The Italian

A Venetian gondolier emigrates to America dreaming of fortune and instead finds himself shining shoes in a New York tenement, where a corrupt ward boss and the brutality of poverty grind down his young family. Stage actor George Beban stars opposite Clara Williams in this Thomas H. Ince production directed by Reginald Barker, one of the earliest feature films to center an immigrant experience with sympathy rather than caricature. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.