Volume II: Filmography

A SCIENTIFIC MOTHER

(Falstaff)

May 7, 1915 (Friday)

Length: 1 reel (1,002 feet)

Character: Comedy

Director: Arthur Ellery

Cast: Mignon Anderson (Mrs. Janes, the mother), Al Keyes (her son), Jack Dougherty (her son), Ruth Elder (his fiancée), Ruth Gilmore (his mother's choice), Harry Jackson

Note: Jack Dougherty's name appeared as Jack "Doughty" in Reel Life, April 24 and May 1, 1915.

SYNOPSIS, Reel Life, April 24, 1915:

"Mrs. Janes' baby is sickly and under-sized. After worrying herself into a fever, the young mother determines to utilize all possible scientific means to bring the infant up to standard. So she studies and experiments until she hits upon a food preparation which she is convinced will make Baby grow. It does. He adds cubit on cubit to his stature before her very eyes. For a few years she is immensely proud of him. At the age of two, he is as tall as a child of ten. At eight, he passes for sixteen. but when, at eighteen, he is nearing the eight-foot mark, the scientific mother begins to wish she had not been so successful. She never had designed her son for a circus career. So she heartily prays that he may stop growing. Wishing 'the Boy' to settle down near her, Mrs. Janes picks out for him the right kind of a wife - a stately girl of the grenadier type. But he already has fixed his affections upon a little bit of a woman. The mother tries to prevent the match. The night her boy has planned to elope, Mother Janes is on hand. But her big son picks her up and tosses her onto the roof of the house, kisses her goodbye, and flees with the damsel of his choice."

REVIEW, The Moving Picture World, May 15, 1915:

"An original and laughable conceit in which a young mother raises her baby by scientific methods. He grows to be a giant in size and then in spite of her eugenic theories insists upon marrying a tiny girl. This gets to be very funny as the idea is worked out."

REVIEW, The New York Dramatic Mirror, May 19, 1915:

"This is a good original single-reel comedy that is thoroughly amusing throughout and most laughably original. A mother discouraged at the puny appearance of her baby studies hygiene and dietetics most carefully, with the result that she evolves a scientific food that is marvelous. Her son grows with phenomenal rapidity until at the time he reaches man's state he is a giant at least eight feet high. His mother finds a mate for him, a woman approximating his own size, but friend son takes things into his own hands and elopes with a girl who is a little under four feet."

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