Deep Archive Finds Movies That Echo the Spirit of Static: Cult Guide

Dir: Al Christie

A fascinating piece of cinema that shares thematic elements.

Dir: Al Christie

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of He Married His Wife perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

Edith and Neal have just been divorced and the judge ordered Neal to pay $300 a week alimony. Neal tried to slip out of the country on the first alimony day, but was caught in an airplane chase. Then next alimony day he got what he thought was a brilliant idea. He left his clothes on the beach and pretended to have killed himself. So Edith took possession of the house and the judge started courting her. Then Neal was informed by his lawyer that he was legally dead and his wife automatically inherited everything and in order to get his money back he would have to marry her again. So Neal disguised himself with whiskers and had a couple of thugs accost Edith so he could play the hero with her. But in the sham fight one of the thugs apologized to Edith for hitting her husband so hard and spilled the beans generally. So Edith took him in the house and nursed him back to health and he proposed. After telling him how like her poor, dear, dead husband he was, she consented, and he had to wear a suit of her supposed dead husband's to get married in. The "guests" were all detectives, the minister himself being a detective. Just as Edith was about to say "I do," she said "I don't " instead and disclosed Neal's identity. The lawyer arrived just then and said in reading over the old will he found a clause saying that quarrels in the family would have to be patched up or the money would go to charity. So they were married all over again - by the judge of the divorce court. Motion Picture News, November 1, 1919

Dir: Al Christie

A company of barnstormers goes on strike in the middle of a performance and a number of local amateurs are prevailed upon to furnish the show, which they do in more ways than one.

Dir: Al Christie

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

Ann is one tough cowgirl. After she beats up Hank, her parents send her East to college, hoping she'll come back a lady.

Dir: Al Christie

Bobby, a clerk, is sent on a hurry trip by his boss to deliver a $5,000 check to Mr. Brown. Bobby meets a girl while on the train. At the junction they miss another train, wait three hours, arrive at the home of Brown - and then the plot deepens when another plot in the making makes it appear that the girl is Brown's wife.

Dir: Al Christie

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

A fascinating piece of cinema that shares thematic elements.

Dir: Al Christie

On the strength of father's promise of a $10,000 check to the happy bride and groom, a truckload of furniture arrives with which newlywed Mary desired to furnish a city flat.

Dir: Al Christie

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

At a choir festival, country girl Sally is kidded by traveling show people into believing that she has a grand opera career. The twist to the story of the ambitious girl going to the city and getting into the chorus comes when she proves to be a "boob," gets ejected from the theater, and is returned to the cows and chickens far from Broadway.

Dir: Al Christie

A fascinating piece of cinema that shares thematic elements.

Dir: Al Christie

Rosie is a Y. W. C. A. gym instructor in the East. Coincident with her getting a little too rough with one of the girls, knocking her out and being fired from her job as athletic director, Rosie is advised of the fact that she has acquired a piece of real property in the form of the Rough Neck Rancho. There is nothing for her to do but go West, going Horace Greely one better by setting out for the Rough Neck Rancho with the idea of bringing it up right and proper with deft feminine touches. These touches turned out to be deft, but scarcely feminine, inasmuch as they were blows from Rosie's husky mitt. Naturally, a bunch of bewhiskered and devil-may-care cowboys resented the innovation of a woman manager, and when Rosie ordered the foreman and all the rest of them to shave their mustaches, it was a little too much for hard boiled Bill and his gang of leather-necked cowboys. Rosie imported a bunch of strikebreakers, some of her own girl pals, who were nicely settled in the ranch house. Bad Bill hit upon the brilliant idea of hiring a bunch of Indians to attack the ranch house, scare the wits out of the Eastern young ladies and otherwise maintain the morale of the men folks around Rough Neck Rancho. It was a bad day for the Indians and a worse day for the cowboys, as it turned out, for after Rosie and her cohort of Sure-Shot Susie's finished mopping off the Indians out of the barricades of windows, and after three or four Indians had bitten the dust after good old-fashioned melodramatic style, the redskins turned around and licked the tar out of all the cowboys for putting them up to such a hazardous undertaking. By this time one or two of the cowboys had fallen for the lure of the women folks and had sacrificed their flowing whiskers, their sole pride and joy, under the telling fire of Cupid's darts. Red Bill, the burly foreman, was finally vanquished by Rough Neck Rosie in a fist fight which was not exactly fair but thoroughly effective. Bill got the final wallop when he wasn't looking by one of Rosie's pals planted behind a carpet before which the fight took place. At the end of the second reel of desperate milling Rosie and her pals are victorious and the Rough Neck Rancho settles down to peace and quiet and every clean-shaven cowboy has a little milkmaid on his arm. Motion Picture News, November 1, 1919