Vintage original 8x10 in. US double-weight matte photograph from the lost teens WWI-themed silent film comedy/drama, TO HELL WITH THE KAISER!, released in 1918 by Metro Pictures Corporation and directed by George Irving. Featuring a screenplay by June Mathis, the cast includes Lawrence Grant, Olive Tell, Betty Howe, John Sunderland, Earl Schenck, Mabel Wright, Frank Currier, Karl Dane, Walter P. Lewis, Henry Carvill, George S. Trimble, and May McAvoy.

The image features an interior shot during a meeting of the Kaiser (Lawrence Grant) angrily clenching some documents in his fast in response to Professor Monroe (Frank Currier) while the Crown Prince (Earl Schenck) watches the altercation between the two men as various officers stand nearby. Printed for the film's original 1918 US theatrical release, it is in very fine condition without any pinholes, creases, tears, stains, writing, or other flaws.

To Hell With the Kaiser! is a lost silent film, as no prints are known to exist.

To Hell With the Kaiser! is a lost 1918 American silent Great War propaganda comedy film produced by Screen Classics Productions and distributed by Metro Pictures. It was directed by George Irving and starred Lawrence Grant as the Kaiser. Made toward the close of World War I, this film falls in line with other films of this popular genre, the wartime propaganda film, made at the same time i.e. The Kaiser, Beast of Berlin, The Prussian Cur, The Claws of the Hun, Yankee Doodle in Berlin, Civilization, Hearts of the World, The Heart of Humanity, Over the Rhine, The False Faces, The Unpardonable Sin, My Four Years in Germany, and The Sinking of the Lusitania, to name a few. Like many American films of the time, To Hell with the Kaiser! was subject to restrictions and cuts by city and state film censorship boards. For example, the Chicago Board of Censors cut, in Reel 2, the intertitle "Give the men free reign [sic] — you know what that means", Reel 3, the three intertitles "These quarters are not so bad — all but the girls, of course", "I'll take the first choice", and "Morning — the lust of the war gods", and, Reel 5, the intertitle "You came here willingly" etc.


PLOT: Following the death of his father, Frederick III of Germany, Wilhelm Hohenzollern becomes the German Kaiser and forms a pact with the devil whereby he will conquer the globe in exchange for his soul. During the Kaiser's invasion of Belgium, the Crown Prince enters a church and rapes Ruth Monroe, the daughter of an American inventor who has perfected a noiseless communications device. When the professor denounces the Crown Prince, he immediately is shot, whereupon his other daughter Alice vows to obtain revenge. While Alice's sweetheart, Winslow Dodge, fights with the Americans as an aviator, she arranges to meet the Crown Prince through her friend Robert Graubel, an actor who impersonates the Kaiser at public functions. With her father's wireless, Alice informs Winslow of the Kaiser's whereabouts, and as he captures the German emperor, she kills the Crown Prince. Now a prisoner, the Kaiser drowns himself and wakes up in hell, where Satan abdicates in his favor, saying that the Kaiser's tortures are more fiendish than any he has devised.