The earliest surviving film featuring Lon Chaney in a major role, By the Sun's Ray's was but one of several 2-reel westerns starring the florid Murdock MacQuarrie. MacQuarrie plays a detective investigating a series of gold shipment robberies. Along the way, he falls for a mine superintendent's pretty daughter (Agnes Vernon), much to the dismay of a sullen mine office clerk (Chaney), who is also smitten with the girl...
Characters in the film attend a movie titled 'Life’s Mirror', where they see parallel, cautionary versions of their own lives. Only the first two of the original seven reels survive.
Shakespeare's tragedy of the Scots nobleman whose ambition leads him to betrayal, murder, and damnation.
