Pie, Tramp and the Bulldog

Edison summary: This we believe to be one of the funniest pictures ever put on exhibition. It has had a run of five weeks at Proctor's New York Vaudeville Theatres and the audiences never seemed to tire of it. The backyard of a country villa is where the comedy is enacted. The cook is just placing a pie on a shelf outside the kitchen window. The tramp appears and spies the pie, and also the dog house, out of which a pug nose and a pair of suspicious eyes gaze at him. There is then a hard tussle between tramp and bulldog which ends in the tramp and the dog falling from the stilts to the ground, the dog relieving Willy of his clothes, rather, rags, all the time. The tramp finally manages to get upon his feet and makes off with the dog hanging to what is left of his trousers.
       Selig summary: A film which has now been on the market for about a year and has proved the greatest success of any motion picture ever shown. It has attracted thousands in every city in the United States and is now creating a furore in England, France and Germany, in each of which countries it is shown simultaneously. It is intensely comic and the brightest, clearest film ever shown. It represents the felonious action of a tramp who enters a backyard for the purpose of appropriating a pie set there to cool. The dog intervenes at the proper moment and the tramp has his own time endeavoring to escape. The bull dog tenacity of the canine is well exemplified and the scene calls forth uproarious laughter and applause and is almost invariably redemanded wherever shown. No exhibition can afford to be without this film.
       Lubin summary: Laugh and grow fat. A tramp, a veritable hobo, climbs over a fence, and after carefully looking over the ground and seeing no person about, proceeds to "swipe" a pie which was left outside to cool. As he attempts to get over the fence again with his plunder a fierce bull-dog seizes him on the bosom of his trousers and pulls him back on the ground. Then begins a tussle between man and dog. The bum is dragged all around the yard but he holds on to the pie like grim death. The mistress of the house urges the dog on and the tramp, from the expression on his face, does not see the joke. This is a genuine laugh producer.