User Reviews

A very entertaining silent film, this movie also documents the last years of the long gone iron era in North Jersey. It also illustrates a slice of life in those times around the small town depot. This movie was shot along the old Wharton & Northern Railroad in the once bustling town of Oreland in Upper Hibernia, with scenes of the old tank engine sailing over the top level of the famous triple crossing in Wharton itself. Glimpses of the Mount Hope Mineral Railroad and of the nearby Lackawanna can also be seen. There were more than 30 silents know to have been shot in Wharton during the first decades of the 1900s, and this is one of the very few to have survived. If anyone knows of any others, I'd love to hear about them. The copy I have was released in the 1950s by the Blackhawk series of railroad films, and in the 1980s by Pentrex in Glendale, Calif.

Kalem was famous back in the day for sending camera crews to real life locations when shooting films like Ireland and the Middle East (Sidney Olcott and the "O'Kalems") and for one of the most famous and long running serials of the silent era, "The Hazards of Helen". I'm a huge fan of "Hazards", and while I don't like buying DVDs of silent films or otherwise, there was one episode not available on YouTube ("The Pay Train"). So, I bought the complete 7 episodes on Amazon. Couldn't refuse for $7 and free one day prime shipping! As a bonus, "The Grit of the Girl Telegrapher" was included on it. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it! While definitely a precursor to the famous "Hazards", there were some unique moments in it. It had the flavor of a Thanhouser or Biograph melodrama mixed in with elements of "Hazards". All in all, definitely recommended!!

This short film is lots of fun to watch (particularly for railroad fans), with brisk direction and full-blooded acting, although the premise that an entire community would be thrown into uproar over the presence of a fugitive whose worst crime is auto theft seems almost comical in light of today's mores. Still, the film is well worth watching both as entertainment and as a time-capsule look at an America that's long gone. (PS: Several years after its premier this film was re-titled and re-issued disguised as an episode of the "Hazards of Helen" serial, but the title and release date shown above are the originals.)

A picture made good and interesting by the materials it uses rather than by the way they are handled. It is a railroad, melodramatic picture, but the plot, the form it takes, is haphazard. It features the grit of a girl telegrapher, which, as shown, is equal to that of the usual Western sheriff, and it also features a chase in locomotives of a bad man by the girl. The bad man had not done anything to hurt the girl; she landed on him chiefly because her lover, a detective, had been ordered to keep an eye out for him. We are interested in the heroine solely because of her unusual grit, which isn't likely to make many spectators fall in love with her. After all, the best kind of heroine for wide popularity is Larrie Doone, a womanly, lovable girl. Another remark we may safely make, apropos of this picture, is that the well-made melodrama, even when it uses much that is trite with freshness in its characters and sets, is more likely to please than a picture like this in which we find much freshness and good acting, but do not find the old formulas that have been proved effective. - The Moving Picture World, October 5, 1912