Best Movies of 1914

The Tramp interferes with the celebration of several kid auto races in Venice, California (Junior Vanderbilt Cup Race, January 10 and 11, 1914), standing himself in the way of the cameraman who is filming the event.

Percival is a spoiled mama's boy. When two toughs make time with his girlfriend he sends a telegram to his mother for help.

Griffith adapts the story of the Apocryphal Book of Judith to the screen. During the siege of the Jewish city of Bethulia by the Assyrian tyrant Holofernes, a widow named Judith forms a plan to stop the war as her people suffer in starvation, nearly ready to surrender.

Samson, an Israelite whose enormous strength is legendary, falls in love with Zorah, a Philistine, and marries her, overcoming his father Manoah's objections.

A womanizing city man meets Tillie in the country, after a fight with his girlfriend. When he sees that Tillie's father has a very large bankroll for his workers, he persuades her to elope with him.

Two drunks fight with their wives and then go out and get even drunker.

Thwarted by his despotic uncle from continuing his love affair, a young man's thoughts turn dark as he dwells on ways to deal with his uncle. Becoming convinced that murder is merely a natural part of life, he kills his uncle and hides the body. However, the man's conscience awakens; Paranoia sets in and nightmarish visions begin to haunt him.

The Perils of Pauline is a motion picture serial shown in weekly installments featuring the actress Pearl White playing the title character. Pauline has often been cited as a famous example of a damsel-in-distress, although viewers will find her character more resourceful and less helpless than the classic 'damsel' stereotype. Nine episodes (from a condensed 1916 re-release) survive to this day.

The hero, a janitor played by Chaplin, is fired from work for accidentally knocking his bucket of water out the window and onto his boss the chief banker (Tandy). Meanwhile, one of the junior managers (Dillon) is being threatened with exposure by his bookie for gambling debts unpaid. Thus the manager decides to steal from the company.

Pierre and Jacques are working as waiters at a restaurant where the cooks go on strike. When the two are forced to work as bakers, the striking cooks put dynamite in the dough, with explosive results.

Charlie and his partner are to deliver a piano to 666 Prospect St. and repossess one from 999 Prospect St.

Based on Charles Perrault's fairy tale: Cinderella is mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters, but she is able to go to the Royal Ball with the help of the Fairy Godmother.

Charlie takes care of a man in a wheelchair.

Charlie plays an actor who bungles several scenes and is kicked out. He returns convincingly dressed as a lady and charms the director, but Charlie never makes it into the film.

Mabel goes home after being humiliated by a masher whom her husband won't fight. The husband goes off to a bar and gets drunk.

Although only a dental assistant, Charlie pretends to be the dentist. After receiving too much anesthesia, a patient can't stop laughing, so Charlie knocks him out with a club.

Charlie is a clumsy waiter in a cheap cabaret, suffering the strict orders from his boss. He meets a pretty girl in the park and tries to impress her by pretending to be an ambassador. Unfortunately she has a jealous fiancé.

A swindler scams a journalist to get some money and then applies for a job at his newspaper.

Charlie is hanging around in the park, finding problems with a jealous suitor, a man who thinks that Charlie has robbed him a watch, a policeman and even a little boy, all because our friend can't stop snooping.

To show his girl how brave he is, Pug challenges the champion to a fight. Charlie referees, trying to avoid contact with the two monsters.

The Spoilers is a 1914 film directed by Colin Campbell. It is set in Nome, Alaska during the 1898 Gold Rush, with William Farnum as Roy Glennister, Kathlyn Williams as Cherry Malotte, and Tom Santschi as Alex McNamara. The film culminates in a spectacular saloon fistfight between Glennister and McNamara. It was adapted to screen by Lanier Bartlett from the Rex Beach novel of the same name.

The Tramp, a film Johnnie (someone who loiters near theaters or studios to meet stars or get a job), attempts to meet his favorite movie actress at the Keystone Studio, but does not win friends there.

The Tramp gets drunk in a hotel lobby and causes some misunderstandings between Mabel and her lover.

Charlie and a rival vie for the favors of their landlady.

Mr. Snookie steals an umbrella and then, while trying to help a woman to cross a puddle, the Tramp appears and intervenes.

A lonely little girl is befriended by Shep, a neighbor's collie. The girl meets an untimely death, leaving Shep behind.

This early Chaplin film has him playing a character quite different from the Tramp for which he would become famous. He is a rich, upper-class gentleman whose romance is endangered when his girlfriend oversees him being embraced by a maid. Chaplin's romantic interest in this film, Minta Durfee, was the wife of fellow Keystone actor, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.

A painter turned tramp (Chaplin), devastated by losing the woman he was courting as a wealthy man, finds himself drunk and getting drunker by the minute with some sailors at a bar until he's literally falling down. He keeps futilely trying to draw the woman's picture on the floor with a piece of chalk until he finally passes out cold (or perhaps dies, as in the poem) at the end of the film.

