Thanhouser Company
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The Coffin Ship
A love story filmed in Long Island Sound with a stowaway and a shipwreck. Because of 1911 production convention, a sprawling adventure is truncated to one-reel length. Good location work, a strength of Thanhouser pictures, creates a visually strong seagoing story. Long Island Sound locations were...Watch Movie
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Zudora Episode #2: The Mystery of the Sleeping House
A mysterious and exotic secret society conducts elaborate ceremonies in American suburbia with the kidnapped heroine Zudora who they want to marry off to their leader as a substitute for the real princess who was taken by a rival tribe back in India. The sets range from cheap...Watch Movie
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A Dog's Love
The fantasy centers on a dog and a child, a universally appealing movie subject. The loyal dog's attachment to his little girl playmate is treated with pictorial beauty and simple, honest sentiment. Reviewers of the time praised the double-exposure passages for their dramatic effectiveness. Baby...Watch Movie
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The Thanhouser Studio and the Birth of American Cinema
A fifty minute documentary recounting the remarkable tale of one of America's pioneering independent motion picture studios during the first decade of the twentieth century. Based in New Rochelle, New York, the studio produced over one thousand films that were seen by...Watch Movie
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
James Cruze featured as Jekyll/Hyde in this second U.S. film version of the classic novel by Robert Lewis Stevenson. This famous tale, made even more sensational by Richard Mansfield's stage performance, was filmed in at least nine silent versions. Thanhouser's was the second...Watch Movie
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She
This sensational popular story was one of three Haggard novels filmed by Thanhouser. It has many of the elements found in the not-yet-invented adventure/fantasy serial genre. Thanhouser’s expertise in location work, costume fantasy, and elaborate storytelling pay off in in SHE, the studio’s first...Watch Movie
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Joseph in the Land of Egypt
The second of “Thanhouser Big Productions,” a monthly schedule, Joseph in the Land of Egypt was a true “feature” film, a new class of film which came to dominate the market by the end of 1914. A feature was an hour or more, heavily advertised, with elaborate production...Watch Movie
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The World and the Woman
THE WORLD AND THE WOMAN is historically important as the screen debut of legendary actress Jeanne Eagels. The role of a prostitute turned faith healer is suitably challenging for the star. Edwin Thanhouser began phasing down production at the studio in early 1917, so this is a...Watch Movie
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The Woman in White
In its last two years of production Thanhouser concentrated on multi-reel features of high quality. Lloyd Lonergan’s scenarios were the foundation for the attention to quality, whether with original stories or with adaptations like THE WOMAN IN WHITE. Stylistic and technical...Watch Movie
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Shep's Race with Death
If you thought Lassie had little to draw on in way of predecessors, there's a revelation in store in this silent 1914 melodrama and its titular star, a fun-loving collie who appeared in several Thanhouser films in 1914 and 1915 and who here proves fully capable of outwitting a...Watch Movie
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The Cry of the Children
THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN is the most famous and best documented of all Thanhouser films. In its day it was recognized as one of the most important expressions of the pre-World War One reform movement, in particular child labor. Perhaps because the uncompromising content drew...Watch Movie
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The Elusive Diamond
A one-reel crime drama with crooks, ruses, kidnapping, escape and a twist, all wrapped in a coherent narrative. Screenwriter Lloyd Lonergan’s amazing versatility served equally well in several genres. There is successful pictorial telling of the setup and attempted theft, and...Watch Movie
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Marble Heart
This story, already a well-known English play of 1854 adapted from an earlier French play, casts the three most popular Thanhouser adult stars in a story of unrequited love, with a dream sequence that parallels the main story. Pale makeup is especially noticeable in some scenes, the answer to...Watch Movie
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Tannhäuser
Though different in spelling and pronunciation, Thanhouser’s adaptation of "Tannhäuser" was probably inevitable. The opera, with original libretto and music by Wagner, based on traditional legends, was the first Wagner opera seen in the United States and enjoyed great popularity throughout the...Watch Movie
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The Decoy
A rather complex interweaving of romance and crime is squeezed into one reel. A "respectable" couple of city "card sharpers" invite a distant country relative to visit, then use her as a pretty, unwitting decoy to lure rich victims. They flee town a step ahead of the law. At a resort, the...Watch Movie
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The Vicar of Wakefield
Edwin Thanhouser and Lloyd F. Lonergan, who wrote or supervised screenplays for hundreds of Thanhouser films, often turned to classic plays and novels for quality source material. THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD was an enormously popular English novel for 150 years, offering a complex...Watch Movie
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The Vagabonds
THE VAGABONDS source is a different kind of classic, a poem by an influential and prolific writer of inspirational and cautionary stories for children, particularly boys. THE VAGABONDS is a series of flashbacks where a penniless, friendless tramp relates the story of his downfall due to drink....Watch Movie
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The Marvelous Marathoner
Thanhouser’s "Falstaff Comedies" was a schedule of one-reel comedies released each Friday beginning in April 1915, later changed to each Tuesday. Looking for a niche, Thanhouser’s short plot-driven comedies stood out from other studios’ trend toward longer offerings and broad...Watch Movie
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Their One Love
One of the many Civil War movies made during the 50th anniversary of the conflict. This was one of Thanhouser’s last one-reel dramas and was released just after D.W. Griffith’s Civil War epic THE BIRTH OF A NATION. Griffith’s monumental picture had included three long-shots of nighttime...Watch Movie
