Saturday, December 30, 2017

The Country Doctor (1909)

So this morning I was watching something off my DVR, and TCM filled out the time slot with the RKO-Pathé Screenliner Film Fun. This short, which I hadn't heard of before, is one of those subjects from the 1950s where they would take old silent films and edit them with "humorous" commentary by some narrator. The first film was A Cry for Help from 1912, starring a young Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, and Harry Carey, before he was even a senior becaue Harry Jr. hadn't been born yet. I looked this one up on Youtube, but apparently the full original isn't available. That seems to be true as well for the other short IMDb identifies: the third silent in this short is a police drama from 1909 called His Duty. There's another movie in the middle about a woman preventing a bell from getting rung because that's the signal to execute her lover, or something. IMDb doesn't identify it.

In looking up His Duty, one of the links Youtube gave me was a 1909 short called The Country Doctor featuring a very young Mary Pickford at the beginning of her career. This one, as well as the three in Film Fun, should all be in the public domain, although scores added to them might not be:

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