Headin' Home

This is a rare silent film of 26 minutes from 1917, called Do Children Count. It was directed by Lawrence C Windom and stars Mary McAllister.

In order to help her poverty-stricken family, Jonnie Consadine, a strong-willed young woman from the Blue Ridge Mountains, comes to the city and takes a job in a mill, while her uncle, Pros Passmore, continues his endless search for a lost silver mine.

Becky Warder constantly indulges in the telling of little white lies. In an innocent effort to ease the troubled marriage of her quarreling friends Eve and Fred Lindon, Becky meets secretly with Fred, thereby constructing a web of deceit that leads Eve to suspect Becky of trifling with her husband's affections. Eve informs Becky's husband Tom of these meetings and Tom, suspicious, accuses his wife of infamy. ....

Philander has embraced every superstition imaginable, from hoarding rabbit's foots and horseshoes to avoiding the third light on a match. But his luck manages to run out anyway -- he loses his girl, Brunhilda and his job.

The Lady cop Florence Vinton goes undercover to get the goods on rival gangsters Eddie Swan and Larry Marsh. Just at the point in which Florence looks like she's going to be rubbed out, Swan and Marsh shoot each other down.

Efficiency wins success in business; why not in love? Edgar Bumpus, a rising young man, applies this reasoning to his courtship of Mary Pierce. He first eliminates Wimple, his closest competitor, who plays a guitar, by learning to play a saxophone, which makes louder noise, and by sending Mary flowers and candy each time Wimple calls on her. The plan works O.K., until the saxophone disturbs Mr. Pierce's slumbers. He and Edgar clash and the latter is forbidden to visit Mary any more. Edgar employs a clipping bureau to send news items to Mr. Pierce which tells of the troubles young girls get into when their fathers refuse to let them have beaux. One eloped with a milkman; another disappeared. This has no effect upon Mr. Pierce, however, except to make him hate Edgar more. However, the youth's persistence finally wins Mary's love. Then Edgar plays his trump card. He gets Mary to sign a legal agreement to forfeit $10,000 to him, unless she marries him.

Harry Leon Wilson has written nothing more diverting than this story of the irreproachable English valet who is lost in a poker game to a rough-and-ready westerner and taken to Red Gap ultimately to become its social mentor and chief caterer, and there is sheer delight in the story of how the Earl, brought over to save his younger brother from the vampirish clutches of Klondike Kate, makes the lady his Countess and once more stands Red Gap upon its somewhat dizzy head.

The Truth About Wives is a 1923 silent film.