The Peachbasket Hat
About The Peachbasket Hat
At breakfast Mr. Jones reads that gypsies have kidnapped a child and worries about his own baby, a year old. Mrs. Jones is reading hat advertisements. Outside he sees gypsies with a child. She goes shopping for a peachbasket hat and leaves the baby with the nursemaid, who asks the gypsies to read her palm. After they go, the baby is missing. The house assumes a kidnapping. The baby is under the hatbox.
Cast & crew
More about The Peachbasket Hat
D. W. Griffith directed. Frank E. Woods wrote the scenario. Arthur Marvin and G. W. Bitzer photographed. Biograph copyrighted it and released it on 24 June 1909, split-reel with The Mexican Sweethearts. The comedy half is listed at 666 feet, about 7 minutes. Florence Lawrence is Mrs. Emma Jones. John R. Cumpson is Mr. Eddie Jones. Anita Hendrie is the nursemaid. Mary Pickford is a girl on the street.
Themes
Making
Griffith uses the morning paper as the false lead. The gypsies are invited in for a fortune, and the hat Mrs. Jones went out to buy is where the baby is.
Look
Bitzer and Marvin shoot the breakfast, the street gypsies, the hat shop, and the search that ends at the box.
Music
Silent.
Preservation
A print of the split-reel comedy survives.
Notes
- A Moving Picture World blurb calls the peachbasket hat a skyscraper of a hat, decorated like a horticultural and food exhibition.
- Violet Mersereau is a visitor wearing one. Linda Arvidson is another visitor.
- Marion Leonard and Herbert Prior play gypsies. Prior is also a store customer.
- Mack Sennett is a store customer and a policeman. Arthur V. Johnson is a customer and the first policeman.
- Lubin released Flossie’s New Peach-Basket Hat the same year.
- Copyright number H128739.
Scenes
- Mr. Jones reads the kidnapping and Mrs. Jones reads the millinery ads.
- The nursemaid asks the gypsies to read her palm.
- The baby turns up under the peachbasket box.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (The Peachbasket hat (1909).webm)
