Southern Mountaineers Filmography
This is a listing of known films about mountaineers. The W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection owns only a few of the following. They are found within the Jerry Wayne Williamson Papers (viewable only via Internet Explorer 5.0+).
Compiled by J.W. Williamson
Films from 1904 - 1995
1904 THE MOONSHINER / BIOGRAPH Directed by WALLACE MCCUTCHEON Comments: The earliest known treatment of mtn people by the movies, filmed in New Jersey. The last scene, "The Law Vindicated," features--ironically--the shooting of the law in the back by the moonshiner's wife. A big hit in the early nickelodeon trade.
1905 A KENTUCKY FEUD / BIOGRAPH Directed by WALLACE MCCUTCHEON Comments: The first known treatment on film of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, though this story is made of whole cloth, featuring a "Jim" Hatfield and a "Sally" McCoy. Violence is set in motion when little Buddy McCoy shoots the Hatfield matriarch in revenge for a thrashing he has received for stealing Hatfield apples.
1907 DANIEL BOONE: OR, PIONEER DAYS IN AMERICA / EDISON Comments: The earliest known coonskin-capper. The plot featured many Indian fights. The native-Americans ("savages") abduct Boone's daughters and at one point have Boone tied to a stake, torturing him. He is rescued by his faithful horse and kills the Indian chief.
1908 THE MOONSHINER'S DAUGHTER / KALEM Comments: The 1st movie to introduce a love interest between the revenue agent and the moonshiner's daughter. Set in north Ga., the destruction of distillery equipment at the courthouse in Atlanta supposedly based on eye-witness account. The revenue agent is killed at the end and the moonshiners are not brought to justice, a fairly unique plot innovation.
1908 THE MOUNTAINEERS / LUBIN Comments: A movie photographer happens to capture evidence of a crime--a mountaineer robbing, murdering, and tossing a victim off a precipice. Includes moonshiners and a revenue agent and unconvincing special effects: "The dummy used in the fall is the worst stuffed affair even shown on a screen."
1908 A MOUNTAIN FEUD / SELIG Comments: Plot not found, but apparently a "typical feud story" set in "natural surroundings."
1908 THE JAMES BOYS IN MISSOURI / ESSANAY Produced by O T CRAWFORD Comments: The 1st known movie about Jesse James, the highlands bandit. Featured "some excellent work by genuine cowboys who know how to ride." When O T Crawford died in1917, this film was remembered as having had considerable success. Based on a popular stage play.
1908 IN THE NICK OF TIME / SELIG Comments: The first known two-men-and-a-woman plot type (in which at least one of the three is "mountain" in some decisive sense). Bessie Barton, a young girl of the Ky mtns, is loved and courted by Robert Clayton, a wealthy young man from the Bluegrass. Jack Martin, a mtneer, is also in love with Bessie and resents Clayton. Martin attempts to kill Clayton, and Bessie is rejected by Bluegrass society. Features a set with a chasm and a drawbridge and a thrilling conclusion.
1908 THE ORPHAN, OR, A MOUNTAIN ROMANCE / VITAGRAPH Comments: Another romantic triangle movie, this one featuring two women and a man. The orphan of the title is a girl "reared in the mtns, [who] is wild and ungovernable, and rebels against her protector," yet wins his hand in the end.
1908 THE MINER'S DAUGHTER / VITAGRAPH Comments: A coal miner's daughter first marries a humble miner, then is wooed and taken away by a wealthy New Yorker. The humble miner reclaims his wife with decisive physicality and takes her back home to the hills, "and the recent desolate home is once more filled with happiness."
1908 THE FEUD AND THE TURKEY: A ROMANCE OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS / BIOGRAPH Directed by D W GRIFFITH Comments: An ancient struggle between the rather aristocratic Wilkinsons and the Caulfields. A Romeo/Juliet love develops between a son and a daughter of the warring clans, and the young lovers are disowned. Reconciliation effected at Christmas time over a stolen turkey and two kindly though comic black servants.
1908 THE MOUNTAINEER'S REVENGE / LUBIN Comments: A young mtn wife proves unfaithful to her husband by running off with a city man in his auto. The mtn husband gets revenge by stealing the motorist's daughter and making him realize his great crime. The mtn man gets his wife back, and the city man is better for his comeuppance.
1908 THE MOLLY MAGUIRES, OR, LABOR WARS IN THE COAL MINES / KALEM Comments: A decidedly anti-union treatment of the coal- mining unionization struggles of the 1870s in Pennsylvania. In this version, the secret "Molly Maguires" "used their power over the simple miner folks for their own selfish ends."
1909 A DREAM OF WEALTH / VITAGRAPH Comments: In 1849, a Ky mtneer strikes out for the Calif gold rush with his family, encountering great adversity on the way. The only survivor of the trek is the mtneer's little daughter, who is discovered by Indians and rescued. Fifteen years later, as the girl is about to be married, she recognizes an aged Indian--who is being roughed up by whites--as the Indian who rescued her on the desert, and she becomes the means of his rescue in return.
1909 MAID OF THE MOUNTAINS / ESSANAY Comments: Revenue officers search for an illicit still, which is located in a cave. The deputy sent to investigate instead falls in love with the moonshiner's daughter. The deputy must eventually decide between love and duty, and he tears off his badge and throws it away rather than arrest his girlfriend's father.
1909 THE MOUNTAINEER'S HONOR / BIOGRAPH Directed by D W GRIFFITH Starring: MARY PICKFORD, JAMES KIRKWOOD, KATE BRUCE Comments: Story of a mtn girl (Pickford), wronged and abandoned by a valley man. The girl's brother kills the valley man, is himself caught, and is about to be hanged for murder when his mother kills him with a single shot, rather than see the family dishonored.
1909 THE SINS OF THE FATHERS / VITAGRAPH Comments: A story of Tenn feudists. A son of one family goes away to the city, gets educated, comes back home as a teacher (an educational missionary), falls for the daughter of the rival family, is forced into a fight by a bully member of the rival family (who happens to be the sweetheart's brother and the schoolteacher's own student), is pursued so that he has to flee out of the mtns, but he takes his girlfriend with him for a happy ending.
1909 THE LAW OF THE MOUNTAINS / KALEM Comments: A mtn man, for the sake of his sick child, gives information that enables revenue officers to catch some moonshiners, and he accepts payment for his information. He is shot from ambush for thus violating the unwritten law of the mtns.
1909 DAVY CROCKETT--IN HEARTS UNITED / NEW YORK MOTION PICTURE CO Comments: The earliest known Davy Crockett movie, wherein the Alamo does not appear. This is the alternate Crockett of the Lochinvar legend, in other words this is a two-men-and-a-woman plot. The rough-hewn Davy meets Anna when he mends a saddle girth for her and her intended husband Blake, a city smoothie. While Davy mends the girth, Anna reads the poem about Lochinvar aloud to him. Later, Davy reenacts the Lochinvar story by rescuing Anna from her nuptials to Blake.
1910 A FORESTER'S SWEETHEART / LUX Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, featuring some thrilling action sequences, including a fight with axes between the two men. The good mtn man wins.
1910 TALE OF THE BACKWOODS / SELIG POLYSCOPE Comments: Two women from rival backwoods families fighting over the same man. Lumbermill background. Also features a "half- wit."
1910 SENSATIONAL LOGGING / ESSANAY Comments: A non-fiction "industrial" film shot in the Cumberland range of Ky on Russell's Fork. A documentary on massive log- harvesting, involving the building and then dynamiting of a big dam. "What a tremendous profit there must be in this great industry!"
1910 THE MOUNTAINEER: A TALE OF KENTUCKY / A G WHYTE Comments: "Back in the heart of the mtns we find the primitive, simple folk, who know no law but that of fight and justice." Two-men-and-a-woman. One valley man, a mtn girl and a mtn man, and the valley man wins the girl.
1910 THE FEUD / KALEM Comments: A melodrama having as its basis a feud over a boundary, followed by a reconciliation prompted by two lovers, one each from the warring families.
1910 VICTIMS OF FATE / VITAGRAPH Comments: A feud story which, like most of the others, features much killing followed by pious reconciliation. On the way to the end, however, one woman "of nerve and passion" takes up a gun and defends her cabin and is herself killed.
1910 A MAID OF THE MOUNTAINS / URBAN Comments: Plot not found, but probably two-men-and-a-woman drama.
1910 A FAMILY FEUD / LUX Comments: Plot not found but apparently a story of the courtship between a son and daughter of two men sworn to maintain a family feud.
1910 DAVY CROCKETT / SELIG POLYSCOPE CO Comments: Another non-Alamo Crockett story. Mary, promised by her mother to another, loves Davy, and ends up riding off with him--who is playing Lochinvar again--rather than marry her mother's choice. Features the famous legend of Crockett barring the door against wolves with his own arm.
1910 THE SPECIAL AGENT / VITAGRAPH Comments: Very typical revenue agent/moonshiner's daughter romance.
1910 THE FEUD / NEW YORK MOTION PICTURE CO Comments: Between the Daytons and the Carvers. Reconciliation reached by way of a romance between Bob Dayton and Sue Carver.
1910 A FRONTIER HERO / EDISON Comments: Struggles between settlers and Indians on the far side of the mtns in Ky. A 14-year-old boy and his dog become the heroes as they overcome blood-thirsty Indians and rescue little sister from their clutches.
1910 BACK IN THE MOUNTAINS / NESTOR Comments: A feud over a boundary dispute between the Bakers and the Haltons threatens to end a tender romance between Ned Baker and Alice Halton. The love & daring of the young people wins out, and with the help of surveyors, the feud is ended but only after much violence.
1910 THE U S REVENUE DETECTIVE / YANKEE Comments: Secret revenue agents in the Ky mtns. Mac, a devoted husband and father, is sent by the federal government into "the wilds of Kentucky" to work undercover against the moonshine menace. He ends up "shutting his eyes" to let one young moonshiner off. Why? Because the young man is himself a devoted husband and father.
1910 THE MOONSHINER'S DAUGHTER / NESTOR Comments: A hybrid story, combining two-men-a-woman elements and a case of mistaken identity. The rough mtn clan mistake their daughter's new wooer for a revenuer, but he's actually a cowardly valley man whom the daughter rejects. The daughter's true lover is a mtn man who wins her family's respect by pretending to kill the supposed revenuer.
1910 THE FUGITIVE / BIOGRAPH Directed by D W GRIFFITH Comments: A Civil War tale set in the mtns, where near neighbors can become mortal enemies, though "mother instinct" for reconciliation finally prevails.
1910 A MOUNTAIN WIFE / G MELIES Comments: A mtn wife fiercely defends her husband from revenue agents. At the end they escape the mountains "to a place where they can work at an honest trade and live a good life free from offense to God and man."
1910 MOONSHINE AND LOVE / POWERS PICTURE PLAYS Comments: In the Tenn mtns, a schoolteacher goes into a cave and stumbles upon an illicit still. The moonshiners hold him captive, but the chief moonshiner's daughter is in love with the teacher and secures his release.
1910 IN THE MOUNTAINS OF KENTUCKY / VITAGRAPH Comments: Two-women-and-a-man, with moonshining as background, wherein trouble in a mtn marriage comes by way of a siren woman.
1910 THOU SHALT NOT KILL / POWERS Comments: A parson gets the patriarchs of rival clans to sign a paper ending their feud, but a drunken son of one family starts the whole thing over by getting himself dead at the hands of an essentially innocent young man of the opposing family. As the father of the slain rowdy prepares to kill his son's killer, he remembers his Bible oath and lets the young man go.
1910 A DAUGHTER OF THE MINES / EDISON Comments: A love story set among the coal mines. The superintendent's son falls in love with a miner's daughter and despite parental opposition (on both sides) a wedding occurs.
1910 A MOUNTAIN MAID / EDISON Comments: A theatrical company is to put on a play called "A Mountain Maid," and the two leads go separately to the Tenn mtns to pick up local color for their portrayals. There they unconsciously act out the script of the play.
1911 ELDA OF THE MOUNTAINS / NESTOR Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. An arrogant city man trifles with the affections of an innocent mtn girl, who eventually recognizes the city man as a coward and realizes that the good mtn man is the man for her.
1911 SLEEPY HOLLOW / NESTOR Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, in which the woman is married to one of the men, who is unreasonably jealous of her. He suspects her of faithlessness with a visiting photographer and has a realistic dream in which he catches his wife and the photographer kissing and kills the photographer by throwing him over a high cliff. The dream jolts him out of his jealousy.
1911 THE GIRL OF THE MOUNTAINS / VITAGRAPH Comments: City man comes to the mtns for his health, falls in love with mtn girl, but returns to city and marries city woman. A study of an urban man's corruption and weakness.
1911 THE TRANSGRESSOR / NESTOR Comments: The only survivor of the Collins-Clayton feud must go to prison for 15 years, leaving his wife and daughter behind. When the man escapes prison, he finds his daughter in love with a man from a good family, and rather than reveal himself to her as her felon father, he conceals his identity so that she can rise socially.
1911 THE STRIKE AT THE MINES / EDISON Comments: The main character is an orphan boy who first warns the coal miners of a fire in the shaft and almost dies for his efforts. The miners strike for higher wages. The orphan warns the mine owners that the miners are planning to dynamite and flood the shaft. The mine management is good and reasonable; the miners, bad and unreasonable. But the good example of the orphan boy wins the miners' hearts, and he is promoted to management.
1911 A KENTUCKY GIRL / YANKEE Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman story. The good man, in a jealous rage, turns in his moonshining rival to the revenue men, then helps free him and ends up defending him. But the moonshining rival is a coward and runs away, leaving the good man to be arrested for his crimes. Eventually the good man is exonerated and gets the girl.
1911 THE IMMORTAL ALAMO / STAR FILM CO/GASTON MELIES Produced by GASTON MELIES Directed by WILLIAM F HADDOCK Starring: FRANCIS FORD, GASTON MELIES, WILLIAM CARROLL, EDITH STOREY, DONALD PEACOCK, WILLIAM CLIFFORD Comments: The familiar Alamo story filmed on location in San Antonio, starring Francis Ford as Davy Crockett.
1911 HIGGINSES VS JUDSONS / LUBIN Starring: 'MISS' LAWRENCE, 'MR' JOHNSON Comments: The first known comedy about feuding set in Ky. Ends with reconciliation and double marriage.
1911 PEGGY, THE MOONSHINER'S DAUGHTER / KALEM Comments: A revenue agent and the moonshiner's daughter. Because of his love for the daughter, the agent allows her father to get away, extracting a promise from him that he will quit the moonshine trade.
1911 LOVE IN THE HILLS / ESSANAY Comments: A fish-out-of-water and mistaken identity comedy. A surveyor in the Ky hills falls in love with a mtn girl, whose brothers are rough and protective of her. Because of a lost note, the brothers believe the surveyor has jilted their sister and mistake another surveyor for the missing lover, whom they drag back to their cabin to marry their sister.
