The Global Archive Complementing the Tone of Bread: Cult Guide

Dir: Victor Schertzinger

When the circus comes to town, the town's orphans are treated to an outing to see the show. The circus troupe's 'Jinx' girl causes so many problems for the performers and performances that, to escape punishment, she must run away. She mingles with the orphans and runs away to join an orphanage.

Dir: Victor Schertzinger

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of His Own Home Town perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

Jimmy Duncan, the son of the well-respected Reverend Duncan, takes over his local newspaper as manager. He takes on the criminal element in town with great vigor, until he realizes that his own father is in league with those devils.

Dir: Victor Schertzinger

James Ashe sends his son James Jr. off to manage a family-owned logging mill. While attending to his duties, James Jr. falls in love with a beautiful girl.

Dir: Victor Schertzinger

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Sudden Jim perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

The mind of theology student Webster Smith becomes unbalanced from strain. Traveling across the desert as God's savior, he arrives weakened at Red Butte, a small mining town. Faro Fan, who runs a saloon and gambling joint cleanly, and who cares for the town's homeless children, helps Smith, but when he learns her business, he curses her. While Smith builds a church, Faro nurses renegade Spanish Ed, who spreads a fever to her wards. After Smith prays for fire to purge the town, excepting his church, saloon keeper Delicate Hanson, trying to disinfect his bar by burning whiskey on it, starts a fire which quickly spreads to the church, while leaving Faro's house unscathed. Furious, Smith attacks Faro. When she hits his head with a club, his sanity returns, and he helps her nurse the children. After Smith leaves to get supplies, Spanish Ed, crazed with thirst, tries to attract Faro. When Smith returns, Faro shoots him, thinking he is Spanish Ed. As she nurses him to health, they fall in love.

Dir: Victor Schertzinger

Traveling saleswoman Mary Marbury thrashes a masher on a train when he tries to kiss a young girl in a tunnel. After the man and his female companion are escorted from the train, Mary encounters them again in New York City, where they attempt to marry the children of her wealthy employer, Jonas Abbott, then pose as cubist art instructors Fernando Poyntier and his sister, Marcia. Jonas worries that his son and Mary's fiancé, Raymond, is leading a frivolous life in the city's Bohemian community. Mary plots to incur the boy's jealousy by posing as an adventuress leading Jonas astray. When the Poyntiers suspect that the Abbott fortune could go to Mary instead of to them, they rob Jonas's safe and hide the money on his yacht, on which they plan to escape. Exhausted from dancing the fox-trot, Mary and Abbott rest on the yacht, and she discovers the money. When the crooks are captured, Raymond, realizing his love for Mary, proposes.

Dir: Victor Schertzinger

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of The Lady of Red Butte perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

During the May Day celebration at Ferryville, Millie Martin, whose stingy father will not buy her proper clothes, watches as Violet Henry, the daughter of the town's richest man, is pushed into a stagnant pool by the village bolshevik. The story amuses Millie's father, who gives her a dollar, with which she buys beauty cream in preparation for her first railway journey. On the train, Millie meets John Turner, a carpet layer disguised as a doctor. Earlier, John fought a man caught cheating at poker. He took his uncle's railway ticket and doctor's bag when he thought the cheater was killed. After Millie feigns a toothache to get John's attention, her father, to avoid a doctor's bill, gives her chewing tobacco as a remedy. When she swallows it, and John orders an operation, the train stops at a nearby sanitarium. After Millie escapes, and John finds her in a room with a baby, they both explain. John is mistaken for a burglar, and after his uncle arrives to straighten matters out, John and Millie are free to pursue romance.

Dir: Victor Schertzinger

Sheriff's son Royal Beaudry is thought a coward, even by the young woman he has his heart set on. But he disproves cowardice when he rescues his father's friend from kidnappers.

Dir: Victor Schertzinger

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of The Homebreaker perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

Shy Joel Parker seems bound for nowhere, until Abbie Nettleton enters his life. With her prodding, Joel goes from timid nobody to a baseball star with bravura.

Dir: Victor Schertzinger

David Clary runs a sleepy little dry-goods store in a sleepy little town. A vamp from the big city shows up, intent on taking Clary for everything he's worth by a combination of seduction and blackmail. But the day is saved by the ingenuity of David's corset model.

Dir: Victor Schertzinger

A young woman works in the scullery of a grand hotel, and dreams of a life among its fashionable patrons.