Volume II: Filmography

THE REPEATER

December 22, 1912 (Sunday)

Length: 1 reel

Character: Drama

Cast: William Russell (political reformer), Marguerite Snow (May, his wife), Helen Badgley (his daughter), Harry Benham (Jack, the repeater)

Notes: 1. This film was designated erroneously as The Reporter in some notices. 2. In a review in The Moving Picture World, reprinted below, William Russell's role is designated as that of the political ringleader. 3. No synopses of this film were published in either The Moving Picture World or The Moving Picture News.

REVIEW, The Moving Picture World, December 28, 1912:

"A naturally presented picture of sentiment, with a Christmas atmosphere. It will make a good offering in the holiday season. The name describes it only in a roundabout way and doesn't seem fortunate. The story's hero, a reformer in politics, has been accused and convicted of 'padding the registration list,' but on procured evidence and on a frame-up made by the ring leader's heeler, William Russell, he is sent to prison and the story works out to his coming home, a cleared and rehabilitated man, on Christmas Eve. In a convincing way the heeler's conscience has been touched and he shows up his former ringleader in order to set free the innocent man. Marguerite Snow and the Thanhouser Kid play the family to whom the father comes home on Christmas. There are many good scenes, some showing the politicians at work, one or two in a big department store, and, scattered through the picture, some very lovely ones, showing the reformer's home life. It is a picture that will be liked, for it is well acted throughout and beautifully photographed."

REVIEW, The New York Dramatic Mirror, December 25, 1912:

"At this time of year we look for and get numerous photoplays of the 'Night Before Christmas' type with sentiment, maudlin, and otherwise. In this picture the producer and author have, quite successfully, avoided the insipidness common to most pictures of kind where Santa Claus creeps in at the eleventh hour to gladden the heart of a lonely child. The opening scene, that of a young man delivering a political speech, is gratifyingly out of the ordinary and makes a tremendous stride in establishing the premises. The young man is fighting the graft trust that is infesting the city. The grafters, determined to kill his power, trump up a charge against him by running in repeaters at the polls and then throwing blame onto his shoulders with perjured testimony. One of these repeaters, who gained his freedom through turning state's evidence after being arrested, meets misfortune sometime afterward and is compelled to seek work. He is employed to act as Santa Claus in a large department store, where he meets the child of the man he has sent to prison. In the innocence of her heart the child asked the bewhiskered man to send home her father who is in jail, as a present to her. From the fact that the repeater had just previously lost his own child, the appeal stirs him and gives him the determination to right a portion of the wrong he has done."

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