The Lone Game
About The Lone Game
A streetcar hits Grace Proctor. In the hospital she is visited by Dean Anderson, a friend of her brother Phil. Phil has tuberculosis and has gone west to recover. Dean starts to cough, gets the same diagnosis, and follows Phil west. Grace then catches the disease. With little money she goes to an open-air sanitarium near home. Brother, sister, and friend each fight the illness alone.
Cast & crew
More about The Lone Game
Edward C. Taylor directed the Edison short. Bessie Learn plays Grace Proctor. Bob Walker plays Dean Anderson. Wilfred Young plays Phil Proctor. It was released on 11 February 1915.
Themes
Making
Taylor keeps the illness moving from brother to friend to sister, so the short is three diagnoses rather than one sickroom.
Music
Silent.
Preservation
A print survives and circulates at 16 minutes.
Notes
- The title is the fight itself: each of the three plays a lone game against tuberculosis.
- Phil leaves for the west first. Dean follows after his own diagnosis.
- Grace cannot afford a distant cure, so her sanitarium is the open-air kind near the house.
- Learn was Edison's ingenue in the mid-1910s, after stage work that included Polly of the Circus.
- A circulating copy runs 16 minutes.
Scenes
- Dean visits Grace in the hospital and they talk about Phil, already gone west with tuberculosis.
- Grace, short of money, takes a bed at an open-air sanitarium near home.
Also available
- Internet Archive (silent-the-lone-game)