Volume II: Filmography

 

JOE HARKINS' WARD

 

(Princess)

March 19, 1915 (Friday)

Length: 1 reel (1,005 feet)

Character: Drama

Cast: Boyd Marshall (Joe Harkins), Helen Badgley (Barbara, his ward, when small), Reenie Farrington (Barbara, when grown), Edward N. Hoyt

Notes: 1. This film was originally scheduled for release on March 12, 1915, and many trade schedules were published with this date. 2. The apostrophe was misplaced in the title, as Joe Harkin's Ward, in a schedule published in The New York Dramatic Mirror on March 3, 1915. The Harkin name was used instead of Harkins in several notices, including certain reprinted below.

 

SYNOPSIS, Reel Life, March 20, 1915:

"On the death, in the gold fields, of his partner, Ned Lawson, Joe Harkin takes four-year-old Barbara Lawson to live with him. He grows to love the child very dearly. When he strikes it rich he sends Barbara East to be educated, and then, finding his lot intolerably lonely, moves to a city where, being still a young man, he can enjoy life. Barbara returns from school, a beautiful girl of about twenty. Harkin realizes that he loves her, no longer as the child, whom he has brought up, but as the woman he would wish for his sweetheart. He feels that it will be compromising for her to live at his house, so he tries to explain to her the reason why they should part. Barbara wakes to the knowledge that she is in love with her guardian. Her ingenuous 'But could we not marry?' solves the situation."

 

REVIEW, The Moving Picture World, March 27, 1915:

"A young mining man, whose partner is killed, falls heir to a girl baby. He adopts her and in later years learns to love her. This plot has been worked out many times, but is handled pleasingly."

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Copyright © 1995 Q. David Bowers. All Rights Reserved.