Works featuring "crime" (51)

Drunkard's Child

Smelly old geezer flashes fat cash to lure a young boy. Then, when boy's mom croaks, he seizes the opportunity to bumrush dad from his own house and snatch the boy. Finally, dad gets snuffed out when geezer's crony pumps lead into dad's back, and authorities bestow blessings on the snatch&snuff - with no one once bothering to ask the kid what he would like. Stats: in this under-7 minutes short, the serial flasher flashes his wallet 3 times. Good clean family fun film.

The Lonedale Operator

Variation on the invasion-call-rescue formula of Griffith`s earlier "The Lonely Villa". Most importantly, the melodramatic fat is trimmed by replacing Mother Purity and Her Three Snow White Virgins with one smart tough cookie - a working girl who even stays cool enough to take a quick mid-crisis nap - thus avoiding the worst of the dated hokey trappings that plague too many Griffith films.

Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1912]

Is Jekyll a sincere scientist, who becomes the unfortunate victim of his own research? Or is he a mad scientist who craves the hyped-up stimulation of the drug he's discovered? Or is the drug actually nothing more than a placebo, that provides him a pretext for violently escaping his staid bourgeois existence? Or is he actually a psychopath who imagines himself as a scientist, and imagines that his violent psychotic episodes result from a drugged state? A multitude of possible interpretations is one reason for the enduring popularity of this tale.