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1910Thanhouser Company1,000 feetDrama

The City of Her Dreams

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

“Ella Brown is the only child of a poor widower. Their home is in a small town in the Middle West, and Ella has never seen New York, although she has always wanted to go there. Her father, finding times hard, decides to take a chance in the gold fields of Alaska, and when the play opens, is about to start there. He leaves Ella in the care of an aunt, a sour old person who runs a boarding house, who promptly makes a drudge out of the girl. As she has no other relatives, there is nothing for her to do except submit.

“Sitting in her room one evening, tired after a day’s hard work, she looks at her two treasured magazines, one showing views of her pet city and the other giving the latest fashion. The girl is filled with a longing to travel and wear pretty clothes, and falls asleep. In her dream she is transported to New York, where she finds enough money to enable her to buy all the pretty things she admires. Ella greatly enjoys her visit, and is extremely unhappy when she wakes up. But she finds that her dream will become reality before long, for her father has returned from the gold fields with a fortune and a desire to fulfill all the wishes of his pretty daughter.”

Summary from The Moving Picture World · 19 November 1910

What the papers said

1 review · 1 advertisement

“A clear presentation of the visions of a child who wanted to go to the city. The vision is, perhaps, a bit more beatific than the actual city, but it unquestionably represents the imagined city of those who have never seen it. The awakening was rude, but happily the vision becomes real when the father appears with sufficient money to …

Read in full · 1 min

“A clear presentation of the visions of a child who wanted to go to the city. The vision is, perhaps, a bit more beatific than the actual city, but it unquestionably represents the imagined city of those who have never seen it. The awakening was rude, but happily the vision becomes real when the father appears with sufficient money to take the dreamer to the city for which she has longed. The acting and mechanical work on this picture are both of excellent quality.”

The Moving Picture World · 3 December 1910

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12 November 1910The Moving Picture World1 min

“It is a city picture, a town picture, a village picture, a wilderness picture—a picture that will attract attention wherever a projection machine can be put up. Why? Because it portrays something we all have in common and portrays it well. Who has not dreamt? Who is not interested in dreams? The picture tells of the dream as no other descriptive agency ever, ever could; and the cowboy of the plains and the clerk of the city will be enthralled throughout the telling.”

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.

Tell us about a print

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

Filmed in
Some scenes were filmed in New York City

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, “The City of Her Dreams”. thanhouser.org/films/the-city-of-her-dreams/

Where a print is held

Held by
No print known