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  • The Beat of the Year (1914)
  • Short | Short, Drama
The Beat of the Year (1914)
Short | Short, Drama

The headless body of a young man is found in the river and newspaper man Connors and cub reporter Bruce are sent out on the story. Bruce wants to make a record and finds a white and streaked button. Bruce follows the clue and finds in a ...See moreThe headless body of a young man is found in the river and newspaper man Connors and cub reporter Bruce are sent out on the story. Bruce wants to make a record and finds a white and streaked button. Bruce follows the clue and finds in a factory in L.I. City that two employees, John Joyce and Sam Leonard, did not show up for work that morning. Leonard is accounted for, but Joyce is not. McGinnis, a stableman, identifies a picture of a man in a group picture on the wall of the factory office, as one who hired a rig from him, and next to this man is Joyce and a girl, Helen Lister, whose photo adorns Joyce's dresser. Helen tells that she was engaged to Joyce until Greening, the other man of the group, came to work at the factory and Joyce warned her against him. The night before the murder Greening had called and taken her to Jersey City to be married. He had gotten out at his flat in Manhattan, gone inside, then called out the window to tell her to wait at a hotel for him in Jersey City, but he had never shown up. Bruce then discovers that Greening was the son of a multi-millionaire and no one knew why he should be working in a factory under an assumed name. Bruce and McGinnis go to Greening's flat and have a run-in with the janitor and tie him up; later they also catch Greening. He escapes and calls the police and denounces Bruce and McGinnis as burglars, but they turn the tables again and take Greening to the newspaper office. They believe that he killed Joyce to get his girl, but it transpires that the man they have captured is really Joyce. Joyce tells them he followed Greening the night of the murder and confronted him in his rooms and forced him to promise to marry the girl under his own real name and not that of Greening. They fight and Greening is killed accidentally. He then threw his body in the creek. He pretended to be Greening in order to throw the police and reporters off the track and save the girl's reputation. A letter found from Greening tells that he was really on the square with the girl and meant to marry her and the shock of this fact being brought home to Joyce, and the realization that all his work and killing has been for naught, kills him. Written by Moving Picture World synopsis See less
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Updated Dec 19, 1914

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Dec 19, 1914 (United States)

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