RetroClips

Made for about $5,700 and grossing roughly $450,000, this was the film that established Universal as a major studio. Its plot turns on an early piece of surveillance fiction: the missing girl's father, a deaf inventor, has built a phonographic recording device, and his daughter uses it to secretly capture the trafficking ring's own voices as evidence against them. Marketed as an exposé of the real "white slavery" panic gripping American cities at the time, it was a sensation on release, drawing both audiences and moral reformers -- one of the earliest American feature films built explicitly as a message picture. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2006.