The Broken Circuit

Helen races to stop an armed robbery at the paymaster's office, but the crooks get the upper hand and bind and gag her. Left with wire around her feet, she struggles to give chase on foot after the thieves speed away on a hand car. As she pushes herself across the tracks, exhaustion and the awkward bindings make her stumble just as a train approaches. The film keeps its tension tight and immediate, focusing on a single dangerous episode and the physical peril that follows, without revealing any later outcomes or surprises.

Released in 1915, the picture was directed by J.P. McGowan and scripted by Frank Howard Clark and Edward T. Matlack. The cast includes Helen Holmes as Helen, Leo D. Maloney as Thompson the construction foreman, George A. Williams as Wilkens the paymaster, and M.J. Murchison as Nashman the baggagemaster.

Detailed box office records for many 1915 releases are incomplete, and reliable grosses for this title are not available. Like many short silent thrillers of the era, it would have circulated through regional theaters and nickelodeons rather than earning widely reported nationwide figures.

The Broken Circuit illustrates early cinema's appetite for train-bound danger and visible physical risk, moments that later became staples of action serials and melodramas. Its sequence of pursuit and on-rails peril provided audiences with a stark, immediate kind of suspense, and the film sits within a period when stunts and kinetic set pieces helped sell motion pictures.

Surviving commentary and reviews on this specific title are scarce, so modern assessment leans on its genre traits. The film emphasizes physical courage, criminal threat, and industrial settings as sources of tension. It presents a protagonist whose energy and determination drive the plot, which makes the story feel brisk and focused even by silent-era standards.