The People vs. Nancy Preston
1925 film by Tom Forman
The People vs. Nancy Preston is a 1925 American silent drama film directed by Tom Forman and starring Marguerite De La Motte, John Bowers, and Frankie Darro. Prints of The People vs. Nancy Preston exist in the Library of Congress film archive and in the National Film, Television and Sound Archives of Canada film archive.
Plot
As described in a film magazine reviews, Bill Preston and Mike Horgan, prisoners at Sing Sing, become friends, and while Bill dreams of the day when he will be with his wife Nancy and his boy Bubsy, Mike studies medicine so that he can go straight when he is released. Bill goes to work when he gets out, but Gloomy Gus Cole, operative for the Tierney Detective Agency, chases him from one job to another until he is forced to commit a robbery again to support his family and is killed attempting to break into a bank. Mike receives the dead man's request that he provide care and support for Nancy and the boy, and when he is released he goes to them. Cole is also shadowing Mike, and when a robbery is committed at the factory in which Mike works, he is accused. He escapes, but when he is discovered at Nancy's flat, both he and Nancy are arrested. In the detention home Nancy meets Enrico Pasquale, who provides her bail.
“The People vs. Nancy Preston” enters the record as 1925 film by Tom Forman. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what People, Nancy and Preston can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The People vs. Nancy Preston” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, People, Nancy and Preston provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15123088. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “The People vs. Nancy Preston”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow The People vs. Nancy Preston primary sources, The People vs. Nancy Preston archive and People research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “The People vs. Nancy Preston” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.