Volume II: Filmography

JOHN BREWSTER'S WIFE

Production still from JOHN BREWSTER'S WIFE with Ernest Howard (L), Ethelmary Oakland (C)m and Ethyle Cooke (R). Courtesy Joslin T. Stonewell (Brewster)

Working title: THE ONLY WAY

June 6, 1916 (Tuesday)

Length: 2 reels

Character: Drama

Cast: Ernest Howard (John Brewster), Ethyle Cooke (his wife), Samuel Niblack, Carey L. Hastings (maid), Ethelmary Oakland (baby)

Note: The attribution of the working title The Only Way to this film is tentative.

SYNOPSIS, Reel Life, June 3, 1916:

"John Brewster's Wife, a forthcoming Thanhouser-Mutual two-act drama, is a powerful story of how a baby's trust lead to a reunion between a husband and wife. Ethelmary Oakland, the little star who created a sensation at the Motion Picture Board of Trade Exposition at Madison Square Garden in New York City, has the child's part in this absorbing photoplay, and endears herself to the hearts of everyone by her splendid work in a difficult part. Ernest Howard plays the role of the puritanical husband, who is bound by the traditions of his family and his caste. Ethyle Cooke is supreme in the part of the talented young woman who has forsaken the stage to marry the chief man of the small New England town.

"The story opens with the husband and wife in a serious disagreement. Elizabeth rebelled at the prim, narrow conventions, and when she received a card from her former manager informing her that her old show was to play a neighboring town, she left her husband to rejoin her old friends. John Brewster interposed no objections, but a baby's lisped requests will melt the hardest natures, and the husband went to the city to bring back his daughter's mother. At his wife's hotel he found Fred, a former admirer. Her husband refused to listen. Fred is sent to prison. Elizabeth receives a note from her husband, explaining that he was going to spread the report that she had been killed in a railroad wreck. Fred escapes from prison and demands money from Elizabeth. The two go to the husband's town to get the money. There they meet Brewster. Going out they pass the bank of which the husband is president. Elizabeth does not permit Fred to rob the bank because that would ruin the reputation of her baby's father. Fred flees from the town, but the mother explains in a note to her husband that she is absolutely blameless, and father and daughter go forth hand in hand to seek the wife and mother."

REVIEW, The Moving Picture World, June 17, 1916:

"A two-part production featuring Ernest Howard and Ethyle Cooke, with pretty Ethelmary Oakland, a tiny tot of possibly five years, attracting as much attention as the older players. The story on which this picture is based is not an exceptionally well balanced one, and in spite of careful work on the part of the director and players it does not ring quite true. According to the story a wife whose early ambitions savored of the stage grows tired of her home and leaves her husband, with unhappy results."

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