1911 A TENNESSEE LOVE STORY / SELIG Comments: A Romeo/Juliet love story between two feuding families. An accidental death, which gets blamed on "Romeo" and which rekindles the feud, but the lovers marry anyway. The arrival of a baby brings reconciliation.
1911 SHENANDOAH / CHAMPION Comments: A Civil War story, apparently not based on the Bronson Howard play. Cut-throat Union soldiers occupy the Valley and harass good and faithful Confederate families. A Union officer saves one family of women from this harassment, is himself captured by Confederates and threatened with death. The good Confederate daughter has a choice of marrying a Rebel soldier or seeing the good Union officer shot. She helps the officer escape.
1911 THE REVENUE MAN AND THE GIRL / BIOGRAPH Directed by D W GRIFFITH Comments: The moonshiner's daughter is going to kill the revenue man, but a sort of miracle forestalls her, and she ends up loving him and leaving for the city with him.
1911 THE CALL FROM THE HILLS / POWERS Comments: A mtn boy's musical genius (violin) is not appreciated by the mtn people, but he is discovered by a wealthy city woman. After a violent confrontation with his father, the boy goes to the city, where he is seen at the height of his powers, seemingly accepted by city society and in love with a city girl, who does not reciprocate his affection. Despondent, he remembers the hills and the girl he left behind there, who is now sick and dying. He returns to the mtns and plays her well again.
1911 DANIEL BOONE'S BRAVERY / KALEM Comments: Daniel frees himself from the usual savages in one scene by rolling into the fire and burning his bonds off.
1911 COALS OF FIRE / SELIG Starring: HERBERT BOTSWORTH Comments: Despite its title, not a coal-mining story. On the Ky frontier, two men struggle over a mtn girl. One is "big, strong, brawny," the other, "weaker in physical vitality but superior in his intellectual mentality." The brainier one wins the girl and also becomes gov of Missouri.
1911 THE REVENUE OFFICER'S LAST CASE / POWERS Comments: In the mtns of Ky, a revenue officer falls for the moonshiner's daughter. A jealous rival wounds the lawman, who is saved by the girl and her family. The lawman then arrests the girl's father. The girl pleads effectively with him, and he resigns his job in the revenue service out of love for her.
1911 LOVE IN THE HILLS / BIOGRAPH Directed by D W GRIFFITH Starring: BLANCHE SWEET Comments: A mtn girl thinks she loves a city fop, but she finds out that she is mistaken and that a manly mtneer is really the one she loves. Features the effects of a violin on the girl's emotions.
1911 MADGE OF THE MOUNTAINS / VITAGRAPH Comments: Madge is the daughter of a Tenn moonshiner. Harry Brownley, son of a rich New Yorker, goes slumming for excitement with revenuers, who bust up the still of Madge's father, who is killed while Harry is himself wounded in the raid. Ironically, Madge nurses him back to health, and naturally love develops between them. Madge ends up in a mansion in New York married to Harry.
1911 THE MOONSHINER'S TRAIL / CHAMPION Comments: In the mtns of Tenn, a moonshiner allows liquor to dribble and make a trail that the revenuers can follow.
1911 THE GIRL AND THE SHERIFF / VITAGRAPH Comments: A girl helps a wounded man being pursued by the sheriff and falls in love with him. She diverts the sheriff in his pursuit (at one point playing the banjo for him and plying him with drink) and manages to help her new lover escape the law.
1911 THE MOONSHINER(S) / RELIANCE Starring: WILLIAM WALTHALL, RUTH ROBINSON Comments: A moonshiner suspects his wife of informing on him to a revenue agent, who in this story is the clear villain. The climax is the escape of the moonshiners and the reconciliation of the man and the woman.
1911 THE MOUNTAIN LAW / ESSANAY Comments: The daughter of a moonshiner loves a young man but refuses to marry him until he agrees to give up the moonshine trade. His fellow moonshiners suspect him of informing on them, almost lynch him, but he is saved and all the moonshiners vanquished by the actions of the moonshiner's daughter.
1911 THE CHIEF'S DAUGHTER / SELIG Comments: Daniel Boone story. Daniel's son captures a chief's daughter, who is given her liberty after Boone's daughters beg for it. The Boone girls are themselves captured by Indians, and the chief's daughter, grateful to the girls for her own freedom, secures their release. Further, she masterminds the white settlers' deliverance from a large war-party of her people.
1911 THE REVENUE AND THE GIRL / KALEM Comments: In the "Blue Ridge mtns of Ky" (well, geography isn't everything), revenue officers plan to attack a notorious still. The moonshiner's daughter first misleads an agent, then rescues him from certain death in a fire set by the other revenue agents in the moonshiners' cave. Then she manages to free all the captive moonshiners and is let off by the law because she had earlier saved the agent.
1911 BONNIE OF THE HILLS / CHAMPION Comments: A high-strung mtn girl is orphaned, meets and falls in love with a city man who is forced back to the city by his father (who bitterly opposes the crude mtn Bonnie), comes unexpectedly into a fortune, goes to the city to be educated, is reunited with her city sweetheart and his disapproving father when she saves them from two highwaymen. One of several early movies in which a mtn woman handles a gun effectively.
1912 A TALE OF THE WILDERNESS / BIOGRAPH Starring: EDWIN AUGUST, CHARLES MAYO Comments: Two brothers, one an outlaw who attempts to force himself upon the beautiful daughter of a settler. When he is rejected, he rouses the Indians against the frontier settlers, then for the sake of his brother repents. Reissued in 1916.
1912 LIFE OF DANIEL BOONE / REPUBLIC Comments: Purported to be the most historically accurate depiction of Boone yet in the movies. Featured large Indian battles at Boonesborough. Also Boone's peaceful death in 1822, surrounded by children and grand-children.
1912 A MOUNTAIN TRAGEDY / RELIANCE Comments: Poor mtneers (and here the "mtns" are undoubtedly Western). The husband is knocked unconscious. Meanwhile, two drunken desperadoes, including a "Mexican," play cards to see who gets the unconscious mtneer's wife, who is no patsy. She defends herself with a gun until the sheriff arrives.
1912 THE BLIND MINER / VITAGRAPH Comments: A blind old miner improbably saves his daughter's sweetheart, "an industrious miner," from a mine explosion and fire. Shot on location in the coal-mining region of Pa.
1912 A BLUE RIDGE ROMANCE / REPUBLIC Comments: A revenue officer falls in love with a girl who rejects him and marries a lumberman instead (she thinks), but her new husband turns out to be a moonshiner. After the officer takes care of him, he and the girl head West for a new life.
1912 AN AMERICAN INVASION / KALEM Comments: Some Kentuckians in 1826 came to Calif by way of New Mexico, where they were held by Mexican authorities. The main Kentuckian later marries the Mexican woman who helps secure his release from prison.
1912 WHERE BROADWAY MEETS THE MOUNTAINS / AMERICAN Comments: A Broadway playwright finishes his play at a mtn retreat; two Broadway actors who are to play parts in the production come to the mtns to rehearse. A mtn girl, who loves the playwright, believes the playacting to be real and incites her family against the playwright. Eventually, the playwright and the mtn girl are united.
1912 FIRE AT THE MINE / GAUMONT Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, set at a coal mine. The rival who gets the girl is naturally saved from death in the mine fire by the other man, who sacrifices his life for his rival.
1912 THE DUEL / RELIANCE Starring: HENRY WALTHALL Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman: a lawyer and a moonshiner of the Ky hills are both in love with the same mtn girl and fight an inconclusive duel for her hand. The woman marries the lawyer who becomes gov of Ky and intends to wipe out moonshining. The moonshining former rival goes to kill the gov, but the daughter of the lawyer and the woman make the moonshiner repent.
1912 A CHILD'S PLEA / ECLAIR Comments: Two young KY mtneers are both in love with Virginia Dare. One frames his rival for murder and thereby gets Virginia for himself. All three end up in New York City, where the bad mtneer turns in the unjustly framed mtneer for the murder. The bad mtneer repents when he sees the face of the good mtneer's child, and at the last moment the trial of the good mtneer is interrupted and all is put right.
1912 THE BLACK WALL / VITAGRAPH Starring: KENNETH CASEY, ADELE DE GARD Comments: Two children get trapped in a coal mine behind "the black wall," the debris of coal after a cave-in. The story was "taken by the authority of the United States Bureau of Mines."
1912 A FEUDAL DEBT / NESTOR Comments: A man kills another man, and the act is witnessed by the dead man's 10-year-old son, who is brought up believing it his duty to continue the blood feud. Eighteen years later, the boy's sister falls in love with the son of the man who killed his father, and through this love and the illness of the mother, "the fanatical feudist is melted and subjugated in spirit."
1912 THAT HOUN' DAWG / PATHE Comments: "This story is based on that now famous song which blew in from the Ozark region. The film is a screamingly funny comedy from beginning to end." The song features the chorus, "They better quit kicking my dog around."
1912 THE END OF THE FEUD / AMERICAN Comments: First of three different movies produced in 1912 with this title. Bruce Jackson, the son of the dying leader of the Jackson clan, has been given the obligation of carrying on a feud with the Perriwells. He moves West where there are presumably no Perriwells, but he soon meets one and is forced finally to lay the feud aside.
1912 KAINTUCK / RELIANCE Comments: The title character is a big, lumbering, apparently slow-witted mtn boy in love with a mtn girl. A slick outsider, an artist, wins the love of the girl, but Kaintuck is obliged to save the artist from some moonshiners, even though he is his rival.
1912 THE SERPENTS / VITAGRAPH Comments: Made on location at Chimney Rock and in Hickory Nut Gap in the western NC mtns.
1912 HILL FOLKS / GEM Comments: Clem Parker, a young mtneer, had left his native mtns years before to get "cultured" and educated, and he returns to his mtn district as a lawyer. But his former neighbors resent his presence because they are moonshiners. They try to do him in, to no avail, and he wins the heart of the beautiful mtn girl Judith.
1912 PANSY / SELIG Comments: A comedy, wherein the butt of the joke is a politician's cowardice. At a mtn resort, a tame bear named Pansy becomes a tourist attraction. A no-good politician conspires to fake a film of himself wrestling Pansy. Mtneers replace Pansy with a real wild bear and enjoy the results. A fragment of this film survives in the Library of Congress.
1912 A ROMANCE IN OLD KENTUCKY / ECLAIR Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. The woman's father is a moonshiner. One of the two men is a revenue spy; the other, an honest mtneer. The girl ends up going West with the honest mtneer to get away from moonshining, revenue men, and jealousy.
1912 THE LITTLE MOONSHINER / NESTOR Comments: The two daughters of a moonshiner who dies are left to run his operation. The eldest daughter is loved by two men, one of whom in retaliation turns her in to the revenue officers.
1912 A MOONSHINER'S HEART / ESSANAY Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman: the revenue detective and the moonshiner's daughter and a rival moonshiner. The woman chooses the lawman.
1912 FERDIE'S FAMILY FEUD / IMP Comments: A comedy with a plotline repeated many times: Ferdinand Featherbrain, a penniless counter jumper, is notified that he has inherited a legacy, left by a relative living in the moonshiner's district in Tenn. The legacy, however, is a family feud.
1912 IN OLD TENNESSEE / IMP Comments: Nell Gwinn, a government secret agent, is given the assignment of going into the Tenn mtns undercover to flush out an illicit still. She gives money to a mtn man to betray the moonshiners, is herself discovered and then saved, and she ends up marrying the mtn man she bribed.
1912 A FEUD IN THE KENTUCKY HILLS / BIOGRAPH Directed by D W GRIFFITH Starring: MARY PICKFORD, JACK PICKFORD, KATE BRUCE Comments: Features some spectacular pitched battles between the two feuding families that are suggestive of what Griffith would eventually stage for his battles in "A Birth of a Nation."
1912 THE END OF THE FEUD / ESSANAY Comments: The Parkers and the Simpsons at war in Ky. Jim Parker has been off at college. He returns, falls for Rose Simpson. The Simpsons try to break up the romance, but the two lovers run away together anyway and are married. Years later, their child Millie is instrumental in finally putting an end to the feud.
1912 WOOERS OF MOUNTAIN KATE / AMERICAN Comments: Mountain Kate is wooed by three suitors. "A triangular struggle ensues, & after the excitement has subsided, Mountain Kate is again left to lead the lonesome life of a hermit."
1912 A KENTUCKY FEUD / REX Comments: Between the McCalls and the Buckners. Ends with a general reconciliation.
1912 MOUNTAIN DEW / KALEM Comments: Revenue agent is saved from death by mtn girl, with whom he falls in love.
1912 WAY OF THE MOUNTAINS / LUBIN Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. One of the men attempts to force himself on the woman, attempts to murder his rival, accidentally kills the woman's little brother. Eventually the woman and the good mtneer are united, the bad mtneer executed summarily by all the other mtneers.
1912 BATTLE IN THE VIRGINIA HILLS / KALEM Comments: During the course of a feud between the Tuckers and the Hoods, young Joe Hood shoots and wounds by mistake beautiful Nancy Tucker. These two eventually fall in love, are both renounced by their families, wed anyway.
1912 BLUE RIDGE FOLKS / CHAMPION Comments: A love-triangle between Dallas Walters and James Barker, both of whom love Ruth Barton. Involves a house fire and a chase by the sheriff's posse.
1912 THE SHERIFF PROTEM / MELIES Comments: A moonshiner and his daughter are betrayed by a vengeful mtneer who has been rejected by the daughter. An interim sheriff is sent to arrest the old man, who is fiercely defended by the daughter. The daughter is shot and killed by the rejected suitor, and the shock of that death causes the father to renounce moonshining and the "sheriff protem" to give up his badge.
1912 THE END OF THE FEUD / LUBIN Comments: In the Tenn mtns, the Blakes and the Morgans. An ancient feud is revived when a Morgan shoots and kills a Blake dog. The wounding of a little Morgan girl causes shocked repentance and an end to the feud.
1912 BLACKENED HILLS / AMERICAN Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman featuring a mtn witch and another girl, an evil hellcat, who also loves one of the men, the good one. The evil man and the evil hellcat are both defeated, so that true love can triumph.
1913 THE AWAKENING / AMERICAN Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, wherein the good man is mtn, the bad man from the city. The bad man wins temporarily, takes the woman to the city, where she is awakened to truth and returns to the hills.
1913? BURIED ALIVE IN A COAL MINE / INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM CO Comments: A refined young man is forced by circumstances to take a coal-mining job in Pennsylvania, where his natural aristocracy cannot be hid from mine owner, the owner's pretty daughter, or from the miners, whom the young man talks out of striking. He gets promoted to the head office and marries the owner's daughter.
1913 THE MOUNTAINEERS / EDISON Directed by BANNISTER MERWIN Starring: CHARLES OGLE, GERTRUDE MCCOY, AUGUSTUS PHILLIPS, WILLIAM WEST Comments: A moonshiner film in which the moonshiner's daughter is converted by a visiting parson and wishes her father's still smashed and ends up in love with a revenue agent.
