Best Movies of 1904

The adventures of an inattentive man who can't look away from his book.

A “madman” escapes prison and the torments of his warders.

A camera moving forward on an overhead crane gives a traveling view of men working on machinery. Carts carrying parts and pieces of machinery pass by on rails; cranes lift machinery; and men perform their various duties, including hammering objects. (Library of Congress)

A gang of criminals plans and executes the robbery of a bank in Philadelphia. However, the police are alerted and a chase through the city's streets ensues.

A woman stands in front of a building, a chair to her left, dressed in black, full skirt, quarter sleeves, and a scooped bodice. Her hair is piled high. She bows slightly, and, with finger cymbals, begins to dance the cooch.

Billy Bitzer filmed 21 short actualities inside the Pittsburgh Westinghouse Works in April and May of 1904. Audiences of the day would have been treated to footage of factory panoramas, women winding armatures and turbines being assembled. These industrial films were produced for the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company.

The story of Christopher Columbus.

An over-the-hill American tourist has a terrible time on his European "rest cure" vacation.

Several Japanese youths are playing various games and enjoying some refreshments outdoors when a military courier arrives. The messenger asks for one of the young men, and gives him his orders. The young man puts on his uniform, leaves home, and reports to a unit in the field, where preparations are being made for a battle against the Russians. The young soldier is then sent on a dangerous but important mission.

The film depicts the assassination of the Russian minister in charge of the secret police.

A boy pulls a prank on his poor old mother.

The Great Toronto Fire was a devastating blaze that destroyed 122 buildings and put 5,000 people out of work. The fire started in a clothing warehouse on Wellington Street and quickly spread, gutting thirteen acres of Toronto's prime commercial district. Special trains brought hundreds of firefighters from as far as Buffalo, New York. There was only one person injured -- the Toronto fire chief. Amazed firefighters and onlookers watched photographer George Scott and his assistant set up in the thick of the fire and film the burning buildings on Front Street. One of the first big Canadian film scoops, Scott's film was distributed throughout Canada and the United States.

A magician makes a woman appear and disappear.

A brief vaudeville-style demonstration of a "Dog Transformator," a machine that instantly turns dogs into sausages, and amazingly, sausages back into dogs.

A family moves out to the 'peaceful' suburbs where everything goes wrong, including the mother-in-law moving in.

A camera on an overhead crane travels down a large, long aisle where men are shown working on large machinery on either side. Carts carrying equipment are shown traveling on rails down the aisles. There are also men walking in the aisles. From Bitzer's Westinghouse Works series.

A husband rushes for a doctor and his wife has triplets.

Shows a parade through bunting-draped streets, probably in the town of Leominster, Mass.

This short, otherwise unremarkable feature is of some interest because of the way that it unabashedly caters to the tastes that it perceived in its audiences. Besides combining the elements of the risqué 'blue' movies of the era with the popularity of movies about fires, it also attempted to use the combination to get extra mileage out of it. The movie's title summarises the setup, and most of the footage shows firefighters using ladders to rescue stage girls, clad in portions of their costumes, from an upper level. Although it all seems pretty tame by today's standards, it no doubt provided its male viewers with some brief moments of excitement as the various women hurried down the ladders with their costumes in disarray. (IMDb)

A thief notices a large amount of money in a woman's purse. When she dozes off on the train, he snatches the cash. Discovering her purse empty, the woman confronts the pickpocket and his simple robbery escalates into a crime far more serious.

Frenchman Count Hardup advertises for a wife. He gets more than he bargained for when women start chasing him. He's caught by an old maid.

As a mother enters a store, she leaves her child outside in a carriage. Another woman standing nearby quickly snatches the child out of the carriage. Soon afterwards, another mother is playing with two children in the park, and when she leaves one of them unattended, her child is also seized by the same woman. These are only two of a number of children that an unscrupulous couple has captured for their own purposes.

A small group of men turn on what appears to be a generator. As the rotary spins, the men make adjustments to the machine and check its operations.

Rows of women are shown at tables with winding machines. They wind using material from spools behind them, apparently putting the finished products on the table in front of them. Various supervisory staff, male and female, walk through the aisles, checking the work of the women.

Facing a stationary camera, sitting at a desk, a man works busily. Posters of burlesque queens are on the wall behind him. A single woman, followed later by later two others, comes into the office seeking a job. The manager hands each a box with a costume in it and points to dressing rooms. Each of the women has a different reaction when she discovers the nature of her costume, and the busy manager has a distinct response to each of the women as well.

