HELEN OF FOUR GATES was made in Hebden Bridge in 1920 by silent film pioneer Cecil M. Hepworth, based on a popular novel of the same name. Reportedly highly successful when it first opened, the film would later fall into obscurity, with all copies believed to be destroyed. In 2007, a print was discovered in a vault in Canada.
This is the first movie version of the famous story. Alice dozes in a garden, awakened by a dithering white rabbit in waistcoat with pocket watch. She follows him down a hole and finds herself in a hall of many doors.
An early trick film where a car explodes and body parts fall from the sky. A policeman witnesses and attempts to piece the remains back together.
A dog leads its master to his kidnapped baby.
Hamlet is a 1913 British silent drama film directed by Hay Plumb and starring Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Gertrude Elliot and Walter Ringham.
A man fakes an engagement to a typist to please his rich aunt.
Dog Rover, from Rescued by Rover fame, chases a kidnapper's car and while he is in a pub, drives it safely home and thus saves the baby.
A boy uses a professor's liquid to make objects transparent.
A mesmerist, obsessed with putting a beautiful woman under his power, hypnotizes her to try to force her to kill her fiancé. His plans are altered with the appearance of a deadly serpent.
As the camera looks down an open road, a horse and carriage approaches, and passes by to one side of the field of view. Soon afterwards, an automobile comes up the road, straight towards the camera. As it gets nearer, the occupants start to wave frantically, but can a collision be avoided?
Tomboys drive a fire engine through a fairground and hose the firemen.
Chrissie White, one of Hepworth Studios' biggest stars, heads up this feisty battle-of-the-sexes comedy about an independent young lady who, for the sake of a rich husband, poses as the epitome of Victorian femininity - weak, docile and submissive. But when he steps out of line the gloves come off to reveal 'Physical Culture Phyllis', who punches well above her weight!
A man preparing for a trip encounters a series of mysterious problems.
Documentary on the process of hay-making, from the cutting of the grass to the stacking of the hay.
An orphan named Oliver Twist meets a pickpocket on the streets of London. From there, he joins a household of boys who are trained to steal for their master.
Young heiress Margaret Yeoland is found unconscious on the Devonshire moors by a disillusioned author, Denis Marlowe. She tells him she has run away from her family, but is reluctant to reveal the full story. Intent on concealing her identity from her pursuers, Denis coerces her into marrying him. But when the body of Margaret's missing father is discovered, it leads Denis to suspect his wife of murder.
A boy breaks his sister's doll and it mends, grows, tears him up and eats him.
As an older man and a youth are eating at the table, the older man decides to amuse himself by using pepper to make the boy sneeze. Later, the boy retaliates by sneaking into the older man's room and putting pepper in his handkerchief, hairbrush, and clothing. But things quickly get out of hand when the sneezing that results begins to disrupt the whole town.
Funny how we think of the loutish behaviour of some of today's teens as a modern-day phenomenon. Here, in a short film more than one hundred years old, we see two tearaways terrorising a bed-ridden old lady, sabotaging a number of honest workmen as they go about their daily work, vandalising a bakery and taking a vehicle without consent - all in the space of six frenetic minutes.