1913 BUD TILDEN, MAIL THIEF / RELIANCE Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, in which the title character is a good mtneer but is framed by his evil rival as a reader of obscene literature. The evil rival mails the obscene material to the woman, and to save her from seeing it, Budd robs the mail carrier.
1913 THE GAME WARDEN / KALEM Comments: A young mtneer with no respect for the law must learn respect from the game warden.
1913 WHERE THE MOUNTAINS MEET / ESSANAY Comments: A marriage between a young couple, the man proving to be a wastral. He must reform before the end.
1913 THE MOUNTAIN WITCH / KALEM Starring: JANE WOLFE, CARLYLE BLACKWELL Comments: A young minister is appointed to a mtn parish where he must defend an odd mtn girl against the prejudices of the mtn people.
1913 THE FIRE COWARD / KALEM Starring: EARLE FOX, IRENE BOYLE Comments: The hero is a revenue officer who loves the sister of wildcat whiskey makers, but he is cowardly in the face of fire, and disgraces himself before the sister. He must redeem himself in courage, and he succeeds in arresting the moonshiners.
1913 BLACK DIAMONDS / VITAGRAPH Comments: A non-fiction "industrial," an inspection of the coal mines of the "richest coal fields in the United States."
1913 THE STRENGTH OF MEN / VITAGRAPH Comments: Made on location in the western NC mtns.
1913 BROTHER LOVE / AMERICAN Comments: Jimmy a poor mtn boy is blind, and his brother Ed sends him to the city to be operated upon. The operation is successful, but Jimmy becomes the pawn of a city woman, gets jilted, roughed up by city toughs, becomes blind again, is rescued by brother Ed and returns blind but wiser to the mtns.
1913 THE CITY FELLER / MAJESTIC Comments: A hustling New Yorker comes to the timber region of Tenn, stumbles into a nest of moonshiners, and falls in love with a moonshiner's daughter, who is lusted after by an uncouth and unscrupulous mtn man. The city man wins, taking the daughter back to the rich life in New York.
1913 BROTHER BILL / VITAGRAPH Starring: EDITH STORY, NED FINLEY, CHESTER HESS Comments: Bill's brother Jim has fallen in love with a girl in the mtn village, who is merely trifling with his affections, and has made a tough character there jealous. Brother Bill must repeatedly save Jim, but in the process he wins the love of the woman who had been trifling with Jim's affections.
1913 A MOONSHINER'S WIFE / LUBIN Produced by J M NICHOLLS Starring: ORMI FLAWLEY, EDWIN CAREWE Comments: An acrobat kills a man in the city, flees to the mtns, falls in love with a moonshiner's daughter.
1913 THE MOONSHINER'S LAST STAND / PATHE/MUTUAL Comments: A moonshiner sells illicit whiskey to Indians on a nearby reservation. A revenue officer, in love with the moonshiner's daughter, must decide between love and duty. "A tribe of drunken Indians demanding more whiskey puts in an appearance at the crucial moment and a fight for life ensues."
1913 IN THE BATTLE'S SMOKE / PILOT Comments: "The story is of a feudist who kills a man and leaves the section. Later, in the Civil War, the slayer and the son of the man killed meet on the field of battle." Reconciliation follows.
1913 THE TRANSITION / VITAGRAPH Starring: CHARLES BENNETT, MARY CHARLESON, GEORGE C STANLEY Comments: Moonshiner and his daughter and the law and the usual love between daughter and lawman.
1913 HELD FOR RANSOM / RELIANCE Comments: A young man swindled out of his fortune in the city, becomes a hermit in the Va mtns. By extraordinary occasion, he kidnaps the daughter of the man who wronged him and falls in love with her.
1913 IN ANOTHER'S NEST / AMERICAN Comments: City man goes to the mtns, is enchanted by the clean honesty of people there, disinherits his rich and spoiled family. His children come to mtns and woo the children of the family their father is now leaving his wealth to.
1913 AN INNOCENT INFORMER / EDISON Starring: SYDNEY AYRES, CHARLES SUTTON, BETTY HARTE Comments: A Ky moonshiner's daughter innocently leads the revenue men to her father's still.
1913 A SPLENDID SCAPEGRACE / EDISON Directed by C J BRABIN Starring: MARC MACDERMOTT, CHARLES OGLE, BIGELOW COOPER Comments: Based on an O Henry short story. A man wishing to become an aristocrat buys for $200 another man's feud with the Coltranes, a family feud being one sure sign of social standing. Redone in 1918 (?) as A Blackjack Bargainer (which see below).
1913 THE WHIM OF DESTINY / MAJESTIC Comments: The hero is a revenue detective who must arrest the gambler father of the girl he loves.
1913 THE EIGHTH NOTCH / KALEM Comments: The Griggs-Danvers feud. Ed Griggs has seven notches on the handle of his gun for the seven Danvers he has killed.
1913 THE WILL OF FATE / ECLIPSE Comments: Dick loves Anna, whose family is involved with smuggling and is being pursued by revenue agents. Dick's father, though, is the one who gets killed by the agents. In revenge, Dick's mother thinks to do harm to Anna's family and ends up killing her own son by mistake.
1913 A ROMANCE OF THE OZARKS / LUBIN Comments: A revenue officer comes into the mtns looking for moonshine, rescues a beautiful mtn maid from the unwanted attentions of a rough moonshiner. She not only saves the revenue man from treachery but marries him in the end.
1913 SHENANDOAH / KALEM Produced by KENEAN BUELL Directed by KENEAN BUELL Starring: BOB VIGNOLA, HENRY HALLAM, ALICE HOLLISTER, HAL CLEMENTS Comments: A Civil War epic, shot on location in the Shenandoah Valley. Based on a famous and successful play by Bronson Howard. Kalem secured exclusive rights to film the play in 1912, warning other film companies away from the story.
1913 THE MADCAP OF THE HILLS / RELIANCE Starring: VIRGINIA WESTBROOK, CLAIRE KROLL, PAUL SCARDON, IRVING CUMMINGS, ALAN HALE Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. The woman's true love is a simple mtneer, but her head is turned by a city smoothie. His perfidy takes a long time to manifest itself to her, but she ends up in the arms of the simple mtneer.
1913 THE KENTUCKY FEUD / WARNER'S FEATURES/SATEX Starring: MARTHA RUSSELL Comments: Pitched battle instead of a planned wedding. The mtn girl jerks off her veil and stomps it and picks up a gun. Everyone is killed until the dramatic moment when just the girl & the boy face one another. Amor Vincit Omnia.
1913 A CHILD OF THE HILLS / PILOT Comments: An overworked composer is sent to recuperate in the Blue Ridge mtns, falls in love with a mtn lass, ends up taking her away to the city.
1913 THE GUERRILLA MENACE / BISON Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, wherein the good man is a loyal son of the Confederacy who joins up to fight the Civil War, leaving his sweetheart at the mercy of a malicious tavern-owner rival. The "guerrilla menace" of the title is provided by Union sympathizers, who are egged on by the malicious tavern-owner. Eventually of course the good Rebel boy wins, choking the malicious rival to death.
1913 HER FINAL CHOICE / RELIANCE Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman in a Pennsylvania mining town.
1913 THE MISSIONARY'S TRIUMPH / PATHEPLAY Comments: Moonshiners and a mining camp and a good gentle woman who intends to bring godliness and cleanliness to miners, which means first getting rid of the moonshiners.
1913 BUILDING THE CHATTANOOGA LIGHT AND POWER DAM / ESSANAY Comments: An industrial filmed on location.
1913 THE MOONSHINER'S MISTAKE / KALEM Comments: Illicit whiskey-making but with no revenue men. "A tragedy worked out by the mtn folk themselves."
1913 THROUGH THE CUMBERLAND MOUNTAINS, TENNESSEE / ESSANAY Comments: A scenic, taken from the front of a locomotive. Contained also "a fine character study in the face of an old darkie man."
1913 THE RED OLD HILLS OF GEORGIA / EDISON Produced by CHARLES M SEAY Comments: Filmed on location in Ga. A young engineer from outside comes to the hills and falls in love with an ignorant mtn girl and incidentally introduces her to more modern farming methods, thus improving her life. "Very valuable mineral deposits" are discovered on the girl's poor property, and the young engineer finds it convenient to announce his love for her.
1913 A VIRGINIA FEUD / KALEM Directed by ROBERT VIGNOLA Starring: HENRY HALLAM, JAMES B ROSS, JAMES VINCENT, ALICE HOLLISTER Comments: Filmed on location in the Blue Ridge mtns of Va. A marriage between two warring clans is supposed to end hostilities, but one male in each family wants to keep the feud going, and the wedding is almost scuttled. But in the end, love and reconciliation win the day.
1913 NATURE'S VENGEANCE / VICTOR Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, with a no-count city man invading the world of innocent herb-pickers in the mtns. The city man loves her and leaves her, but he is forced back at gun-point by the girl's mother and made to marry her. Then he sneaks off again in a canoe, is killed by "nature's vengeance," and his erstwhile bride is left to find true love with the good mtn man.
1913 KENTUCKY FOES / RELIANCE Starring: ALAN HALE, IRENE HUNT, GEORGE SIEGMAN, BOBBY TANSEY Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, wherein the two men are from rival feuding families. One of the men is a sorry drunk who tries to force himself on the woman, who pushes him over a cliff and thinks she's killed him. The other man protects her from the rival clan, and the drunken rival shows up alive.
1913 BATTLEFIELDS AROUND CHATTANOOGA / EDISON Comments: Another "scenic" shot on location.
1913 UP LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN ON THE ELECTRIC(AL) INCLINE / ESSANAY Comments: A "scenic" shot at Lookout Mountain, Tenn.
1913 THE MAID OF THE MOUNTAINS / NESTOR Comments: Hero is suspected of being a revenue officer, wins the girl anyway, induces her father to give up moonshining.
1913 AN ORPHAN OF WAR / KAY-BEE Comments: "John Waldron, a giant mountaineer in West Virginia, is a Northern sympathizer at the outbreak of the Civil War and is hated by his neighbors."
1913 A MOUNTAIN MOTHER / LUBIN Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. A mother wants an education for her daughter, so that she can become a lady instead of just an ignorant mtn girl.
1913 A SERIES OF TULLULAH FALLS, GEORGIA / EDISON Comments: A scenic. "Views of a mountain torrent that is soon to be choked into pipes and made to serve mankind by helping in the world's work."
1913 NAN OF THE WOODS / SELIG Comments: A wild girl story. Received poorly by the critics: Nan and her father are "very unnatural; they have no apparent reality and the players have not been able to give atmosphere to them to interest us."
1913 AN ACCIDENTAL SHOT / PATHEPLAY Starring: GEORGE GEBHARDT Comments: "The accidental shot wounds and apparently kills a revenue officer in the cabin of an old woman and her daughter. It comes from his own revolver in his own hand and in the midst of a struggle with the old woman. He has just discovered that she is selling whiskey to Indians."
1913 THE HILLS OF STRIFE / LUBIN Produced by John Ince Starring: ELEANOR BLANCHARD, ARTHUR MATHEWS Comments: Much killing between members of two feuding families, including a woman with babe in arms. A woman from the rival family rescues the baby, who grows up without the fierce hatred of the other mtneers and falls in love with a girl of the other family (actually his own cousin). At the end, after the woman who rescued him has been killed also, the boy and his sweetheart leave the mtns in disgust to live in the "peaceful valleys."
1913 SPELL OF THE PRIMEVAL / SELIG Comments: A drunken man about town leaves the city and seeks to rehabilitate himself in the mtns. There he falls in love with a beautiful and innocent mtn lass.
1913 INFLUENCE OF THE UNKNOWN / BIOGRAPH Starring: MAE MARSH, ROBERT HARRON, HENRY WALTHALL Comments: A revenue officer on the trail of a moonshiner is saved ultimately by a moonshining girl. Reissued in 1916 with a much longer plot synopsis.
1913 THE CONTENTS OF THE SUITCASE / EDISON Comments: A fish-out-of-water comedy. An innocent traveler steps off a train, picks up the wrong suitcase, gets held up by a gang of moonshiners.
1913 THE DARE-DEVIL MOUNTAINEERS / IMP Comments: A wild girl is taken to the city by her socially ambitious mother, leaving behind the girl's "dare-devil" mtn lover. In the city the girl's mother tries to force her into marriage with a corrupt Count, but the dare-devil mtn lover comes to rescue her and carries her off on a motorcycle he does not know how to drive. But they make it back to the hills and to happiness.
1913 THE GIRL O' THE WOODS / VICTOR Comments: Love affair between mtn girl, who is a member of a family of mtn squatters, and the landowner's son.
1913 IN THE MOUNTAINS OF VIRGINIA / AMERICAN Starring: HARRY VAN METER Comments: Typical moonshiner fare: urban physician needs rest, repairs to mtns, falls in love with a moonshiner's daughter, must chose between love & duty.
1913 THE SECRET OF THE MINE / VERNON FILM CO Comments: Coal mining story: a stalwart young engineer, nefarious miners.
1913 PRIMITIVE MAN / KALEM Starring: TOM MOORE, ALICE HOLLISTER Comments: A rough man of the woods falls in love with Betty, fights off her rival, marries her, proves a brute until the baby comes, when he experiences a change of heart.
1913 CAPRICE / FAMOUS PLAYERS FILM CO Starring: MARY PICKFORD, OWEN MOORE, ERNEST TRUEX, OGDEN CRANE, JAMES GORDON, BOOTS WALL Comments: City man comes to the mtns (Adirondacks), falls in love with an uncultured mtn girl (after accidentally wounding her in the arm), marries her, takes her to the city where she embarrasses him before his cultured friends, and he declares his marriage a mistake. Thus rejected, Caprice acquires refinement on her own and wins her husband back again. Paramount rereleased this morally reprehensible fable again in 1918.
1913 LITTLE KAINTUCK / VITAGRAPH Produced by ROBERT THORNBY Starring: PAUL WILLIS, KARL FORMES Comments: An orphaned mtn boy is befriended by a storekeeper. The boy has the wanderlust, but the love of his adopted "father" overcomes his desire to go back to the mtns.
1913 HILDA OF THE MOUNTAINS / NESTOR Comments: Rich man's son falls in love with poor mtneer's daughter. Both fathers bitterly opposed.
1913 THE CIRCUIT RIDER OF THE HILLS / FRONTIER Comments: "Mary, daughter of Tom Ashe, revenue officer, is in love with Bud, the son of Lige Stillwell, a moonshiner."
1913 'MID KENTUCKY HILLS / VITAGRAPH Produced by NED FINLEY Starring: NED FINLEY, EDITH STORY Comments: Daughter of a moonshiner is wooed falsely by a revenue detective.
1913 TWO GIRLS OF THE HILLS / RELIANCE Starring: ANNA LAUGHLIN Comments: Two mtn daughters of a moonshiner. One is dutiful and happy, the other rebellious and prime for seduction by a visiting city "adventurer." Almost too late, the rebellious daughter realizes her mistake in loving the city man.