It's clearly set in a studio set and people are walking about on the "street" in front of a window. A woman enters the window frame, and pulls off her blouse, then a couple of other items of undergarments, while a young man pauses to look. At this point, as the title indicates, she pulls down the blinds.

Numerous women sit in rows at machines where they appear to be winding some type of wire and tooling it onto machines. Two young men push spools of this wire down the aisle. Supervisors, male and female, walk down the aisle and observe the women's work, stopping for a while at one woman's station.

A man walks down to the water's edge, takes off his clothes and prepares to go for a swim.... only to find himself fully clothed. This happens again and again.

A staged crash between two outmoded locomotives given to the Edison Co. by the Pennsylvania Railroad for the express purpose of destroying them.

Dranem enters the barracks and takes off his field kit in preparation for some bunk time. However, every time he gets down to his skivvies, his field undress and pack reappear on him, ready for field maneuvers!

A couple of Sunday school teachers invite Chinese laundry workers to their session. In return the Chinese invite them to an opium den, where the devout schoolmarms quickly abandon their morals!

A woman and her guests frantically search for her missing child, who is eventually found playing with her dog in the kennel.

A man rides a bike into the water and two officers tries to help him.

Giovanni -- whoever he may be when he's not on the stage -- exhibits his trained birds in various feats of gymnastics and cuteness. I particularly like the one in which two birds pull another in a cart, while the passsenger waves a flag.

A woman dressed as a Spanish dancer enters from the wings, camera right, and starts to dance. Her dancing consists of a series of high kicks, followed by a routine of handsprings, splits, and some contortionist positions. At the end, she takes a bow.

A procession of American and European automobiles--including such makes as Daimlers, Mercedes, Stanley Steamers and Pierces-- drive up and down the steep roads on Mt. Washington, New Hampshire. Some of them struggle with the steep grade. A hiker persists in sequential shots. It's unknown whether the film was an attempt to document a race or rally, or merely present picturesque actuality. It's also been surmised that audiences of the day might have bet on the film's numbered cars.

Employees leaving Westinghouse Works .

Two kids having a boxing match at the beach.

Two small boys with policemen's hats and nightsticks are struggling with another small boy. The object of their struggle seems to be to arrest him. Approaching the camera from a distance are two men in bathing suits, pretending they are horses, and pulling what is supposed to be a patrol cart. The small culpit is put in the wagon and taken back to a tent on the sand. The tent bears the sign "police patrol headquarters."

It's one on those thingies you see at amusement parks. You get into a small gondola, the machine starts whirling about, and centrifugal force lifts the gondolas up in the air.

Inside a boxing ring are two horses. Attendants put white bag-like objects on their forefeet. At a signal from the ringmaster, the two horses stand on their hind legs and start boxing.

In this one, we have a tracking shot, starting from a long distance into a close up as policemen restrain a woman for her mug shot -- and she does some mugging to enliven the piece.

This is a single camera position film of muscle-flexing exercises by a professional physical culturist. The expansion, contraction, and flexing of the muscles and chest were done to display not only the prowess but also the control of the demonstrator.

During a strike, several workers are killed in a confrontation. The wife of one of them kills the factory owner. At her trial, the owner's son asks for mercy, knowing that his father was wrong. Because of that the wife is freed.

During a game of hide and seek, a new bride hides in a chest and remains undiscovered until a strange visitation thirty years later.

A prefect is converted to Christianity and dies in the arena with his lover.

A documentary recording of the Šibenik port from 1904, by Frank S. Mottershaw. For a long time considered to be the oldest extant Croatian film and recording of Croatia, possibly even all Yugoslavian countries, dated to 1903 and ascribed to Stanis?aw Noworyta. In the meantime, these theories have been rejected, and this film is known to be a part of a larger film, "Krunisanje kralja Petra I Kara?or?evi?a i putovanje kroz Srbiju, Novi Pazar, Crnu Goru i Dalmaciju" ("The coronation of king Peter I of Serbia and a ride trough Serbia, Novi-Bazar, Montenegro and Dalmatia"), by F.S. Mottershaw and Arnold Muir Willson.

Renactment of a skirmish that was likely to have occurred in the Russo-Japanese War. Opens with an establishing scene entitled "A Japanese outpost on the Yalu River," which shows the Japanese soldiers of the infantry outpost doing rifle drills and raising the flag. Following scenes are entitled "The Attack," "The Capture," and "The Retreat". In them, the Japanese fire their cannon; the Russian infantry demolish the camp, replace the Japanese flag with their own, and then fire their rifles at the enemy; and the Japanese recapture the outpost and once again run up their flag. Photographed from a single camera position.

Japanese pose as coolies, blow up a train, are caught and shot.