Not So Long Ago

When the parents of Laurie Killikrankie realized their daughter was of marriageable age, each sets about to find her a mate. Dame Killikrankie selected Laird MacNutt. The father favored Laird MacNabb. Laurie decided that Tammy, a poor stalwart lad, was the ideal of her dreams.

The film is liberally inspired by the period when Eça de Queiroz was Portuguese Consul in Cuba, when still a Spanish colony. Eça de Queiroz struggles against local authorities in his defense of Chinese workers, brought to the sugar plantations by greedy middlemen and exploited as slaves. Two parallel stories unfold, that of a Chinese girl which Eça de Queiroz saves from the clutches of one of the island’s most powerful slave owners, and the other of a romance involving a young American woman on holidays in Havana.

Forced to wear quaint short dresses and pigtails so that she will inspire her grandfather's sentimental poetry, nineteen-year-old Joy Havenith longs for companions of her own age.

After a chance meeting at a train station, Henry and Stascha, unhappy with their circumstances, are determined to leave and be together.

In 1846, Anthony Hope sails into London with the mysterious Sweeney Todd, a once-naive barber whose life and marriage was uprooted by a corrupt justice system. Todd confides in Nellie Lovett, the owner of a local meat pie shop, and the two become partners, as Todd swears revenge on those that have wronged him and decides to take up his old profession.