1913 RED MARGARET, MOONSHINER / GOLD SEAL/UNIVERSAL Comments: A wild girl moonshiner is uncatchable until she falls in love. Reissued or remade as "Moonshine Blood" in 1916.
1913 THE SOUL OF THE SOUTH / KAY-BEE Comments: A Civil War story. The opening shows the son of a moonshiner escaping from revenue agents. He stumbles into a family that takes him in, and he falls in love with the daughter. Both he and the daughter's brother enlist in the Confederacy, and he eventually is saved again by this family from execution.
1913 THE ELECTRICIAN'S HAZARD / KALEM Comments: "Lil, an ignorant mtn girl, is awed by the ease with which Stanley, in charge of the isolated power plant, handles the machinery."
1914 THE POWER OF LIGHT / AMERICAN Produced by LORIMER JOHNSTON Starring: SYDNEY AYRES, JACK RICHARDSON, VIVIAN RICH, CHARLOTTE BURTON Comments: "Life and conditions in a moonshiner's camp." "A boy aids his father in the operation of an illicit still, yet prompted by an alert inner-consciousness, resolves to seek a remedy other than through the aid of the law."
1914 THE INTRUDER / NESTOR Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. A "big-hearted mtneer" builds a hut for the woman he loves to live with him in the wilderness. "She is happy, though she often dreams of the great world outside. Then comes the intruder from the city." After being successfully lured away to the city, the woman discovers the brute under the slick city surface and returns to her true love in the mtns.
1914 A KENTUCKY ROMANCE / KAY-BEE Comments: Two young lovers separated because of a silly feud between their families. After many misunderstandings, the feud is ended, the young lovers reunited.
1914 JUST A SONG AT TWILIGHT / MAJESTIC Comments: An uneducated mtn girl is taken to the city by a wealthy socialite, marries a city man, and develops a guilty shame over her roots. Hearing old mtn songs makes her repent her attitude.
1914 RECONCILED IN BLOOD / SELIG Comments: The Clairborne-Hawkins feud in Ky. A man of one feuding family gives blood to save a stricken child of the opposing family, ending the feud.
1914 CHILDREN OF THE FEUD / VITAGRAPH Comments: The Morton-Belfield feud. Again, reconciliation through a Romeo-Juliet love match.
1914 THOU SHALT NOT KILL / SELIG Comments: The Knox-Waterton Feud, reconciled by the ministrations of a beautiful young woman from New England, who teaches the 6th commandment. "The story is one of the slightest and practically unbelievable."
1914 THE RAIDERS / KAY-BEE Comments: Moonshining in the Ky mtns as background for two-men- and-a-woman in which all three are mtneers. Mtn woman marries the good man, a moonshiner. The bad mtn man betrays the couple by turning them in to revenuers. Both the good husband and the bad rival end up dead, the woman alone.
1914 THROUGH FIRE TO FORTUNE, OR THE SUNKEN VILLAGE / GENERAL FILM CO/LUBIN Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman against a coal-mining background.
1914 THE HIGHER LAW / MAJESTIC Comments: A secret service man on vacation in the Virginia mtns meets a beautiful girl and captures a fugitive counterfeiter.
1914 BREED O' THE MOUNTAINS / NESTOR Starring: WALLACE REID, DOROTHY DAVENPORT Comments: "A waif left at the door of a young woodsman's cabin brings about some misunderstandings." A feud between two families "in the Blue Ridge mtns."
1914 THE UNEXPECTED / BALBOA FEATURE FILMS Comments: A woman moonshine detective equipped with carrier pigeons is sent into the West Virginia hills, becomes unconsciously involved in a love triangle (fierce mtn girl jealous of her moonshiner boyfriend), and because the fierce mtn girl saves the detective from snakebite, the detective saves her moonshiner boyfriend from harm.
1914 THE HEART OF THE HILLS / REX Starring: WALLACE REID, DOROTHY DAVENPORT Comments: Moonshiner story in which a moonshining brother needs $500 to cure his crippled brother of an infirmity. Into the district comes a female revenue detective who promptly falls in love with the moonshiner. After being menaced by other moonshiners and then rescued by the man she loves, she renounces the government, he renounces moonshining, and together they go out to earn the $500 honestly.
1914 THE MOONSHINER'S DAUGHTER / MAJESTIC Comments: A hybrid two-men-and-a-woman in which the woman is the moonshiner's daughter; the good man, a revenuer; the bad man, a moonshiner. "Shooting is indulged in copiously."
1914 THE MOUNTAINEER / NESTOR Comments: An honest young mtneer mistakenly believes his true love has fallen for another, an artist from the city. The artist is himself mistaken for a revenuer and captured by rough mtneers, then is freed by the honest young mtneer as an act of altruism.
1914 WHY KENTUCKY WENT DRY / FRONTIER Comments: Burlesque of a love story and a feud, featuring "Colonel Bourbon and Colonel Sourmash."
1914 THE MYSTERY OF HIDDEN HOUSE / VITAGRAPH Comments: A "demure little mtn maiden" actually harbors a dual personality which both fascinates and appalls a visiting city man. The love of the city man cures her.
1914 FIGHTING DEATH / BLACHE FEATURES Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, in which the good mtneer is framed by the bad mtneer. But after many thrilling scrapes, the good mtneer and the woman are united.
1914 HER MOONSHINE LOVER / NESTOR Starring: EDDIE LYONS, VICTORIA FORDE, LEE MORAN Comments: A comedy burlesquing the "old-fashioned" moonshiner story.
1914 WHEN MEN WOULD KILL / WARNER'S FEATURES INC Comments: A feud between the Charlton and Redfern families. Grace Charlton goes to the city and becomes a grand opera star but does not hesitate to take sides when the feud erupts anew, even though she loves Jim Redfern, who has "completely won her by his primitive loving." The reuniting of these two lovers finally ends the feud for good.
1914 THE END OF THE FEUD / REX Starring: PAULINE BUSH, MURDOCK MACQUARRIE, LON CHANEY Comments: Feud story, "old in subject" (Romeo-Juliet love affair between a son and daughter of the rival clans), which is brought to a conclusion through the efforts of "a gospel man."
1914 THE GREAT LEAP; UNTIL DEATH DO US PART / RELIANCE MOTION PICTURE CO/MUTUAL FILM CORP Produced by D W GRIFFITH Directed by W CHRISTY CABANNE Starring: MAE MARSH, ROBERT HARRON, RALPH LEWIS, EAGLE EYE, DONALD CRISP, RAOUL WALSH Comments: Two lovers from opposite feuding families escape together on horseback and approach a great cliff, which they mean to leap from, but the horse stumbles, throwing the riders and saving their lives. All shake hands.
1914 THE STRANGER AT HICKORY NUT GAP / IMP Starring: WILLIAM E. SHAY, FRANK HERZOG, ONA HUNGERFORD Comments: A conventional moonshiner story. At the end the detective takes the mtn girl away with him to the city.
1914 MOUNTAIN LAW / REX Comments: A feud between the Hawkins and the Tyler families has been ended but breaks out again. A tragic ending in which the girl of one family kills her sweetheart in the other family.
1914 THE UNLAWFUL TRADE / REX Comments: The story of George Tate, an outcast who lived among moonshiners, who, when others are crying "every man for himself," does the right thing and helps save his sister and her lover, who "have something to live for."
1914 THE FEUD / UNIVERSAL/GOLD SEAL Produced by WILFRED LUCAS Comments: Warring mtn clans and a Romeo-Juliet romance.
1914 THE LAST OF THEIR RACE / POWERS Comments: A feud has wakened between the Cameron and McBride families because of love between two young people.
1914 THE FEUD / POWERS Starring: CLEO MADISON, GEORGE LARKIN Comments: "Typical mountain feud" drama "of the moonshiner's country." Ends with the hero and heroine as only members of their families left alive.
1914 THE BARRIER OF IGNORANCE / KALEM Starring: PAUL HURST, MARIN SAIS, GEORGE H MELFORD, JANE WOLFE, CLEO RIDGELEY Comments: "A mtneer is so ignorant that he can't realize how much his daughter will be benefited by knowing how to read and write." Background for a story of two-men-and-a-woman in which the mtn woman is convinced that marrying the city man will ruin his career, so marries the uncouth mtneer instead. Later, the city man (a doctor now) saves the woman from a head wound inflicted by her ignorant husband.
1914 TENNESSEE / KAY-BEE Comments: Moonshiner's daughter/revenue agent / divided loyalties drama.
1914 GOOD CIDER / LUBIN Comments: "A rural comedy with a barrel of cider as the main theme. Everybody doctors the cider and eventually the cider doctors everybody, even the doctor."
1914 IN THE SOUTHERN HILLS / DOMINO Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. One man kills his rival, blames the local preacher, who was about to be lynched by the irate mtneers, but the girl saves him. And the murderer is himself killed.
1914 A THROW OF THE DICE / HEPWORTH-AMERICAN Comments: An intemperate coal miner is fired, rouses fellow coal miners to strike.
1914 THE EAGLE'S MATE / FAMOUS PLAYERS Produced by ADOLPH ZUKOR Directed by JAMES KIRKWOOD Starring: MARY PICKFORD, JAMES KIRKWOOD, IDA WATERMAN, ROBERT BRODERICK, HARRY C BROWNE, RUSSELL BASSETT Comments: Based on Anna Alice Chapin's novel, set in the WVa mtns. A gentle, refined young girl is kidnapped by a wild and lawless mtneer and is suddenly confronted with life in its most brutal and savage form. Rereleased with much fanfare in 1918.
1914 JESS OF THE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY / WORLD FILM CORP Comments: A "novelty feature" of the day, with the cast composed entirely of children, ages 7 to 13, acting out a standard city- man-mtn-woman romance.
1914 NATURE'S TOUCH / AMERICAN Comments: A city man finds peace and contentment in the mtns.
1914 THE WEAKLING / KALEM Produced by KENEAN BUELL Starring: ALICE JOYCE, JERE AUSTIN, TOM MOORE Comments: A melodrama about rough mtneers, which seeks to prove that environment can overcome the benefits of heredity. "Third of the Alice Joyce Series."
1914 KAINTUCKY BILL / KALEM Comments: The old sheriff dies and in jest the mtneers nominate Kaintucky Bill, the worst moonshiner in the state, for the office.
1914 CARYL OF THE MOUNTAINS / SELIG Starring: KATHLYN WILLIAMS, THOMAS SANTSCHI Comments: A moonshiner, anxious to win a mtn maiden, tries to catch her through fear by starting the story that her father is a revenuer.
1914 THE FEUD AT BEAVER CREEK / KAY-BEE Comments: In the Tenn mtns, the Hatfields and the Coles. "The usual plot ... embracing the eventualities occurring amongst the primitive population of the backwoods."
1914 MEG O' THE MOUNTAINS / EDISON Directed by RICHARD RIDGELY Starring: MABEL TRUNNELLE Comments: "A thrilling story of love, hatred, and accusation in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Carolina."
1914 THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE / BROADWAY PICTURE PRODUCING CO Comments: From the synopsis, this may have been the version of John Fox's novel most faithful to the original. The feud between the Tollivers and the Falins, with the intervention of the outsider/engineer.
1914 THE LONG FEUD / BRONCHO Comments: A conventional moonshine story and a conventional feud story. Two lovers from rival families bring the feud to an end.
1914 MOONSHINE MOLLY / MAJESTIC Starring: MAE MARSH, ROBERT HARREN Comments: Set in Ky mtns, a Pinkerton detective disguised as a school teacher is the good man in this two-men-and-a-woman plot, and the woman leaves the hills with him at the end.
1914 THE TRAP / AMERICAN Starring: VIVIAN RICH, WILLIAM GARWOOD Comments: A revenue man and the moonshiner's daughter melodrama set in the Ky mtns.
1914 ON LONESOME MOUNTAIN (ON THE LONESOME MOUNTAIN) / LUBIN Comments: A wild son is sent to the Ky mtns to manage some timberland, but the natives have occupied the land for a number of years for their illicit stills. A love affair between the boy and the daughter of the "chief clansman."
1914 THE MOONSHINERS / KALEM Starring: PRINCESS MONA DARKFEATHER Comments: The usual moonshiner tale with an old feud involved, but in this the moonshiner is an Indian and the moonshiner's daughter, an Indian princess.
1914 THE TAMING OF SUNNYBROOK NELL / AMERICAN Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. The good man is a simple mtneer; the bad man, a city fellow who is already married and faithless. The good mtneer saves the woman from running off foolishly with the city man.
1914 REGAN'S DAUGHTER / VITAGRAPH Directed by THEODORE MARSTON Starring: HARRY NORTHRUP, JAMES MORRISON, MARY ANDERSON, DOROTHY KELLY Comments: In the Tenn mtns a detective captures an outlaw who proves to be his sweetheart's father.
1914 DAPHNIA / AMERICAN Directed by THOMAS RICKETTS Starring: GEORGE FIELD, ED COXEN, WINNIFRED GREENWOOD Comments: The girl is part of a counterfeiting gang in the mtns of Ky. Instead of the revenuer and the moonshiner's daughter, it's the federal agent and the counterfeiter's daughter.
1914 THE REVENUE OFFICER'S DEPUTY / RELIANCE Produced by F A KELSEY Comments: Another love story involving a revenue man and a daughter of the moonshiners.
1914 THE MAD MOUNTAINEER / KALEM Directed by TOM MOORE Starring: IRENE BOYLE, TOM MOORE Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. One man hurls his rival over a cliff. Conscience drives the man mad.
1914 SECRET SERVICE SNITZ / STERLING Starring: FORD STERLING Comments: Comedy. Revenue agent Snitz sent to capture moonshiners gets into several situations, wins the moonshiner's daughter at the close.
1914 THE MOUNTAIN LAW / LUBIN Starring: LOUISE HUFF, EDGAR JONES, ARTHUR MATTHEWS, JAMES DALY Comments: "For a moonshine picture it contains unusual merit." Plus the usual feud between neighboring families.
1914 THE WITCH GIRL / VICTOR Comments: At a sanitarium in the Blue Ridge Mtns: a wild girl gains the attention of a valley man, who takes her to his mansion in town, where eventually he wins her love.
1914 THE UNDER TRAIL / EXCELSIOR FEATURE FILM CO Starring: WINIFRED ALLEN Comments: From Anna Alice Chapin's book. Chapin was author of "The Eagle's Mate," in which Mary Pickford "scored a tremendous success." This story was set in the Blue Ridge mtns of Virginia.
1914 THE STRIKE AT COALDALE / ECLAIR Starring: STANLEY WALPOLE, MILDRED BRIGHT Comments: A railroad drama. A young engineer drives a train across a burning trestle, wins the strike for the men, and the hand of the boss's daughter. "A railroad trestle was actually burned for the making of this picture and cost the Eclair Company many hundreds of dollars."
