Money Mad
About Money Mad
An old miser, played by Charles Inslee, begs in the street. A girl drops her purse. He picks it up, and when she comes back for it he knocks her down and runs. The purse is full of notes. At the bank he changes them for gold. Two thieves, Harry Solter and George Gebhardt, see the gold and follow him to the cellar where he hides his money. They break in while he sleeps. He wakes, they kill him, and they take the bag back to their own room.
Cast & crew
More about Money Mad
D. W. Griffith directed, and the scenario is credited to him, from Jack London's story Just Meat. G. W. Bitzer photographed it. Biograph copyrighted the film on November 28, 1908, and released it on December 4, 1908. It is one reel, 684 feet, about 11 minutes at 16 frames a second. Arthur V. Johnson plays a bank clerk. Florence Lawrence plays the landlady and a bank customer. Jeanie Macpherson is another customer. Mack Sennett is a man on the street.
Themes
Making
Bitzer and Griffith shot it as a Biograph one-reeler in the last weeks of 1908, with the cellar and the bank counter as the two rooms that matter.
Look
G. W. Bitzer photographed the street theft, the bank window, and the cellar, at Biograph's usual one-reel length of 684 feet.
Preservation
A print survives and has been digitized. A copy is on Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- The source is Jack London's short story Just Meat, not a Molière play, though Moving Picture World compared the miser to Harpagon.
- Biograph's copyright number is H118991.
- Lawrence is double-cast, as a woman at the bank and as the landlady of the thieves' room.
- Sennett, later the head of Keystone, is an extra on the sidewalk.
Scenes
- The miser strikes the girl down and keeps the purse she dropped.
- The two thieves kill him in the cellar when he wakes over the gold.
Influenced by
- Just Meat (Jack London story)
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Money Mad (1908).webm)
