Chocolate Dynamite

The film's storyline centered on the young daughter of a woman who manages a small general store. Few descriptions of the comedy have been located in copies of 1914 film-industry publications available in library collections and in online reference sites such as the Internet Archive and the Media History Digital Library. A two-sentence synopsis of the plot can be found in the February 28, 1914 issue of the New York trade journal The Moving Picture World, which simply states, "The night May's mother is indisposed tramps break into the store. May settles them with dynamite—no explosion, but quite as effective.[4] Two weeks later, in its March 14 issue, The Moving Picture World provides a bit longer description of the comedy, although it is a summary that offers greater insight into the varying emotional tones of the characters and settings rather than any details about the story's performers or any particulars about some scenes:

CHOCOLATE DYNAMITE (Biograph), Feb. 28.—A pictureplay comedy with moments that border on the tragic. It is rural in atmosphere and full of ginger. It elucidates the quick wit of a girl under trying circumstances. She causes the arrest of two tramp burglars by a strategic movement worthy of a general; the denouement causes spontaneous laughter. The girl deserves mention for good work.[5]

Fortunately, despite the lack of insightful summaries of the comedy's plot in contemporary trade papers and journals, a brief but very helpful description of the story and a five-page, scene-by-scene typed outline of the film's shooting sequences survive in the Library of Congress.[6] The outline also includes transcriptions of the motion picture's intertitles or "Sub-titles", along with their specific locations between scenes in the footage. All of this paperwork was part of the documentation that Biograph submitted to the federal government in February 1914 to obtain copyright protection for the production prior to its release to theaters. The plot's description in those copyright papers is given as follows:

May and her mother kept the country grocery store. That night May's mother had a headache and May agreed to assume the management of affairs. After all the customers had gone, May put the money in the safe and went to bed. Two burglars looking in the window, [sic] saw May put the money away and broke into the store shortly after May [had retired]. May heard them and came to the rescue. May's mother also heard and came in. At that point May was seized with an inspiration. A box of candy near-by was marked "Dynamite", but which really contained a large chocolate candy stick. May seized the stick and held it in the air just over the burglar's head, while her mother notified the sheriff of police by telephone. At last he arrived and the tramps were arrested. They broke loose from the sheriff, but May again held them up by throwing the box of dynamite after their retreating figures, and thus they were recaptured.[6]

One page from outline of scenes submitted by Biograph to the federal government to copyright the film in 1914.

In the early 1980s, after examining all surviving studio records and other assorted period documentation relating to films produced by Biograph from 1908 through 1913, the four compilers of the 1985 reference D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company pointedly state about Chocolate Dynamite, "No material survives from which the cast can be determined".[1] The previously noted 1914 copyright documents also do not identify by name any of the cast members in the comedy, although those documents do provide a basic accounting of the five principal roles in the "photoplay" and indicate the scenes in which each actor appeared.:[6]

• May, the "heroine" (unknown performer)
• May's mother (unknown performer)
• Burglar number 1 (unknown performer)
• Burglar number 2 (unknown performer)
• Sheriff (unknown performer)

The short was filmed in New York City, either in Biograph's new glass-enclosed studio in The Bronx or at the company's old facility in Manhattan.

According to studio records also cited in the reference D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company, the comedy was shot in New York City and filming was "finished" on August 28, 1913, a full six months before the short's release.[1] The company at that time was in the process of completing the move of its studio operations and offices from a converted brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street in the city's borough of Manhattan to much larger, state-of-the-art facilities in another borough, The Bronx, and located there at 807 East 175th Street.[7][8] While the interior scenes for Chocolate Dynamite may have been shot at the Bronx site, Biograph records state only that the picture was filmed in "New York".[1] By the late summer of 1913, at the very time this comedy was in production, the company remained in the final stages of transitioning to its new facilities and completing the constructing of support buildings and installing updated equipment. It is possible then that this very modest motion picture was either among the first to be filmed at the new studio on 175th Street or perhaps was one of the last films to be shot at the old Manhattan studio on 14th Street.[1]

On February 28, 1914, Biograph officially released Chocolate Dynamite and its split-reel companion, the 580-foot comedy Because of a Hat starring Charles Murray.[14][15] The studio did not actively promote either one of these brief films in the weeks prior to and after their release, opting instead to provide only minimal information about them to trade journals and newspapers. Very limited promotion of such "little" films was not an unusual practice by 1914, a time when most American film studios were rapidly expanding their investments in making and advertising much longer, far more elaborate multiple-reel productions.[16][17][lower-alpha 4] Not surprisingly then, a survey of those publications reveal neither basic assessments of the shorts' plots nor even moderately detailed descriptions of any scenes in them.

Not a single film still from Chocolate Dynamite is published in available period trade publications from 1914. Also, general surveys of the holdings of major film repositories, archives, and silent-film databases in North America and Europe do not list any positive footage, partial film negatives, a paper-print roll, or any photograph related to the production. Some of the institutions surveyed include the Library of Congress, the George Eastman Museum, the collection of moving images at the Museum of Modern Art, the UCLA Film and Television Archives, the National Film Preservation Foundation[19] the Library and Archives Canada (LAC), the British Film Institute,[20] Cinémathèque Française, the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, and other catalogs for silent motion pictures accessible through the European Film Gateway (EFG). Currently, this film, like the vast majority of motion pictures produced in the United States during the silent era, is presumed to be lost.[2]

• Chocolate Dynamite at IMDb