1914 RIP VAN WINKLE / ALCO Directed by EDWIN MIDDLETON Starring: THOMAS JEFFERSON Comments: Filmed on location in the Catskills, "in the most impenetrable parts of the region. Children who were engaged for these scenes lived in sections from fifteen to thirty miles distant from a railroad. Most of them have never seen a train with cars."
1914 PEG O' THE WILDS / IMP Starring: VIOLET MERSEREAU, WILLIAM WELSH Comments: The epitome of the wild girl: "a mass of tangled, golden hair surrounds a face of innocent beauty; underneath the one-piece dress there are lines which suggest a rugged, well developed body. Peg climbs trees and jumps streams." Mersereau in the part exhibited "a gracious witchery, a subtle capriciousness that is at once rare and captivating."
1914 IN THE HILLS OF KENTUCKY / LUBIN Directed by EDGAR JONES Starring: GILBERT ELY, EDGAR JONES, LOUISE HUFF Comments: Two nefarious outsiders plot to steal a simple mtneer's land for the coal they know is there. They try to seduce his wife, and almost succeed in getting the mtn man to sign over his land.
1914 LIFE'S STREAM / ALCO Comments: "The mtn girl whose life is so magically changed after her encounter with a man such as she may have dreamed about in the long stillness of the woodland afternoons."
1914 THE LAST OF THE HARGROVES / EDISON Starring: GERTRUDE MCCOY, ROBERT CONNESS Comments: Feud between the Hargroves & the Buckners has left but one female and one male alive of each family. Naturally, the two of them meet and fall in love before the girl discovers the man's identity.
1914 THE STRENGTH O' TEN / AMERICAN Starring: WILLIAM GARWOOD, VIVIAN RICH, JACK RICHARDSON, REAVES EATON Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, in which not drinking is the test the girl holds the men to.
1914 THE PLACE, THE TIME AND THE MAN / ESSANAY Starring: RICHARD C TRAVERS, RAPLEY HOLMES, THOMAS COMMERFORD, GERDA HOLMES Comments: With western Pennsylvania as background, two rival railroads struggle to be the first to penetrate a mtn range with a tunnel. Adapted from a Munsey Magazine article.
1914 THE LION, THE LAMB AND THE MAN / REX Starring: PAULINE BUSH Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. The girl has come to the Ky mtns, where two brothers fall in love with her. The story flashes back to the stone age, and all three appear in skins.
1914 THE MOONSHINE MAID AND THE MAN / VITAGRAPH Produced by CHARLES L GASKILL Starring: HELEN GARDNER, NED FINLEY, REX HITCHCOCK, JOHN COSTELLO Comments: A young mtn man loves Nancy, a mtn girl, but he needs money to successfully woo her. Unknowingly he turns in her father for moonshining to get a reward but is killed for his trouble. This film may have been shot in the NC mtns.
1914 ON MOONSHINE MOUNTAIN / LUBIN Comments: Both a moonshining drama (revenue agent and the mtn girl) and two-men-and-a-woman love triangle.
1914 THE MOUNTAIN TRAITOR / ECLAIR Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, with moonshining as the background. Possibly a Western rather than an Eastern (since "prospectors" are in these mountains), but the moonshining motif seems identical to those in films about the Southern mtns.
1914 THE HEART OF THE HILLS / UNIVERSAL/VICTOR Produced by HAL REID Directed by WALTER EDWIN Starring: MARY FULLER, CHARLES OGLE Comments: Handsome surveyor falls in love with 'Lizbeth Ann, beautiful untutored girl of the mtns. She is invited to the city by her rival for the man's affections, but "on every hand 'Lizbeth's naive ways and charming disposition open to her the doors of the most exclusive homes in the great city."
1914 THE GIRL FROM THE (THUNDER) MOUNTAIN / ESSANAY Starring: RICHARD C TRAVERS, RUTH STONEHOUSE Comments: Set in the Virginia mtns: "A moonshiner melodrama which tells the story of virile, rugged life in the mountains, in which the usual government official comes into contact with the natives and falls in love with the barefooted girl in a tattered dress."
1914 WHO'S WHO IN HOGG'S HOLLOW / VITAGRAPH Directed by SIDNEY DREW Comments: A comedy wherein Bixford, a city fellow, runs afoul of Phineas Hogg, who is Sheriff, Judge, Hotelier, etc. of Hogg's Hollow.
1915 HIS FIGHTING BLOOD / SELIG Directed by THOMAS SANTSCHI Starring: THOMAS SANTSCHI, BESSIE EYTON Comments: "Unusual photography realistically picturing the wonderful mtns, hills and vales of old Ky ... picturesque mtn passes, rough cabins ... an atmosphere of feudal days, and dealing with Ky mtneer life, and primitive manhood and womanhood." A feud story.
1915 THE STILL ON SUNSET MOUNTAIN / DOMINO Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman in which the bad man is a dastardly revenue officer.
1915 THE CREED OF THE CLAN / ESSANAY Starring: RUTH STONEHOUSE, BRYANT WASHBURN, RAPLEY HOLMES, LILLIAN DREW Comments: Based on a story in Munsey Magazine. Probably a moonshiner pict, as the plot featured a detective.
1915 IN THE TENNESSEE HILLS / KAY-BEE Comments: Out-of-work hero whose bed-ridden mother is ejected by the landlord. The mother dies & the hero shoots the landlord. Captured by a posse, the hero is left on his horse with a noose tied around his neck so that when the horse moves he will be hanged. Heroine arrives in time to save him.
1915 THE PRAYER OF A HORSE / BIG U/UNIVERSAL Starring: AGNES VERNON, MURDOCK MACQUARRIE, ALBERT MACQUARRIE Comments: "A sort of Black Beauty story, told by a horse. A good Ky feud story is pictured in the opening scenes, the horse taking a prominent part." Produced by permission of the NY Women's League for Animals.
1915 DIANA OF EAGLE MOUNTAIN / BISON Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman, plus moonshining. The city man takes the mtn girl as his wife to the city, where she becomes an insufferable social butterfly.
1915 MOONSHINES / MINA Comments: A cautionary tale about the evils of drink under the guise of comedy. The whole pict is a dream a drunk man has, featuring a sinister moonshine king.
1915 THE MAID OF THE MIST / REX Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. "Ray, a young novelist, sets out for the mountains in search of local color." He ends up marrying a mtn maid, who is beloved by a jealous mtneer. Because the jealous mtneer is also the postmaster, he is able to keep the lovers separated and in the dark about one another for months.
1915 MOLLY OF THE MOUNTAINS / BRONCHO/MUTUAL FILM CORP Comments: A young surveyor makes love to the moonshiner's daughter, refuses to marry her, tells the revenue officers of the still, is himself later mistaken for a moonshiner and killed.
1915 A NIGHT IN KENTUCKY / ESSANAY Comments: Weird story of mistaken identity. A man stalled in Ky mtns by a train wreck is captured by a mtn clan and accused of ruining their sister.
1915 THE SONS OF TOIL / DOMINO Comments: Coal mining plus two-men-and-a-woman.
1915 WILD BLOOD / IMP Starring: WILLIAM GARWOOD, VIOLET MERSEREAU Comments: A feud story with a new twist: the girl of one clan follows the mtn man to the city vowing to "get his blood." He becomes a doctor and he allows his blood to be used in a transfusion to save her life and she repents her hatred.
1915 LOVE AND HANDCUFFS / POWERS Starring: SYDNEY AYRES, DORIS PAWN Comments: Moonshiner's daughter and revenue agent.
1915 THE VOW / BROADWAY FILM CO Directed by S E V TAYLOR Starring: MARION LEONARD Comments: Feud violence is inherited through the bloodline in this bizarre tale, which begins in the Ky mtns when a rejected suitor kills a young woman's husband and vows to kill her infant son. When the son grows up, he and his mother are now part of New York's fashionable crowd (yeah, sure), and his mother is alarmed by her son's sudden and unaccountable desire to visit Ky, not to mention the way he is unconsciously fondling a gun.
1915 M'LISS / WORLD FILM CORP Starring: HOWARD ESTABROOK, BARBARA TENNANT Comment: A better-known version of this Bret Harte story was made in 1918 as a Western starring Mary Pickford. But this earlier version was done as an "Eastern" on location in western NC in and around Asheville. M'Liss lives with her dissipated father in Red Gulch, but decides to acquire education and manners when a handsome outsider comes to town.
1915 THE CURE OF THE MOUNTAINS / LAEMMLE Starring: CHARLES ALEXANDER, HELEN LESLIE, FRANK LLOYD Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman and a case of mistaken intentions. The hard-drinking city man has come to the mtns to dry out.
1915 A PROPHET OF THE HILLS / LAEMMLE Starring: MARC ROBBINS, HELEN LESLIE, FRANK LLOYD Comments: Feud story. The prophet of the title is killed in his efforts to bring peace to the warring factions.
1915 THE SPY'S SISTER / LUBIN Comments: Divided loyalties among mtneers because of Civil War.
1915 THE LAST OF THE STILLS / SELIG Starring: VIRGINIA KIRTLEY, ROBYN ADAIR Comments: Moonshine whiskey, revenue officers, and love between the moonshiner's daughter & the revenue officer.
1915 AN IDYL OF THE HILLS / REX Starring: PAULINE BUSH, WILLIAM DOWLIN, LON CHANEY Comments: A stranger comes into moonshining country, is suspected of being a revenue spy. "By a curious turn of events his life is threatened by three guns in the hands of different people at the same moment."
1915 THE REVENUE AGENT / ESSANAY Starring: G M ANDERSON, MARGUERITE CLAYTON, LEE WILLARD Comments: Revenue agent disguised as painter wins the heart of mtn gal, and his rival, a mtn boy, gives up his claim to the gal in favor of the revenue agent.
1915 THE GODDESS / VITAGRAPH Directed by THOMAS INCE Starring: ANITA STEWART Comments: Filmed on location at Bat Cave, Chimney Rock, and the Esmeralda Inn in western NC.
1915 ON BITTER CREEK / LUBIN Produced by EDGAR JONES Comments: Scenario by Emmett Campbell Hall. A conventional feud story.
1915 THE MAID O' THE MOUNTAINS / BIOGRAPH Starring: LOUISE VALE, KENNETH DAVENPORT, EDWARD CECIL, JACK DRUMEIR, FRANKLIN RITCHIE Comments: Moonshiners, a moonshiner's pretty daughter, an unwelcome suitor, a marshall in search of lawbreakers, and a handsome novelist of fiction.
1915 THE WORD / UNITED FILM SERVICE/LARIAT Comments: Mtns as refuge for bandit who only commits a robbery to get what is by rights his.
1915 IN THE VALLEY / THANHOUSER Comments: Innocent girl from mtns goes to "the valley" (that is, the city), is almost ruined by her innocence & an unscrupulous city man, returns to mtns and her contentment as wife of a mtn man.
1915 MOUNTAIN MARY / AMERICAN Starring: VIVIAN RICH, JOSEPH GALBRAITH, JACK RICHARDSON, LOUISE LESTER, CHARLES NEWTON Comments: Standard feud story with the classic dilemma: the son of one family "is torn by conflicting emotions--love for the girl and the promise he has made to his wounded father."
1915 DEAR LITTLE OLD TIME GIRL / LAEMMLE Starring: WILLIAM C DOWLIN, VIOLET MACMILLAN Comments: Mtn girl is sent to the city where she charms a city man by her pretty, old-fashioned, unsophisticated ways.
1915 HER RUSTIC HERO / NESTOR/UNIVERSAL Directed by HARVEY GATES Starring: VICTORIA FORDE, EDDIE LYONS Comments: A comedy about a would-be authoress who goes to the mtns to find a character to write about. The man poses as a mtn youth and tries to teach her a lesson. They end up in love and married.
1915 JANE OF THE SOIL / ESSANAY Starring: EDMUND F COBB, LILLIAN DREW, RICHARD C TRAVERS Comments: Jane, a "mtneer girl, wild & rough," "fights a bitter battle with conscience because she believes she has killed a man." She has been sent out of the mtns for schooling, returns with the rough edges buffed off but still with the "simple soul" of a wild mtn girl.
1915 THE CUB / WORLD FILM CORP/BRADY Produced by GEORGE W LEDERER Directed by MAURICE TOURNEAU Starring: JOHN HINES, MARTHA HEDMAN Comments: Based on Thompson Buchanan's 1910 Broadway satire of mtn feuds. The director & his asst. went to WVa, via Bluefield, to visit with Devil Anse Hatfield to interview him for backgrounds, etc. A photograph of that meeting was published in "The Moving Picture World."
1915 WHERE HAPPINESS DWELLS / UNIVERSAL/BIG U Starring: ADELE LANE, EDWARD SLOMAN Comments: Two city people on vacation meet in the mtns.
1915 MOUNTAIN JUSTICE / REX Starring: LON CHANEY, ARTHUR SHIRLEY, ELSIE JANE WILSON, GRACE THOMPSON Comments: Conventional plot dealing with the running of an illicit still, a cruel mtneer who abuses his wife. His partner punishes him and gives him over to justice.
1915 THE MIRROR / LUBIN Comments: "She is a simple mtn girl with an overabundance of vanity." Two-men-and-a-woman.
1915 THE MAID OF THE WILD / BALBOA Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. One of the men is a sickly city fellow who wins the mtn girl & takes her to the city. "But Lucy cannot reconcile herself to this strange, cramped city life with its pretenses and restraints."
1915 SEE AMERICA FIRST / GAUMONT/MUTUAL FILM CORP Comments: Documentary footage of views in and around Asheville, NC.
1915 THE CODE OF THE MOUNTAINS / WORLD Comments: From the novel by Charles Neville Buck. Filmed entirely in the Adirondacks. "It had been the intention to make the film in the South, but this was impossible."
1915 SUNSHINE AND TEMPEST / RIALTO Starring: FLORENCE TEMPEST, MARION SUNSHINE, FLAVIA ARCARO, SIDNEY MASON, JOHN REINHARDT, HENRY W PEMBERTON, LOUISE KENT, JAMES LEVERING, JACK HOPKINS Comments: Two-women-and-a-man, with moonshining as background.
1915 THE VILLAGE HOMESTEAD / ESSANAY Produced by JOSEPH BYRON TOTTEN Starring: DARWIN KARR, BETTY BROWN, JOSEPH BYRON TOTTEN, HOWARD LANG Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman with moonshining as background. The plot "would seem to indicate that the scenes of this drama are laid in Kentucky; the scenery, however, is pure New England."
1915 BILLIE--THE HILL BILLY / BEAUTY Starring: NEVA GERBER, WILLIAM CARROLL, LUCILLE WARD, WEBSTER CAMPBELL, TEDDY LYNCH, ROBERT MILLER Comments: The first known use of the term "hillbilly" in the movies, here used in reference to people in the Ozarks. "Pap" is a tyrant, like many mtn fathers in the silents. A city man comes to these mtns and rescues pap's daughter from his tyranny, taking her back to the city with him.