In a dance hall, two members of the orchestra and a tipsy dancer fight over the hat check girl.

A very plastered fella follows a pretty woman home, and proceeds to make a nuisance of himself.

Charlie begins to woo a woman on a bench, only to have her seaman boyfriend object. After a brick fight between the two men that eventually involves two police officers, all five people end up in the local pond to cool off.

Elaine Dodge is the beautiful young daughter of Taylor Dodge, president of the Consolidated Insurance Company. When Mr Dodge is murdered by a mysterious cloaked figure known only as the Clutching Hand, Elaine enlists the aid of Craig Kennedy to unmask the killer

Around the film hang fascinating questions about border politics, which I’ll touch on in an introduction before the screening. One of Eugene Buck’s motivations for making the film may have been his rough cross-examination during his kidnappers’ first trials, in October 1913, when defense attorneys cast him as a confused and unreliable witness against idealistic freedom fighters. On film he could reproduce the pursuit, the shootouts, his kidnapping, and his friend’s murder just as he had testified. Reenacting the crime on film may have been the best revenge—and a way to honor the sacrifice of Deputy Ortiz, a twenty-year police veteran and, for the era, a rare Mexican American lawman.

After the bandit Jim Stokes robs the stage he is wounded fleeing. Recuperating at a ranch, he falls in love with and marries the daughter. Now wishing to go straight he tries to return the money but is recognized and captured. When the Sheriff then loses the recovered money at a crooked roulette table, he and Stokes strike a bargain.

A miser is reformed by visions of past, present and future.

The film presents Jehovah's Witness beliefs about God's plan from the creation of the Earth through to the end of the 1,000 year reign of Christ. This presentation combined motion pictures and a slideshow, synchronized with sound (the first time such synchronization had been achieved). Over 9,000,000 people in North America, Europe, New Zealand and Australia saw the film.

Daisy and her husband both go in for a face-pulling contest, but when the big day comes she is unable to attend the competition, and her husband wins instead. When the next opportunity comes around, she is determined to win -- but gets a little over-enthusiastic on the way to the contest and finds herself in trouble! She is most ungrateful for her rescue; fate, however, catches up with her that night…

An American sailor falls in love with a fisherman's daughter and convinces her that Jesus is more powerful than the gods who have cursed her.

A young girl, squatting on a wealthy man's land fights for her fellow squatters' right to stay.

Giles Bateson gets expelled from college for misconduct. His angry father, the Earl, sends him a message: "Never let me see you again until you have earned a half crown and proven yourself worthy of confidence."

A poor child strikes matches for warmth and dies in the snow.

Charlie and his friend Ambrose meet in a restaurant and accidentally leave with each other's coats. Charlie was going to pick up a baby bottle and Ambrose was going to mail a love letter that was in his coat pocket. Charlie's wife finds the letter and thinks he has a secret lover and Ambrose's wife believes he has an illegitimate child. Controversy arises in the park between Charlie and his wife and Ambrose and his wife. It is resolved at the end, but Charlie sparks another fight between the other couple by showing his friend's wife the love letter that was in his pocket.

A jealous wife is chasing her unfaithful husband during a parade, after he starts to flirt with a pretty woman.

Blamed for the theft of an orphans fund, Captain James Wynnegate flees to the West where he makes a new life with the Indian woman Nat-U-Rich.

John Howard Payne leaves home and begins a career in the theater. Despite encouragement from his mother and his sweetheart, Payne begins to lead a life of dissolute habits, and this soon leads to ruin and misery. In deep despair, he thinks of better days, and writes a song that later provides inspiration to several others in their own times of need.

In the Land of the Head Hunters is a 1914 silent film fictionalizing the world of the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) peoples of the Queen Charlotte Strait region of the Central Coast of British Columbia, Canada, written and directed by Edward S. Curtis and acted entirely by Kwakwaka'wakw natives. It was the first feature-length film whose cast was composed entirely of Native North Americans; the second, eight years later, was Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North.

When a married couple become separated in the park, Charlie takes up with the lady and is beat up when her husband rejoins her. He takes a room in their hotel, and she sleepwalks into his room so that when her husband returns from his walk he must go out again to look for her. Charlie returns the lady to her room but must climb out onto the window ledge in a downpour.

Charlie is in charge of stage "props" and has trouble with actors' luggage and conflicts over who gets the star's dressing room. Once the dressing-room issue is resolved the next issue is getting everyone on stage with the correct backdrop. Backstage Charlie and an old man fight, often disrupting the on-stage performances. The audience also break into a fight, and a hose brought out behind the scenes ends up squirted over them.

Mabel and her beau go to an auto race and are joined by Charlie and his friend. As Charlie's friend is attempting to enter the raceway through a hole, the friend gets stuck and a policeman shows up.