Tangled Lives

The tragic story of bank cashier John Hill, who fakes his own suicide to escape justice over a cash shortage, leaving his wife May alone. A couple of years later, John, now a tramp, returns to his wife, only to find that she is preparing to remarry. The film was discovered in Gosfilmofond of Russia during an examination of the uncatalogued portion of the foreign film collection. It had been listed under its German release title, Ein zerstörtes Leben (A Shattered Life), which had led to its initial classification as a German production. Subsequent identification established that it was in fact the American film Entangled Lives, produced by Edwin Thanhouser’s (1865–1956) film company and previously believed to be lost. To date, this is the only known surviving copy of the film in the world. The film was discovered and identified by Kirill Vlaskin and Alexandra Ustyuzhanina, chief art historians of the Analytical Department of Gosfilmofond of Russia.