Volume I: Narrative History

Chapter 7 (1914): The Cripple and Other Releases

The Cripple, featuring Nolan Gane, a juvenile actor of whom much was expected at the Thanhouser studio, and Lydia Mead, was released on October 6th and was from a scenario by Phil Lonergan. The Moving Picture World stated that "this story is so handled that it leaves a pleasant feeling with the observer." The next release was The Benevolence of Conductor 786, on October 9th, with Riley Chamberlin in the title role. Filling space at the end of the reel was Lizards of the Desert, a documentary possibly taken at the nearby Bronx Zoo. Note

The One Who Cared, the Princess release of October 9th, featured Reenie Farrington and Boyd Marshall and was followed on the 11th by The Rescue and on the 13th by The Diamond of Disaster, the latter a two-reel film directed by Carroll Fleming and including in the cast Ernest Warde, Irving Cummings, and Muriel Ostriche. The Touch of a Little Hand, the Princess subject of October 16th, included Riley Chamberlin, Boyd Marshall, Mayre Hall, and Eldean Steuart. Born on October 22, 1911, Eldean Steuart was in Biograph films by the age of five months. Her sister Loel, born in 1910, and her brother Maurice, Jr., born in 1908, were also motion picture children. With their parents the three children were seen in vaudeville as The Five Steuarts. The youngsters appeared in Thanhouser films during the next several years.

Left on the Train, a comedy based on a story by Evelyn Van Buren, was distributed through the exchanges on October 18th and featured the Thanhouser Twins and Helen Badgley. Then followed Old Jackson's Girl on the 20th, concerning which The New Rochelle Pioneer Note reported:

James Durkin's company of Thanhouser-Mutual players recently gave Staten Island a touch of Western life. Durkin has been engaged in producing a picture called Old Jackson's Girl, a drama of the Argonaut days. His cavalcade of cowmen and cowgirls created something more than a sensation among the commuters' families in this smallest of New York's five boroughs, but it failed to excite curiosity on the part of the real native Staten Islanders. They stuck to their jobs, paying not half as much attention to the rough riding and shooting as they would to a corncrib fire. But after the scenes had been made and the company was preparing to go home these same blasé folks got together and prevailed upon Durkin to hold a Wild West show. So he and Morris Foster, Mayre Hall and David H. Thompson got up a program, held a show, and turned the receipts over to a local charity. It probably is the first time that motion picture actors engaged in making a movie have intentionally amused a large colony, charged admission for the amusement so provided, and then donated the proceeds to a local institution.

A review in The Moving Picture World noted that "the story is an ordinary Western one, the strongest features being the excellent photography, pleasing scenery, and a good general atmosphere of the plains country."