1915 A KENTUCKY IDYL / VICTOR Starring: J WARREN KERRIGAN, ETHEL PHILLIPS, T D CRITTENDEN, HELEN LESLIE, NORBERT MYLES Comments: A no-account mtn man allows a newly arrived missionary to stay in these Ky mtns because the parson has a pretty daughter. He eventually gets both religion & the girl.
1915 THE HEART OF THE BLUE RIDGE / WORLD FILM CORP/SHUBERT Directed by JAMES YOUNG Starring: CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG, CHESTER BARNETT, ROBERT CUMMINGS Comments: Moonshiners, two-men-and-a-woman (the latter named Plutina), plus a pet bear. Filmed on location at the Esmeralda Inn and at Chimney Rock in the western NC mtns. Rereleased in 1917 as The Savage Instinct.
1915 LON OF LONE MOUNTAIN / REX Starring: ARTHUR SHIRLEY, LON CHANEY, GEORGE HARRELL, MARCIA MOORE Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman; or, learned chivalry vs brutish uneducated mtn male behavior. But the brutish one saves his schoolteacher rival & wins the girl.
1915 A MYSTERY OF THE MOUNTAINS / BIOGRAPH Starring: IVAN CHRISTY, MARY MALATESTA, JACK DRUMEIR, JOSEPH MCDERMOTT, KATE BRUCE, SIDNEY D'ALBROOK, JAMES FUREY Comments: A poor mtneer & his virtuous daughter, his rich city relatives who owe money but won't pay it. The poor mtneer is accused of killing his rich relative, goes to prison where he meets an imprisoned moonshiner.
1915 THE FEUD / RELIANCE Directed by F I BUTLER Starring: MARGUERITE MARSH, WILLIAM HINCKLEY, RAYMOND WELLS, PORTER STRONG, KATE TONCRAY Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman with a feud motif.
1915 MARTYRS OF THE ALAMO; OR THE BIRTH OF TEXAS / FINE ARTS/TRIANGLE FILM CORP Produced by D W GRIFFITH Directed by WILLIAM CHRISTY CABANNE Starring: WALTER LONG, SAM DE GRASSE, FRED BURNS, ALFRED PAGET, ALFRED D SEARS, TOM WILSON Comments: Coonskin caps galore, with Alfred Sears as Davy Crockett.
1915 THE PARSON OF PINE MOUNTAIN / REX Starring: BEN WILSON, DOROTHY PHILLIPS, MATTHEW VON BETZ, JOSEPH W GIRARD Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. One of the men is a parson who ends up forcing the other man, who has betrayed the girl, into marrying her.
1915 THE END OF THE ROAD / AMERICAN Starring: HAROLD LOCKWOOD, MAY ALLISON, HELENE ROSSON, WILLIAM STOWELL, WILLIAM EHFE, LIZETTE THORNE, HARRY VON METER, HAL CLEMENTS, BEATRICE VAN, NAN CHRISTIE Comments: A Mulligan stew: wealthy Northerners at a mtn resort, a mortgage coming due & no money to pay it with, moonshiners, two- men-and-a-woman.
1915 THE SHRINE OF HAPPINESS / BALBOA Directed by BERTRAM BRACKEN Starring: JACKIE SAUNDERS, WILLIAM CONKLIN, PAUL GILMORE Comments: The first 5-reel photoplay ever hand-colored. "A child of nature, a sort of mountain sprite," is left an orphan & is taken to the city by an old friend of her father's.
1915 THE RIVER OF ROMANCE / ESSANAY Starring: JOHN LORENZ, CHARLES E ASHLEY, ELIZABETH TINDER, CHARLES W RACY Comments: A young engineer is offered $10,000 if he can figure how to get through a mtn range without building a tunnel. He is captured by moonshiners, falls in love with a mtn girl.
1915 THE FLOWER OF THE HILLS / VITAGRAPH Starring: CAROLYN BIRCH, LEO DELANEY, DENTON VANE, LOUISE BEAUDET, ROSE TAPLEY Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. The woman is won by the city man.
1915 THE TERROR OF THE FOLD / CENTAUR/MUTUAL FILM CORP Comments: Two-men-and-a-girl.
1915 THE MAKING OVER OF GEOFFREY MANNING / VITAGRAPH/BROADWAY STAR FEATURE Directed by HARRY DAVENPORT Starring: HARRY MOREY, L ROGERS LYTTON, BELLE BRUCE, NED FINLEY, LOGAN PAUL, KATE DAVENPORT, JACK BROWN, MARION HENRY Comments: The title character, an idle and rich layabout, can't even take care of himself until he gets a job at his father's steel mill and learns to work. He takes the side of the workers against his father (who naturally doesn't recognize him as his son), mediates a strike, wins his father's respect, rallies the workers, attracts a suitable mate by his newfound masculinity.
1916 MISSY / UNIVERSAL FILM MFG CO/LAEMMLE Produced by LYNN REYNOLDS Starring: MYRTLE GONZALEZ, ALFRED ALLEN, VAL PAUL, FRANK NEWBURG Comments: The mtn girl goes to the city but is appalled by the social life & flees back to the mtns.
1916 IN THE NAME OF THE LAW / MUTUAL FILM CORP/THANHOUSER Starring: GLADYS HULETTE, JOHN LEHNBERG, MORGAN THORPE, MORRIS FOSTER Comments: The moonshiner's daughter, the revenue agent, in a near-tragedy. Early role for Gladys Hulette who would play another mtn lass in "Tol'able David" in 1921.
1916 THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS / PALLAS PICTURES/PARAMOUNT Starring: DUSTIN FARNUM Comments: An adaptation of Charles Neville Buck's novel. The city is snobbish & corrupting; only in the mtns can the hero realize "a strong heroic love."
1916 TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE / LASKY/PARAMOUNT Produced by CECIL B DEMILLE Starring: CHARLOTTE WALKER, THEODORE ROBERTS, EARLE FOXE, THOMAS MEIGHAN Comments: John Fox Jr's novel treated strictly as a moonshiner/ moonshiner's daughter/ revenue agent plot. "The utter conventionality of the story may act as a weakness in cities where audiences are more critical." Survives in the Library of Congress.
1916 A WOMAN'S POWER / WORLD-EQUITABLE/BRADY Starring: MOLLY KING Comments: Adapted from Charles Neville Buck's novel, "The Code of the Mountains." A mtn girl betters her condition in life. Part of the action set in the Philippines.
1916 THE MASKED RIDER / QUALITY PICTURES/METRO Directed by FRED J BALSHOFER Starring: HAROLD LOCKWOOD, MAY ALLISON, LESTER CUNEO, H W WILLIS, JOHN MACDONALD, HARRY BURKHARDT Comments: Filmed at the Esmeralda Inn in the shadow of Chimney Rock in the western NC mtns, this was a moonshining actioner, with the hero a secret service agent who disguises himself as a parson. He takes the moonshiner's daughter out of the hills at the end.
1916 FOUR NARRATIVES / LUBIN Produced by PAUL M POWELL Starring: R H GRAY, W E PARSONS, GEORGE ROUTH, GEORGE W CHASE, VELMA WHITMAN, NORMAN NAPIER Comments: Narratives within narratives. The first one is the story of a revenue agent hunting moonshiners. He falls for the moonshiner's daughter who is also loved by a bad mtneer.
1916 MAYBE MOONSHINE / KALEM Produced by WILLIAM BEAUDINE Starring: LLOYD V HAMILTON, BUD DUNCAN, ADONI FOVIERI Comments: A Ham-and-Bud comedy. They are first shown as small boys, children of rival mtn clans. When they arrive at manhood, they become ardent moonshiners and feudists. Burlesque.
1916 THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU / WORLD FILM CORP/FROHMAN Starring: ALICE BRADY, JACK SHERRILL Comments: Filmed in Yancey Co, NC, at the Carolina Spruce Band Mill and log pond near Pensacola.
1916 THE BATTLE ROYAL / VIM/GENERAL FILM CO Comments: A feud comedy. One son of each house loves a daughter of the other. Both families united when a revenue officer comes snooping.
1916 ACCORDING TO THE CODE / ESSANAY Produced by GEORGE K SPOOR Directed by E H CALVERT Starring: LEWIS S STONE, MARGUERITE CLAYTON, SYDNEY AINSWORTH Comments: Filmed near Chattanooga "in the exact locality in which the author has laid his plot." Deals with a love story of the Civil War and the meeting of the aged principals more than a half-century afterward.
1916 THE BUCKSHOT FEUD / LUBIN Directed by EDWIN MCKIM Starring: DAVY DON Comments: A comedy with a luckless lawyer trying a case in a courtroom filled with two feuding families.
1916 AT PINEY RIDGE / SELIG/V L S E Produced by WILLIAM ROBERT DALY Directed by WILLIAM ROBERT DALY Starring: FRITZI BRUNETTE, AL W FILSON, LEO PIERSON, EDWARD J POLK, FRANK CLARK, VIVIAN REED, JAMES BRADBURY, WILLIAM SCOTT, LILLIAN HAYWARD Comments: Adapted by Gilson Willets from "the famous stage play" by David K Higgins. Producer Daly "escorted a company of players to the heart of the Tenn mtns where true scenes of mtneer life were filmed."
1916 CAPRICE OF THE MOUNTAINS / FOX FILM CORP Directed by JOHN G ADOLFI Starring: JUNE CAPRICE, HARRY S HILLIARD, JOEL DAY, LISLE LEIGH, RICHARD HALE Comments: Uneducated and impetuous mtn girl Caprice is compromised by a city man; her father forces a shotgun wedding. Caprice finds big-city life unendurable, leaves her husband (who resents the fact he had to marry her) and returns to the mtns. Her husband realizes how much he loves her, follows her, and tells her the two of them will never leave the mtns.
1916 APRIL / AMERICAN FILM CO/MUTUAL FILM CORP Directed by DONALD MACDONALD Starring: HELENE ROSSON, E FORREST TAYLOR, HARRY VON METER, LOUISE LESTER, CHARLES NEWTON, AL FORDYCE Comments: An infant daughter born to wealth and privilege is kidnapped and carried off to the Ky mtns, where she is adopted by a loving mtn mother. But the new mother's evil mtn husband is only enraged by the child's innate goodness. She falls for a lowland poet, almost commits suicide, is about to be sold to an uncouth mtn man as a bride, when her true identity is discovered.
1916 FATE'S BOOMERANG / PARAGON FILMS/WORLD Directed by FRANK H CRANE Starring: MOLLIE KING, CHARLES GOTTHOLD, JUNE ELVIDGE, FRANK GOLDSMITH, HARRY REDDING Comments: An unhappily married civil engineer from the city comes to the southern mtns to build a railroad, tells his troubles to an understanding mtn girl, who promptly goes to the city to try to affect a reconciliation between the engineer and his adulterous wife. The evil wife scorns the mtn girl but promptly dies in an accident, leaving the engineer available for the mtn girl. A working title for this film: The Little Mother of the Hills.
1916 THE FEUD GIRL / FAMOUS PLAYERS/PARAMOUNT Produced by FRED THOMSON Directed by FRED THOMSON Starring: HAZEL DAWN, IRVING CUMMINGS, ARTHUR MORRISON, GEORGE MAJERONI, HARDEE KIRKLAND, RUSSELL SIMPSON, GERTRUDE NORMAN Comments: Shot on location in north Ga with many locals--"not types but actualities"--used as extras. "The feud is perhaps the most realistic that has ever been depicted on the screen."
1916 CONTRARY MARY / BRADY-MADE/WORLD FILM CORP Directed by EDWIN AUGUST Starring: MOLLIE KING, ARTHUR ASHLEY Comments: Shot on location near Asheville "a few miles up Jobel Canyon where towering cliffs and abysmal chasms will afford ample scenic sensation."
1916 THE CODE OF THE HILLS / LUBIN Directed by MELVIN MAYO Starring: MELVIN MAYO, MILLARD WILSON, ADELAIDE BRONTI, BIRD HOPKINS, CECIL VAN AUKER, LUCY PAYTON, EVELYN PAGE Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. The city man marries the girl, carries her with him to the city, where she is miserable. She returns to the mtns pregnant, gives birth, dies. Her child grows up, raised by the faithful mtn man, and by workings of chance comes to confront her father.
1916 JERRY AND THE MOONSHINERS / CUB/MUTUAL FILM CORP Directed by MILTON H FAHRNEY Starring: GEORGE OVEY, GEORGE GEORGE, JEFFERSON OSBORNE, JANET SULLY, CLAIRE ALEXANDER, ABE LINCOLN, ARTHUR MUNDE, JOSEPH VON METER Comments: One of scores of one-reel comedies featuring George Ovey as "Jerry."
1916 THE APOSTLE OF VENGEANCE / INCE/TRIANGLE FILM CORP Starring: WILLIAM S HART, NONA THOMAS, JOSEPH J DOWLING, FANNY MIDGLEY, JACK GILBERT Comments: A young minister, the son of a family of Ky feudists, must decline a church in the civilized North in order to continue the family feud. "The story is strong and virile."
1916 A DEAD YESTERDAY / REX Produced by CHARLES GIBLYN Starring: HOBART HENLEY, JEAN HATHAWAY, CLEO MADISON, HILDA SLOMAN, RAY HANFORD, AGNES VERNON Comments: Opens with the pampered son of a wealthy mother in the city, but shifts to the family's WVa coal mines. Bizarre story of the pampered son marrying both a city model and a WVa mtn girl.
1916 DAVY CROCKETT / PALLAS PICTURES/PARAMOUNT Directed by WILLIAM TAYLOR Starring: DUSTIN FARNUM, WINIFRED KINGSTON, HARRY DE VERE, HERBERT STANDING, HOWARD DAVIES, PAGE PETERS, LYDIA YEAMANS TITUS Comments: Based on the Frank Mayo stage characterization, a non- Alamo romance in which Davy saves the girl by barring the door against wolves with his own arm.
1916 A ROMANCE OF NEWPORT Starring: VIVIAN FREDERICK, GENE ROBINSON Comments: Filmed in and around Newport, Tenn., the cast comprised entirely of local talent.
1916 HOW GOLD IS MINED IN GEORGIA (REEL LIFE NO 13) / GAUMONT /MUTUAL FILM CORP Comments: Filmed in north Ga. Relates the history of a gold rush older than the more famous Calif one.
1916 JUDITH OF THE CUMBERLANDS / SIGNAL/MUTUAL STAR PRODUCTIONS Directed by J P MCGOWAN Starring: HELEN HOLMES, LEO D MALONEY, PAUL C HURST Comments: Shot in "the wilds" of the Santa Ynez mtns below Santa Barbara. "Based on Alice McGowan's virile story." "But the material of the Ky feud and illicit stills has been worn threadbare."
1916 THE STRONGER LOVE / MOROSCO/PARAMOUNT Directed by FRANK LLOYD Starring: VIVIAN MARTIN, EDWARD PELL, FRANK LLOYD, JACK LIVINGSTON, ALICE KNOWLAND, HERBERT STANDING, JOHN MCKINNON, LOUISE A EMMONS Comments: The story of mtn girl Nell "who is reached by the spirit of progress to the extent of rebelling against the sordid conditions and stifling scope of her life." Reel five alone survives in the Library of Congress.
