The Usurer
About The Usurer
A moneylender evicts tenants and seizes furniture, then goes to expensive dinners. A widow comes to his office to ask for time, faints, and accidentally locks him in a safe fitted with a time lock. He suffocates among the money. In the morning the lock opens and he is found dead.
Cast & crew
More about The Usurer
D. W. Griffith directed. Frank E. Woods wrote the scenario. G. W. Bitzer photographed. Released 15 August 1910. Copyright 18 August 1910, J144488. One reel, 994 feet. Wikidata duration is 17 minutes. The Biograph synopsis printed in Moving Picture World on 20 August 1910 opens with Matthew 6:19.
Themes
Making
Griffith cuts between the tenants losing their furniture and the usurer at banquets, then puts him in the time-lock safe.
Reviews
Moving Picture World of 27 August 1910 called it a sermon against oppression, noted the contrast between the debtors and the banquets, and said the usurer's death is staged as drama.
Look
G. W. Bitzer photographed the tenement seizures and the vault scene.
Preservation
The Library of Congress catalog describes a surviving copy. An Internet Archive file is listed as silent-the-usurer.
Notes
- George Nichols plays the usurer. Grace Henderson is in the cast. Kate Bruce plays the tenant who faints in the office.
- Also credited by AFI and Wikidata: Alfred Paget, Anthony O'Sullivan, Edward Dillon, Francis J. Grandon, Henry B. Walthall, Dorothy Bernard, Mack Sennett, and Mary Pickford.
- AFI subjects include locks, poverty, safes, slums, tenements, usury, and vaults.
- The Library of Congress catalog describes the cut between the evictions and the moneylender's parties.
- An Internet Archive copy is filed as silent-the-usurer.
Scenes
- A widow faints in the office and the door of the time-lock safe closes on the moneylender.
- The next morning the lock opens and he is dead on the vault floor.
Also available
- Internet Archive (silent-the-usurer)
