When the Cat’s Away

A one-reel gag scored for three couples in two apartments. Husband A is assigned a business trip to Chicago. His wife goes to visit her mother. The janitor covers the furniture and paintings.

Couple B arrive to rent the apartment, sublet by the janitor, who somberly uncovers everything to show his new tenants what a homey place it is. He and his wife dance in their kitchen over the proceeds.

Wife A receives a telegram from her husband, the business trip is canceled. She returns home to find Husband B in his chair with his back to the door. She kisses him and realizes her mistake as Wife B enters the room. Husband A comes in the door, the two wives pull each other’s hair, the two husbands argue.

The janitor is summoned, and ruefully gives back the money. Expert actors deal this out for its entire comic significance (Mary Pickford is Wife A).

The Mirror

A girl (Mary Pickford) with two beaux, who comically send each other away on errands for a glass of water or a book, in her parlor decorated à la Grecque, finds a way out of her quandary by resorting to a card reader.

This gypsy woman prepares her mind and thrusts each card up, one by one, tellingly. Dick bribes her fetching young assistant with a coin and a smile, to sit in the anteroom beyond the curtain. Hearing what follows, he goes to the girl’s home, climbs to the upper story from the porch and slips inside.

His rival, observing this, summons a policeman to intervene.

Dick inspects the room with its mirror, then hides as the girl in her nightgown slowly descends the stairs backward, holding a candle. She almost forgets the ritual, turning about this way and that. Over her shoulder in the mirror she sees the face of the man she will wed, and practically on her shoulder, too.

The rival and the cop enter, there is a scene, but a quick bill slipped into the hand behind the policeman’s back gets the rival taken away.

The girl turns the lights out solemnly, they sit on the floor while she reads the cards for them by candlelight. A little bit is enough, he kisses her.

A very droll, well-played comedy, turning one reel to account, and also noteworthy for its exteriors of house and street, quite straightforward and vividly realistic.

The Drummer of the 8th

Froward young man runs away from home to serve in the war, like his older brother. The Confederates attack, he’s wounded and captured. He escapes through a crevice in the stockade wall, hides in General Horn’s tent and overhears a plan to attack the Union right flank.

Back at headquarters, he tells what he knows, a defense is laid. General Horn finds blood in his footlocker indicating the spy’s presence. He attacks the Union left flank instead.

In a terrible battle, the Confederates are routed. The boy dies of his wounds, the regiment at his home town present a detail bearing his coffin in the Stars and Stripes to his grieving parents and young sister.

Ince cultivates the general confusion of war by undefined champ contre champ working badly to muddle the issue.

Three beautiful reels in two parts with some losses.