1916 THE DAWN OF FREEDOM / VITAGRAPH/V L S E INC Directed by PAUL SCARDON Starring: CHARLES RICHMOND, ARLINE PRETTY, JAMES MORRISON, THOMAS R MILLS, TEMPLER SAXE, EDWARD ELKAS, BILLIE BILLINGS Comments: A bizarre satire of modern corporate greed in which a "revolutionary patriot" in the Alleghanies is put under a spell and reawakes nicely preserved 139 years later to interact with modern American greed, particularly that of coal barons. "Everything ends happily for the workers."
1916 WEAPONS OF LOVE / BIG U/UNIVERSAL Produced by C S ELFELT Starring: VOLA SMITH, MARC ROBBINS, CHARLES GUNN, G RAYMOND NYE Comments: An old feud between the Ansons and the Murrels is ended by the love and religious devotion of a male Murrel.
1916 SEE AMERICA FIRST NO 52 / GAUMONT/MUTUAL FILM CORP Comments: Travelogue featuring anthracite coal regions of the Pa mtns.
1916 THE LAUGH OF SCORN / BIG U/UNIVERSAL Produced by BEN WILSON Starring: BEN WILSON, CHARLES OGLE, EDNA HUNTER, JOSEPH W GIRARD Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. The mtn girl falls in love with the new schoolmaster and even begins to attend his school, much to the disgust of her cruder mtn suitor, who ends up trying to kill his rival and wounding the girl.
1916 MOUNTAIN BLOOD / BIG U/UNIVERSAL Produced by GEORGE COCHRANE Starring: MOLLY MALONE, GEORGE BERRILL, JACK NELSON, VESTER PEGG, FRED BURNS Comments: Moonshiners and a mtn girl who tries to save them from revenue officers. "...All the ingredients one expects ... including a fight to the death at the close."
1916 FOR HER MOTHER'S SAKE / BIG U/UNIVERSAL Produced by CLIFFORD ELFELT Starring: VOLA SMITH, EDWIN BROWN, G RAYMOND NYE, MARC ROBBINS Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman. The mtn lass goes with the more polished city chap, but returns dejected to the mtns with a baby in her arms. The girl dies, & the jilted lover takes the baby to raise as his own.
1916 A MOUNTAIN NYMPH / BIG U/UNIVERSAL Produced by GEORGE COCHRANE Directed by GEORGE COCHRANE Starring: MOLLY MALONE, JACK NELSON, VESTER PEGG, GEORGE BERRILL, FRED BURNS Comments: Two-men-and-a-woman with moonshining background.
1916 THE ETERNAL WAY / BIG U/UNIVERSAL Directed by: CLIFFORD ELFELDT Starring: VOLA SMITH, MAE HILL, CHARLES GUNN, G RAYMOND NYE Comments: Vola Smith plays a wild, untamed girl who finally learns the meaning of true love.
1916 A MOUNTAIN DAISY / MUTUAL FILM CORP Comments: A mountain girl, jilted by a trifler from the city, marries a man who has been true to her. Upon hearing that the former is coming through the territory with his new bride, the mtn girl and her husband succeed in exposing to the man's wife his former actions.
1916 THE STARBUCKS / AMERICAN/MUTUAL FILM CORP Starring: OPIE READ, MRS C S SMITH, WILLIAM LEE Comments: Reissue of 1912 film called "The Tennessee Judge." Two-men-and-a-woman, illicit whiskey, and a wise old country judge.
1916 CHILDREN OF THE FEUD / FINE ARTS/TRIANGLE FILM CORP Directed by JOSEPH HENABERY Starring: CHARLES GORMAN, DOROTHY GISH, A D SEARS, F A TURNER, SAM DEGRASSE, ELMO LINCOLN Comments: "A two-reel feud amplified to five reels." "It is a pity that a story of the mtns of Va & Ky cannot be written without a whiskey still and wholesale murder." "Worn-out melodrama ... threadbare...."
1916 SEE AMERICA FIRST NO 65 / GAUMONT/MUTUAL FILM CORP Comments: Travelogue of the New River country of WVa.
1916 BAWBS O' BLUE RIDGE / INCE/TRIANGLE FILM CORP Produced by THOMAS H INCE Directed by CHARLES MILLER Starring: BESSIE BARRISCALE, ARTHUR SHIRLEY, JOE DOWLING Comments: A Cinderella/Prince Charming story. "Miss Barriscale wears [her rags] low-necked, short-sleeved, with a skirt brief enough to make even callous Broadway stop and look." Filmed in the "Los Angeles wildwood." Released again in 1917 as though it were a new production.
1916 BROKEN CHAINS / WILLIAM A BRADY PICTURES PLAYS INC/WORLD Directed by ROBERT THORNBY Starring: JOHN TANSY, CARLYLE BLACKWELL, HERBERT BARRINGTON, STANHOPE WHEATCROFT, HERBERT DELMORE, HENRY WEST, MADGE EVANS, ETHEL CLAYTON, JESSIE LEWIS Comments: A federal agent is sent south to round up moonshiners, falls in love with a mtn girl, whose brother frames the agent as an agitator of blacks. The brother is murdered, and the agent is jailed for the crime. The real black agitator talks in his sleep and reveals that he did the crime. Cast featured several African Americans and was originally titled The New South.
1916 BUDDY'S CHRISTMAS / MUTUAL Starring: E K LINCOLN Comments: In uniting to give a good Christmas to an orphan, a boy and girl from rival feuding clans manage to bring a final end to the old hostilities.
1916 MOONSHINE BLOOD / BIG U/UNIVERSAL Comments: Either a remake of "Red Margaret, Moonshiner" (1913) or a rerelease, for both titles had the identical plot synopsis.
1917 BRUTE FORCE / BISON/UNIVERSAL Produced by A W RICE Directed by EUSTACE HALE BALL Starring: GEORGE C PEARCE, JANE BERNOUDY, JAMES FARLEY Comments: Circuit minister rides into moonshine district, falls in love with a mountain girl.
1917 THREADS OF FATE / COLUMBIA PICTURES CORP/METRO Directed by EUGENE NEWLAND Starring: VIOLA DANA, ROBERT WHITTIER, AUGUSTUS PHILLIPS, RICHARD TUCKER, FRED JONES, HELEN STRICKLAND, NELLIE GRANT Comments: Built around the struggle between labor and capital in the Pa coal fields, focusing particularly on foreign (i e, Italian) coal miners, their grievances, and the ways those grievances are exploited by unscrupulous foreigners.
1917 THE LITTLE YANK / FINE ARTS FILM CO/TRIANGLE Directed by GEORGE SIEGMANN Starring: DOROTHY GISH, FRANK BENNETT, A D SEARS, ROBERT BURNS, FRED A TURNER, KATE TONCRAY, ALBERTA LEE Comments: A Civil War/divided loyalties story. Members of a Ky family are Union sympathizers, but the daughter falls in love with a Johnny Reb, which spurs the jealousy of a Union officer, himself in love with the girl. The girl is forced to rescue her Rebel lover, hostilities end, and the two are married.
1917 THE BOONTON AFFAIR / BISON/UNIVERSAL Directed by KING BAGGOT Starring: IRENE HUNT, KING BAGGOT, FRANK SMITH, JACK NEWTON Comments: Also written by King Baggot. A young revenue officer in the mtn country falls in love with a mtn girl and fights with her native admirer hand-to-hand. "The picturesque settings were worthy of a fresher story."
1917 THE SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS / PATHE Comments: An educational. A "glimpse at the people of the mtns of Tenn and NC and their primitive dwellings." Included an old woman carding, spinning, and weaving with the "primitive methods still in use" and views of a possum hunt.
1917 PRINCESS OF THE DARK / KAY-BEE/TRIANGLE FILM CORP Starring: ENID BENNETT, JACK GILBERT, ALFRED VOSBURGH, WALT WHITMAN, J FRANK BURKE Comments: A blind daughter of a consumptive lives a fantasy life in a squalid mining camp in WVa. She imagines a repulsive hunchback is her Prince Charming. When her sight is restored, she is horrified by the hunchback who promptly commits suicide. Moral: there really is no place for ugly poor people in this world.
1917 THE SAVAGE INSTINCT / WORLD FILM CORP/SHUBERT Starring: CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG, CHESTER BARNETT, ROBERT CUMMINGS Comments: A reissue of The Heart of the Blue Ridge, made on location in western NC in 1915 (see above).
1917 A CHILD OF THE WILD / FOX FILM CORP Directed by JOHN G ADOLFI Starring: JUNE CAPRICE, FRANK MORGAN, TOM BROOKE, RICHARD NEILL, JANE LEE Comments: Filmed on location near Hendersonville in the western NC mtns. June Caprice plays a backwoods tomboy who hates school until a handsome new teacher arrives. The new man arouses the jealousy of a local for June's love (= two-men-and-a-woman).
1917 SHORTY TRAILS THE MOONSHINERS / MONOGRAM/MUTUAL FILM CORP Comments: Number 9 in the "Adventures of Shorty Hamilton" series. These were Westerns, but in this number, Shorty is in the mtns of Ky to rescue his sweetheart Anita from dastardly moonshiners who have a trapdoor trick to land him in the soup.
1917 TROOPER 44 / E I S MOTION PICTURE CO Produced by DIXON BOARDMAN Directed by ROY GABRIS Starring: GEORGE SOULE SPENCER, JUNE DAYE, BETTY DODSWORTH, W W BLACK, WALTER P LEWIS, ROY SHELDON, ROY GABRIS Comments: A melodrama about Pennsylvania's "Black Hussars," the mounted police "that have done so much to suppress crime and maintain order in Pa, especially among the lawless element in the coal region."
1917 MISS DECEPTION / VAN DYKE FILM PRODUCTION CO Directed by EUGENE KNOWLAND Starring: JEAN SOTHERN, ROBERT KEGERIS, JACK NEWTON, MARY MOORE, EDWIN STANLEY, JACK ELLIS, HAL PEEL Comments: A comedy, playing on the expectations among snooty city people that a finely bred city woman will lose all her refinement from staying a while in the Ky mtns with an uncle. The city woman decides to fulfill her family's worst expectations by playing the egregious hick to the hilt.
1917 HER PRIMITIVE MAN / REX/UNIVERSAL Starring: MYRTLE REEVES, HARRY GRIFFITH, JACK MULHALL, JEAN HERSHOLT Comments: An artist lady gets an order for some "primitive sketches," and she goes into the mtns to obtain them. The joke is that she ends up sketching a college graduate as her "primitive man," and he must save her from unwanted advances.
1917 A MAGDALENE OF THE HILLS / ROLFE PHOTOPLAYS/METRO Produced by B A ROLFE Directed by JOHN W NOBLE Starring: MABEL TALLIAFERRO, WILLIAM GARWOOD, FRANK MONTGOMERY, WILLIAM B DAVIDSON, WILLIAM BLACK, CHARLES BROWN Comments: Mabel Taliaferro had made a name for herself playing "the sweet girl in rags." In this film (supposedly shot "in the locale of the story") she is a barefoot, rifle-toting girl torn between love and vengeance.
1917 SOMEWHERE IN THE MOUNTAINS / CUB/MUTUAL Directed by MILTON FAHRNEY Starring: GEORGE OVEY Comments: The 78th Cub Comedy with George Ovey in which he appears sans makeup as himself. The moonshiner scenes may well have been taken from the earlier Ovey comedy, "Jerry and the Moonshiners" (1916).
1917 THE GRIP OF LOVE / GOLD SEAL/UNIVERSAL Directed by WILLARD MACK Starring: ALLEN HOLUBAR, LOUISE LOVELY, ALFRED ALLEN, ED BRADY, MAUD EMERY, H B EDMONDSON, BUSTER EMMONS Comments: In the Tenn mtns the hero is mistaken for a revenue agent; the heroine is a schoolteacher; the villain, a jealous mtneer.
1917 THE LAST OF HER CLAN / SELIG/GENERAL FILM CO Directed by BURTON L KING Starring: VIRGINIA KIRTLEY, MORRIS CYTRON, ROBYN ADAIR, E J BRADY Comments: "Evidently made some time ago" (Why? Because it was so old-fashioned in plot or because it was so short?). The girl goes to live with her uncle and cousin in the Ky feud country.
1917 SOUTHERN JUSTICE / BLUEBIRD PHOTOPLAYS INC Produced by LYNN F REYNOLDS Starring: MYRTLE GONZALEZ, GEORGE HERNANDEZ, JACK CURTIS, JEAN HERSHOLT, CHARLES N MALLES, FRED CHURCH, ELWOOD BREDELL, MAXFIELD STANLEY, GEORGE MARSH Comments: Despite its title, a story of the Ky hills without crime or villainy, except for the hustling scenes of a Northerner who tries to bilk the small-town folk on some bogus oil land. The little hero of the piece is an orphan lad who limps into town with an old shotgun in one hand and a copy of "Pilgrim's Progress" in the other.
1917 THE STOLEN ACTRESS / GOLD SEAL/UNIVERSAL Produced by RUTH STONEHOUSE Starring: CHESTER BENNETT, RUTH STONEHOUSE, GEORGE WEBB, WADSWORTH HARRIS, LYDIA Y TITUS, ALFRED ALLEN, JANE BERNOUDY, EUGENE WALSH Comments: A Ky would-be playwright writes a play about moonshiners especially for a famous actress he admires. The plot contrives it so that the events of the fiction are acted out for real. It's another "Where Broadway Meets the Mountains."
1917 A SON OF THE HILLS / GREATER VITAGRAPH Directed by HARRY DAVENPORT Starring: ANTONIO MORENO, ROBERT GAILLARD, JULIA SWAYNE GORDON, BELLE BRUCE Comments: A juvenile feature. A poor but honest young chap of the hills sets out into the world to find his fortune, and does.
1917 PATSY / FOX FILM CO Directed by JOHN ADOLPHI Starring: JUNE CAPRICE, EDNA MUNSEY, JOSEPH GRAMBY, HARRY HILLIARD Comments: The heroine is a ragged tomboy girl of the Southern mtns who is sent to the city. "The director let [June Caprice] wear clothes, both night and day gowns, that no mtn girl would be at all likely to have so soon after she arrived in the city."
1917 MELISSA OF THE HILLS / AMERICAN/MUTUAL STAR Directed by JAMES KIRKWOOD Starring: MARY MILES MINTER, SPOTTISWOOD AIKEN, ALLAN FORREST, GEORGE PERIOLAT, PERRY BANKS, HARVEY CLARK, FRANK THOMPSON, JOHN GOUGH, GERTRUDE LEBRANDT Comments: Story of the feud country of Tenn, originally called "The Circuit Rider." Melissa and her father, a pious circuit rider, get drawn into a bloody feud, with the preacher all the while trying to uplift the mtneers. He gets killed for his efforts. Shot among the big redwoods near Santa Cruz, Calif.
