Featuring a live musical score performed by Music Box House Organist Dennis Scott

One of the final features produced by Chicago’s own Selig Polyscope before the company’s bankruptcy, LITTLE ORPHANT ANNIE is a film steeped in deprivation: by day children fight over dinners rescued from garbage cans and by night they cower under the covers, menaced by grotesque puppet monsters. Into the breach steps Little Orphant Annie (Colleen Moore, in her earliest extant performance), an eternal optimist and skilled storyteller whose fireside parables teach the other ragamuffins that “the Gobble-uns’ll git you Ef you Don’t Watch Out!” Adapted from the 1885 poem by Indiana’s favorite son James Whitcomb Riley that would later inspire the Little Orphan Annie comic strip, the film version is a work of dark whimsy and homespun special effects. LITTLE ORPHANT ANNIE has been painstakingly reconstructed by independent archivist Eric Grayson using materials from the Library of Congress and assorted film collectors.

Introduced by Eric Grayson | Co-presented by Chicago Film Society