When Bearcat Went Dry is a 1919 American silent drama film directed by Oliver L. Sellers from the novel by Charles Neville Buck, and starring Lon Chaney as Kindard Powers.

The plot involving a promise to give up drinking was timely given the passage of the Wartime Prohibition Act, which took effect on June 30, 1919, and banned the sale of alcoholic beverages, and ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in January of the same year.

)[2] Oddly enough, legendary silent film collector John Hampton also claimed to once own a nitrate print that was destroyed when his basement flooded.

A group of mountain men led by the brutish Kindard Powers (Lon Chaney) attacks Jerry Henderson, mistaking him for a revenue officer.

Suspense and fast action with love and pathos are combined and it will undoubtedly register heavily with the majority and completely satisfy the minority also."