1917 THE UNTAMED / STAR FEATURETTE/UNIVERSAL Directed by LUCIUS HENDERSON Starring: MARY FULLER, WILLIAM J WELCH, JOHNNIE WALKER, HELEN SLOSSON Comments: The daughter of a moonshiner continues to run the still after her father is killed. A handsome young revenue officer complicates matters, but she saves his life after he is bitten by a rattlesnake and all ends happily.
1917 MOUNTAIN DEW / TRIANGLE FILM CORP Directed by THOMAS HEFFRON Starring: MARJORIE WILSON, CHARLES GUNN, THOMAS WASHINGTON, AL W FILSON, JACK RICHARDSON, AARON EDWARDS, MARY BORLAND Comments: Marjorie Wilson's first star vehicle for Triangle. Exterior scenes shot at Felton, Calif. The usual plot about KY feuds and moonshine with the outsider being a novelist. "Hill- billies of the KY Cumberlands offer most of the excitement."
1917 THE CONQUEROR / FOX STANDARD PICTURE Produced by WILLIAM FOX Directed by RAOUL WALSH Starring: WILLIAM FARNUM, JEWEL CARMEN, CHARLES CLARY, J A MARCUS, CARRIE CLARKE WARD, WILLIAM CHISHOLM, ROBERT DUNBAR, OWEN JONES Comments: A story of Sam Houston as a rough backwoods TN mtn man who struggles upward socially until he can marry a Nashville belle. Then the story switches to the TX frontier.
1917 HER COUNTRY'S CALL / AMERICAN/MUTUAL STAR PRODUCTION Starring: MARY MILES MINTER, ALAN FOREST, GEORGE PERIOLAT, MARGARET SHELBY Comments: "A girl of the moonshine mtns, stolen during wartime by a bootlegger, has been reared to despise the flag by the mtneer whom she thought was her father." War-time propaganda.
1917 FROM TREE TO MILL / PATHE Comments: An educational short. How hardwood timber is cut and transported in the mtns of Tenn.
1917 THE ADOPTED SON / METRO PICTURES CORP Directed by CHARLES BRABIN Starring: FRANCES X BUSHMAN, BEVERLY BAYNE, LESLIE STOWE, J W JOHNSTON, JOHN SMILEY, GERTRUDE NORMAN Comments: A feud story, featuring the McLanes and the Conovers.
1917 THE COURAGE OF THE COMMONPLACE: A STORY OF YALE / EDISON Directed by BEN TURBETT Starring: LESLIE AUSTIN, WILLIAM CALHOUN, MILDRED HAVENS, JESSIE STEVENS, WILLIAM WADSWORTH, LUCIA MOORE Comments: A Yankee blue-blood with a coal-baron father fails to make Skull & Bones, is sent by his father to manage his toughest coal mine, staffed by working dirty guys with hearts of gold. The Yankee blue-blood saves his miners in a mine disaster, proving that coal owners and coal managers are actually both good people.
1918 MICKEY / MABEL NORMAND FEATURE FILM CO Directed by MACK SENNETT Starring: MABEL NORMAND Comments: The story of "a ragged little mtn girl" (albeit Calif mtns), raised by a poor miner, and sent into town to become civilized. Her misadventures in polite society form the core of the film. Finished in 1917 at great cost (Sennett was in love with Normand) and at great length, it was cut to several different lengths before public release at 7,000 ft in 1918.
1918 MORGAN'S RAIDERS / BLUEBIRD Directed by WILFRED LUCAS Starring: VIOLET MERSEREAU, BARBARA GILROY, EDWARD BURNS, FRANK HOLLAND Comments: "The daughter of a KY mtneer at outs with her more civilized relatives." She gets involved with Col Morgan's raiders by dressing in boy's clothes.
1918 OUR SOUTHERN MOUNTAINEERS (PICTOGRAPH NO 107) / PARAMOUNT- BRAY Comments: "Here we see them [Southern mtneers] weaving cloth for their garments, plying agricultural & other duties in the struggle for a livelihood after the primitive methods followed by their forefathers. The scenes in the picture were photographed in the Blue Ridge, Cumberland & Great Smoky Mtns."
1918 A SOUL IN TRUST / TRIANGLE Directed by G P HAMILTON Starring: BELLE BENNETT, DARRELL FOSS, LILLIAN WEST, GROVER FRANKE Comments: A wealthy young Virginian, married to a Southern belle, has an affair with a mtn girl which produces a baby son.
1918 IN THE MOONSHINE COUNTRY (PICTOGRAPH NO 109) / PARAMOUNT- BRAY Comments: "Hidden from the outside world in the rugged mtns of north GA & KY live the famous American 'moonshiners,' whose mode of living has remained unchanged for 5 generations." An educational short-subject.
1918 NATIVE STATE (THE SON OF DEMOCRACY) / CHAPIN/FAMOUS PLAYERS-LASKY Starring: BENJAMIN CHAPIN Comments: An installment in "The Son of Democracy" serial about Abraham Lincoln. Daniel Boone & a tribe of Indians take part in the action. "The way in which the life of [Lincoln] was intertwined with the Boone family shows that fact is really stranger than fiction."
1918 THE PRIMITIVE WOMAN / AMERICAN FILM CO/MUTUAL Directed by LLOYD INGRAHAM Starring: MARGARITA FISHER, JACK MOWER, MILLARD WILSON, EMMA KLUGE, HELEN HOWARD, MOLLY MCCONNELL, EDWARD PEIL Comments: A comedy, satirizing American men's alarm over "modern women." A haughty professor goes to the hills to write a treatise on "primitive woman." A city woman, looking to get even with his arrogance, poses as a "wild woman" of the hills, lets him study her, and gradually wins his love, finally exposing her identity and his stupidity.
1918 THE SCARLET DROP / UNIVERSAL Directed by JACK FORD Starring: HARRY CAREY, MOLLY MALONE Comments: "Poor white trash triumphant." Feud story involving class hatred between the poor Casses and the rich Calverts in Ky.
1918 THE DESIRED WOMAN / VITAGRAPH Produced by ALBERT E SMITH Directed by PAUL SCARDON Starring: HARRY MOREY, FLORENCE DESHON, JEAN PAIGE, CHARLES HUTCHINSON, WILLIAM CAMERON, EULALIE JENSEN Comments: Based on Will N Harben's novel of the same title. A dishonest stock broker vacations in the Tenn hills, woos a pretty hill school teacher, goes back to town, forgets the teacher and marries a society woman, which produces a miserable marriage and one child. The child dies, his wife leaves him, the school teacher in the hills has married someone else, so the stock broker becomes an evangelist.
1918 RIDERS OF THE NIGHT (THE NIGHT RIDERS) / METRO Directed by JOHN H COLLINS Starring: VIOLA DANA, GEORGE CHESSBORO, RUSSELL SIMPSON, MABEL VAN BUREN, CLIFFORD BRUCE, MONTE BLUE Comments: Evidently more bluegrass KY than mtn, but "the story [is] laid in the picturesque mtn regions of KY." Two-men-and-a- woman, with the bad guy being a tollroad operator hated by all the village. "The struggle of the rude mtneers to overthrow the tollgates & win free roads from the unscrupulous & avaricious owner of the monopoly."
1918 MOUNTAIN LAW / GENERAL FILM CO/BLUE RIDGE Produced by NED FINLEY Directed by NED FINLEY Starring: NED FINLEY, MARION HENRY Comments: "The changes worked by a pretty young school teacher in bringing to an end a bitter mtn feud." Filmed in NC at Finley's Bat Cave facilities.
1918 CYCLONE HIGGINS, D.D. / METRO Directed by WILLIAM CHRISTY CABANNE Starring: FRANCIS X BUSHMAN, BEVERLY BAYNE Comments: A muscular preacher comes to a TN mtn town, puts down the rough element, wins a beautiful girl. Filmed in New York state.
1918 MOONSHINE / PARAMOUNT Starring: FATTY ARBUCKLE, BUSTER KEATON, ALICE LAKE, AL ST JOHN, CHARLES DUDLEY Comments: Arbuckle & Keaton are revenue officers, sent to the mtns of KY to put a stop to moonshining. They are brave & resourceful, but have a weakness for the ladies.
1918 THE MAN FROM NOWHERE / NED FINLEY/BLUE RIDGE DRAMAS Produced by NED FINLEY Directed by NED FINLEY Comments: Mystery, involving a sawmill & lots of action. Filmed at Bat Cave, NC, but this may have been intended as a lumberjack story set in the Northwest.
1918 THE RAIDERS OF SUNSET GAP / GENERAL FILM/NED FINLEY FILMS Produced by NED FINLEY Directed by NED FINLEY Starring: NED FINLEY, MARION HENRY, RICHARD R NEIL, HARRY HAMILL, BERT GUDGEON Comments: A story of moonshiners in the TN mtns. Filmed on location near Bat Cave, NC.
1918 A DAY IN THE COAL FIELDS / GAUMONT Comments: An educational, made in cooperation with the Nat'l Coal Assn. "It draws attention to the necessity for a continuous supply of coal cars."
1918 A WOMAN OF REDEMPTION / WORLD PICTURES Directed by TRAVERS VALE Starring: JUNE ELVIDGE, CHARLES H MARTIN, JOHN BOWERS Comments: A lumber camp tale, more Western than Southern, but filmed at Bat Cave, NC.
1918 ONE DOLLAR BID / PARALTA/ W W HODKINSON CORP Directed by ERNEST C WARDE Starring: J WARREN KERRIGAN, LOIS WILSON, JOSEPH J DOWLING, BEATRICE JOY Comments: "Moonshine whiskey is at the bottom of most of the trouble in the story." A promising young lawyer, because of strong drink, declines to the point he is auctioned off as a slave to the highest bidder, who happens to be a lovely young daughter of local gentry, and she redeems him. Set in KY.
1918 AN OZARK ROMANCE / PATHE/ROLIN Starring: HAROLD LLOYD, BEBE DANIELS, HARRY POLLARD Comments: "A fine moving josh on the old sob style of melodrama, & it is said to be very cleverly handled." Lloyd visits the Ozarks where he has some funny experiences with a mtn girl & her eccentric family.
1918 WILD PRIMROSE / VITAGRAPH Starring: GLADYS LESLIE Comments: Primrose, an apparently poor Tenn mtn girl, is actually the daughter of a high society man and her mother, who was abandoned by the father because of his social standing.
1918 THE POWER AND THE GLORY / WORLD PICTURES Directed by LAWRENCE C WINDOM Starring: JUNE ELVIDGE, MADGE EVANS, FRANK MAYO Comments: Based on the novel by Grace McGowan Cook about the daughter of "a shiftless mtneer" who "won her way to happiness from squalid surroundings." Filmed on location (in part) at Hickory Nut Gap, NC.
1918 HER MAN / ADVANCED MOTION PICTURE CORP/PATHE Directed by RALPH W INCE Starring: ELAINE HAMMERSTEIN, W LAWSON BUTT, CHARLETON MACY Comments: Based on Charles Neville Buck's "The Battle Cry" and filmed on location in the Cumberland Mtns of KY. A society dame comes to the mtns as a missionary "to raise these people to her own standards of living."
1918 A NYMPH OF THE FOOTHILLS / GREATER VITAGRAPH Directed by FRED A THOMPSON Starring: GLADYS LESLIE, ALFRED KAPPELER Comments: "A rustic heroine whose want of accomplishments is more than counter balanced in the eyes of her city-bred hero by her bright smile and golden curls is again made the central figure of a screen romance."
1918 KATE OF KENTUCKY / METRO Directed by GEORGE D BAKER Starring: MAY ALLISON, HERBERT H HEYES Comments: Melodramatic farce about a Southern mtn girl, filmed at Metro's CA studios.
1918 OUT OF A CLEAR SKY / PARAMOUNT Produced by ADOLPH ZUKOR Directed by MARSHALL NIELAN Starring: MARGUERITE CLARK, THOMAS MEIGHAN Comments: Belgium countess swore she wouldn't marry a German & came to America to escape the arrangement, eventually lands in the mtns of TN, where she falls for a virile specimen of American mtn manhood.
1918 THE CHALLENGE ACCEPTED / PATHE/ARDEN PRODUCTION Directed by EDWIN L HOLLYWOOD Starring: ZENA KEEFE, CHARLES ELDRIDGE, RUSSELL SIMPSON Comments: "What happened when the Blue Ridge mtneers went to war." Steve Carey from the mtns of NC is drafted into the training camp, "not knowing what the war is about and caring less."
1918 FIGHTING BLOOD / WILLIAM FOX Produced by WILLIAM FOX Directed by OSCAR C APFEL Starring: WILLIAM FARNUM, DOROTHY BERNARD, FRED HUNTLEY, HENRY J HEBERT, H A BARROWS, DICK LE STRANGE, WILLARD LOUIS Comments: Probably really a Western timberlands melodrama (of which there were many produced & exhibited) but the "program & advertising phrases" recommended to exhibitors were: "A virile story of Life in the KY mtns," "Photoplay of the KY mtns and early gold fields [sic]," "Life, Love and Adventure in the wild mountains of Kentucky." Also called "a reissue," but original title and release date not found.
1918? A BLACKJACK BARGAINER / EDISON? GEORGE KLEINE? Starring: WILLIAM WADSWORTH, RUSSELL SIMPSON, JESSIE STEVENS, FRANKLIN HALL, CARLOTTA CARLTON Comments: A remake of "The Splendid Scapegrace" from a story by O Henry. The disreputable drunk, Yancey Goree, sells everything he owns to some social-climbing mtneers so that he can go on gambling. Then at the urging of the social-climber, he also "sells" an old and mainly forgotten feud so that the mtneers can feel they've truly joined society. In an act of bravery, Yancey saves his old feud enemy but dies himself at the hand of the mtneer.
1919 PARAMOUNT-BRAY PICTOGRAPH / PARAMOUNT Comments: An "educational" which "reveals ... just how the great fields of surface coal in the State of Kentucky are being mined. Closeups of the steam shovels ... scooping up the coal...."
1919 SIS HOPKINS / GOLDWYN PICTURES Produced by SAM GOLDWYN Directed by CLARENCE G BADGER Starring: MABEL NORMAND, JOHN BOWERS, SAM DE GRASSE, THOMAS JEFFERSON Comments: The first feature movie incarnation of the outlandish hillbilly gal from Punkinsville, IN. The character was first made popular on the stage by Rose Melville beginning in 1896. Melville also made many Sis Hopkins one-reelers about 1916.
1919 TWILIGHT / DELUXE PICTURES Produced by THOMAS A PERSONS Directed by J SEARLE DAWLEY Starring: DORIS KENYON, FRANK MILLS, HARRY LEE, GEORGE A LESSEY, WILLIAM HARTMAN, SALLY CRUTE, EDITH WARREN Comments: Adapted from a story by Vingie E Roe published in the Metropolitan. The exteriors filmed on location near Hendersonville,