose all interest in each other. Then the fathers try another tack. They decide to be bitter enemies in public, hoping the opposition will bring the children together. The new plan works like a charm, and Gladys and Charlie, realizing their parents’ shortcomings, decide to elope. They do so, much to the satisfaction of Glade and Sears.”

Summary from The Moving Picture World · 3 September 1910

What the papers said

2 reviews

“Possibly more than one elopement has been similarly assisted. At any rate, as soon as the young folks felt opposition they decided to elope, much to the satisfaction of the elders in the game. The picture is high-class comedy and the acting is so true to life that no great stretch of the imagination is required to make the personages seem real.”

The Moving Picture World · 10 September 1910

“This film story has been done before and by an Independent producer, which prompts the wonder if the Independents would not do well to avoid borrowing—at least from each other. The Thanhouser producers have the excuse, however, in this particular case that the former telling of the story was a sad failure, while this one has pleasing qualities. Two fathers …

Read in full · 1 min

“This film story has been done before and by an Independent producer, which prompts the wonder if the Independents would not do well to avoid borrowing—at least from each other. The Thanhouser producers have the excuse, however, in this particular case that the former telling of the story was a sad failure, while this one has pleasing qualities. Two fathers are determined that their children shall wed each other, but the young folks object to such cut and dried procedure, whereat the fathers pretend to quarrel and forbid the children to love, and the perverse youngsters at once elope, assisted secretly by the parents. The trick of having the boy join the girl in her apparent banishment by hiding in her trunk is the one discordant note in an otherwise plausible and human comedy.”

The New York Dramatic Mirror · 10 September 1910

Have you seen this film, or a print of it?

Prints of films thought lost still turn up in attics, private collections and archives. A record like this one is how the next one gets found.

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Cast and crew

No cast or crew is credited in the surviving sources for this film. Bowers records the title and the release; the names did not come with them.

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More about this film

From Volume II: Filmography of Q. David Bowers’ Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, reproduced with permission and unchanged. Read the history of 1910 →

Cite as: Bowers, Q. David. Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, “An Assisted Elopement”. thanhouser.org/films/an-assisted-elopement/

Where a print is held

Held by
No print known