1. Tillie's Punctured Romance

Above: Mabel Normand (1892 - 1930) 

Watch or download "Tillie's Punctured Romance" by clicking here

Tillie's Punctured Romance (Dir. Mack Sennett, starring Charles Chaplin, Marie Dressler, and Mabel Normand) topped the 1914 box office as the most popular comedy of the year.  

Mack Sennett cranked out dozens of Keystone comedies in 1914, but Tillie remains one of his comedy troupe's most beloved works. 

Chaplin's co-star, Mabel Normand, began her career in pictures as an artist's model for  Charles Dana Gibson. She worked briefly for D.W. Griffith's Biograph studio in 1911, before meeting Mack Sennett at a party and beginning what Wikipedia calls a "topsy-turvy" relationship with him. 

Sennett founded Keystone studios in 1912.

Sennett often gave full creative rein to Mabel, who became one of the film industry's first female screenwriters and directors. In the summer of 1914 she began writing and directing Keystone comedies herself, including Mabel's Stormy Love Affair, Won in a Closet and Mabel's Blunder -- one of her earliest hits.

Above: Normand, Chaplin and Dresser in a classic restaurant scene from Tillie's Punctured Romance.

2. Photo-Drama of Creation

Watch or download the "Photodrama of Creation" by clicking here.

Photo-Drama of Creation (Dir. Charles Taze Russell) won its No. 2 spot in 1914 through sheer momentum and a clever marketing scheme called "free admission."

Weighing in at a whopping 480 minutes in length, it certainly needed some kind of marketing gimmick to make people sit still, and apparently Russell found just the right mix!

Funded by fundamentalists, Russell spent two years making this eight-hour Christian epic, which retold the story of Genesis in four parts. He combined film acting with synchronized sound, music and color slides. 

In fact, thanks to his innovative use of phonographic sound, some consider this film the first "talkie." To see the lips moving and hear a human voice really wowed the crowd. 

An estimated 9 million people in America and Europe watched the Photo-Drama of Creation, making it one of the most popular films of its time.

3. The Squaw Man

The Squaw Man (Dir. Oscar Apfel, Cecil B. DeMille) starring Dustin Farnum, Monroe Salisbury, and Winifred Kingston, may be watched or downloaded at archive.org by clicking here.


Summary: Call this a corny and unauthentic Western if you wish, but Buffalo Bill (1846 - 1917) and many pioneers of the Old West were still living when The Squaw Man was made. In fact this was the first full-length Western feature movie ever made in Hollywood, and director Cecil B. DeMille's first-ever movie assignment.

The Squaw Man brought to screen a 1905 stage play by Beulah Marie Dix, a popular children's book writer. The plot is pure sap and Sarsaparilla: Accepting blame for his brother's charity fraud, Capt. Wynngate leaves England for the Wild West, punches out men in a saloon and meets a beautiful Indian princess . . . . The romantic storyline was so popular, that DeMille successfully remade this film in 1918 and 1931.

The Silent Era website gives film details here. Note bit parts (uncredited) played by DeMille and Hal Roach, director of the "Spanky and Our Gang" comedies.

4. Cabiria

Cabiria (Dir. Giovanni Pastrone, an Italian film epic starring Italia Almirante-Manzini, Lidia Quaranta, Bartolomeo Pagano) may be watched or downloaded by clicking here.

Silent Era website provides film details and full feature here.

Summary: A sprawling, elaborate and sumptuously mounted Italian historical epic based on Emilio Salgari's 1908 novel Carthage in Flames. Adapted to screen by poet Gabriel D'Annunzio, Cabiria tells the story of the Second Punic War (218 B.C.) from the point of view of a small girl, Cabiria, who is kidnapped by pirates, sold into slavery and offered as a human sacrifice to the god Moloch by a wicked priesthood. 

Great mugging, wild costumes, volcanic eruptions, big battles, vast crowd scenes, and elephants, elephants, elephants (Hannibal crossing the Alps!) make this film the great-grand daddy of all epic crowd pleasers. Just imagine the wrap party. Wow.

5. The New Wizard of Oz

Above: Violet MacMillan (1887 - 1953)

Watch or download The New Wizard of Oz (originally released as His Majesty the Scarecrow of Oz) by clicking here.

The Silent Era website provides  film details here.

His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz  (Dir. L. Frank Baum, starring Violet MacMillan, Frank Moore, Pierre Couderc) made a very palpable hit amongst the little people, becoming one of the most popular children's films of the year 1914. Consequently, writer and director L. Frank Baum quickly re-issued the film in 1915 as The New Wizard of Oz.

The film's star, the blonde-haired and wide-eyed ingenue Violet MacMillan (1887 - 1953) launched her career in pictures by winning a Cinderella Girl slipper contest, a publicity stunt sponsored by a Broadway theatre (her small feet fit). She joined  The Oz Film Manufacturing Company in 1914 and starred in several films directed by Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum, including The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) and the Magic Cloak of Oz (1914).  

His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz (1914) turned out to be the short-lived companies most popular work. From 1915 to 1916, Violet also appeared in a lost series of shorts produced by L. Frank Baum called Violet's Dreams, in which she played a girl named Claribel who had fairytale adventures in her dreams.

Violet MacMillan went on to work for Universal Studios and appeared in a total of 26 silent films, briefly starring opposite Lon Chaney. She married an industrial executive, and retired from show business in 1922.  She moved back home to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she died in 1953 at age 66.

6. Judith of Bethulia

Above: Blanche Sweet (1896 - 1986) in a 1915 photo for Biograph Studios.  
Below: A sob scene from Judith of Bethulia (1914). Sweet came from a family of Vaudeville performers, toddled onto stage at age 4, started her career with Biograph in 1909 (as a 14-year-old), and charmed so many people that she was once considered a very serious rival to Mary Pickford.

Judith of Bethulia (Dir. D.W. Griffith, starring Blanche Sweet, Henry B. Walthall, Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish) may be watched or downloaded by clicking here.

7. Fantômas IV: Fantoms Against Fantômas

Watch Fantoms v. Fantomas at the French Concerte Arte TV site here. 

Fantômas IV: Fantoms Against Fantômas (Dir. Louis Feulliade), released in the Spring of 1914, was the fourth episode in a series of French gothic "phantom" films based on the popular Fantômas novels by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre.  Because they were silent, there was no language problem!

The series starred Rene Navarre as the Phantom, Edmond Bréon as police inspector Juve, Georges Melchior as an enterprising journalist, and Laurent Morleas. 

The Silent Era website provides a free showing of Fantomas (1913), the first film in the series here.