The Black Hand

Two extortionists send a butcher a letter, take his daughter when he cannot pay, and are caught in a rented room, and all of it is procedure: the note, the police, the trap. Wallace McCutcheon shot it for Biograph in 1906 on real New York streets and in a real butcher shop, from a case in that week's papers, so the street outside the shop is in the picture without having been asked. The oldest gangster film that survives. Eleven minutes.