Although not the first feature-length animated film, as is sometimes thought, it was the first cartoon to feature a character with an appealing personality. The appearance of a true character distinguished it from earlier animated "trick films", such as those of Blackton and Cohl, and makes it the predecessor to later popular cartoons such as those by Walt Disney. The film was also the first to be created using keyframe animation.
A womanizing city man meets Tillie in the country. When he sees that her father has a very large bankroll for his workers, he persuades her to elope with him.
Young Cabiria is kidnapped by pirates and sold as a slave in Carthage. Just as she's to be sacrificed to Moloch, Cabiria is rescued by Fulvius Axilla, a good-hearted Roman spy, and his powerful slave, Maciste. The trio are broken up as Cabiria is entrusted to a woman of noble birth. With Cabiria's fate unknown, Maciste punished for his heroism, and Fulvius sent away to fight for Rome, is there any hope of our heroes reuniting?
Pierre and Jacques are working as waiters at a restaurant where the cooks go on strike. When the two are forced to work as bakers, the striking cooks put dynamite in the dough, with explosive results.
Charlie is a clumsy waiter in a cheap cabaret, suffering the strict orders from his boss. He meets a pretty girl in the park and tries to impress her by pretending to be an ambassador. Unfortunately she has a jealous fiancé.
Set mostly in the Stone Age, a prehistoric king, with a harem of wives, rules a beach. Charlie arrives and falls for the king's favorite wife. In the end, it turns out to have been a dream; Charlie was asleep in the park.
A swindler scams a newspaper reporter-photographer and then, not realizing where the man is employed, applies for a job at his newspaper.
Mabel and her beau go to an auto race and are joined by Charlie and his friend. As Charlie's friend is attempting to enter the raceway through a hole, the friend gets stuck and a policeman shows up.
The Tramp interferes with the celebration of several kid auto races in Venice, California (Junior Vanderbilt Cup Race, January 10 and 11, 1914), standing himself in the way of the cameraman who is filming the event.
Griffith adapts the story of the Apocryphal Book of Judith to the screen. During the siege of the Jewish city of Bethulia by the Assyrian tyrant Holofernes, a widow named Judith forms a plan to stop the war as her people suffer in starvation, nearly ready to surrender.
Although only a dental assistant, Charlie pretends to be the dentist. After receiving too much anesthesia, a patient can't stop laughing, so Charlie knocks him out with a club.
The hero, a janitor played by Chaplin, is fired from work for accidentally knocking his bucket of water out the window and onto his boss the chief banker (Tandy). Meanwhile, one of the junior managers (Dillon) is being threatened with exposure by his bookie for gambling debts unpaid. Thus the manager decides to steal from the company.
A tramp gets drunk in a hotel lobby and, upstairs, causes some misunderstandings between Mabel, two hotel guests across the hall from her room, and Mabel's visiting sweetheart.
A painter turned tramp (Chaplin), devastated by losing the woman he was courting as a wealthy man, finds himself drunk and getting drunker by the minute with some sailors at a bar until he's literally falling down. He keeps futilely trying to draw the woman's picture on the floor with a piece of chalk until he finally passes out cold (or perhaps dies, as in the poem) at the end of the film.
When a burglar dressed as Santa Claus steals a family's Christmas presents, amateur detective Octavius sets out to recover the loot.
To show his girl how brave he is, Pug challenges the champion to a fight. Charlie referees, trying to avoid contact with the two monsters.
The Span of Life is a 1914 drama film
Mr. Snookie steals an umbrella and then, while trying to help a woman to cross a puddle, the Tramp appears and intervenes.
Charlie takes care of a man in a wheelchair.
Two drunks fight with their wives and then go out and get even drunker.
