Priscilla Dean and Ben Wilson in Lois Weber’s Even As You and I, 1917.
AT THE TURN of the century, there was a word shocking to many Americans. That word was “novel.”1 The novel and the film were fictional, and thus untrue, and they shared an obsession with romance. Romance, as Puritans knew only too well, was simply a cloak for naked sex.
In case you think only bigoted farmers in the rural South felt this way, let me quote from Edward A. Ross, the leading sociologist of the Progressive era. In 1926 he declared that “conscienceless film producers and negligent parents” had allowed to be committed against children “one of the worst crimes on record.” Apart from the occasional sex film from which children were barred, as a publicity dodge to make adults anticipate something spicy, “children have been allowed to see everything which adults have had access to.”2
Ross blamed on the movies the fact that young people were more “sex-wise, sex-excited and sex-absorbed” than any previous generation. “Thanks to their premature exposure to stimulating films, their sex instincts were stirred into life years sooner than used to be the case with boys and girls from good homes.”
He accused producers of making hundreds of millions of dollars, yet of paying not the slightest concern to the effect of their films on children. “I fancy that if every juvenile movie habitué were to develop leprosy within ten years, most of the producers would still fight any movement to bar children from their shows. Never have we witnessed a more ruthless pursuit of gain.”3 (Now that the children have grown up and become grandparents themselves—often objecting strongly to what their grandchildren are watching—how many were corrupted?)
It is easy to laugh at the concern for the moral welfare of children in a distant era when the movies appear so harmless. But films then had a far stronger impact than they do today, when moving pictures are as available as tapwater. And parents had reasons for their concern, reasons which escape our eyes—partly because the films we see are often more heavily censored than the versions they saw at the time. Many have come down to us in 16mm prints prepared for home movie use by the Eastman Kodak Company, most were abridged from seven or more reels to five, and the cutting was done with an eye to the family audience. Anything remotely risqué was removed.
The most strenuous objections were made to The Wanderer (1925), an adaptation of the Old Testament story of the Prodigal Son, directed by Raoul Walsh. It was intended as a sequel to The Ten Commandments (1923), in which Cecil B. DeMille had used the Bible to provide censor-proof excuses for extremes of sex and violence.
At a hearing of the Committee on Education before the House of Representatives in 1926, Wilton Barrett, secretary to the National Board of Review, was asked if he approved of The Wanderer. Absolutely, he replied. His interrogator, Mr. Fletcher, had just seen the picture: “Mrs. Fletcher and I were very much interested in the reaction of the young people, when the draperies were drawn and he was with the woman, nude except for a few flowers.” (An exaggeration, of course!) “Their exclamations and observations were very interesting. And when he came out, fatigued, somewhat staggering, the next morning, after his experience with the woman through the night, their exclamations were again very interesting to observe; very audible were their exclamations. I was just wondering where you would begin to censor a picture of sex questionableness?”
Greta Nissen as the seductress in The Wanderer, 1926. (National Film Archive)
Mr. Barrett fell back on a quotation from Dr. Lovejoy Elliott to the effect that you cannot divorce a motion picture from the environment and training of the person attending it. “And it would be hard to tell where the motion picture was the stimulating influence and where it was environment and heredity.”4
Unusually, this moment survives in the otherwise heavily abridged 16mm version (nine reels to five), and while one can see what a mild bit of vamping it is by modern standards, one can also appreciate why it upset people at the time. A glamorous priestess, Tisha (Greta Nissen), ensnares the young man (William Collier, Jr.), and slave girls drape muslin around them. The film fades out on Tisha’s inviting expression and fades in the next morning as the young man, obviously exhausted, takes his departure. One can imagine a college audience sending it up with hoots of merriment.
But the big sex scene—even so sober a critic as Pare Lorentz described it as “one of the most salacious scenes ever put into a film”5—was cut very short indeed: “The temptress, barely covered by a leopard skin, receives the prodigal on a rose-strewn couch in no mild manner. Yet because the hero was chastened, punished and repented (in one short reel) this movie was hardly touched by the hands of the godly.”6
In any case, sex or no sex, The Wanderer was a flop with the public, and a sequel, The Lady of the Harem, made by the same team, lasted but a day at Loew’s New York.7
To modern eyes, the sex in American silent films is unbelievably tame. So it is in Victorian paintings, until you become aware of the symbolism, or view an Alma-Tadema, the DeMille of his day. But while the sex content of most regular releases was kept to one tenth of 1 percent, stronger stuff was available. Not on the open market, of course, but through the agency of bootleggers. Soft-core pornography could be purchased in 100-foot rolls for home movie projectors in the 1920s. The films tend to look innocuous and rather charming when seen today.8 In one, a girl in her bath sees a mouse, shrieks, and brings a man running in from the street. As she eyes him in alarm, he is transformed into a large version of the mouse that scared her. In another reel, schoolgirls play strip poker. The headmistress surprises the naked girls and announces, “Young ladies, may I remind you that this is a finishing school? And YOU ARE ALL FINISHED!”
The hard-core films were difficult to obtain then and difficult to see now. A few surviving examples going back to the birth of the cinema (and, I suspect, assisting at it) were included in a documentary called Ain’t Misbehaving (1974) made by Peter Neal and Anthony Stern.
I came across a print of A Free Ride at a collectors’ convention in Los Angeles. It was described, somewhat unfairly, as a pornographic Griffith Biograph of 1915! Judging by the fashions, the film was actually made around 1923. The three participants are disguised. The two girls wear wigs—one curled in Mary Pickford style—and the man wears a villain’s mustache. (During the subsequent excitement it falls off, and as he sticks it back on he shields his face with his arm against possible recognition.) The locale is Southern California; two girls are picked up on a lonely road by a man in a Model T and driven to the desert, where they prove that sex in the twenties was conducted in precisely the same way as it is today, whatever the movies would have you believe. And pornographic films were as crudely made; when a girl’s leg moves to the wrong position in a close-up, the cameraman’s hand appears in frame to push it back.
In the industry, you will hear rumors that famous stars began their careers in such films, that professional technicians made them after hours, and that blackmailers became rich from them. None of the examples I have seen betrays the skill of a professional, nor have I recognized any of the participants. (In a film shown in Ain’t Misbehaving, a man was dressed in an “Arab” headdress to resemble Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik.)
Pornographic films were known as “cooch reels” (after hoochie-coochie dancers), and they were astonishingly expensive. They sold for $100 to $200 per reel ($1,000 to $2,000 in today’s money). The police conducted raids whenever they were tipped off that a theatre owner or distributor was trafficking in them, for they were not always shown in private. One proprietor was arrested for showing obscene films to 300 patrons after hours—although, admittedly, he had the doors locked.9 Members of the Women’s Viligant Committee witnessed the destruction of such films.10
Since the police might raid a theatre showing a perfectly innocent picture on the word of some reformer, their view of cooch reels was as all-embracing as their idea of “Reds.” In 1919, a police captain marched into a theatre in Buffalo, New York, and ripped pictures of Annette Kellerman, the famous swimming star, from the walls, declaring that they were not fit to be exhibited.11
Much of the wrath directed at the movies was sparked off by the advertising displays which accompanied them. In some cases, attacks on movies were inspired by the billboards—which were detested anyway—the reformers not troubling to see the films they advertised. The titles alone were enough to cause apoplexy: Passion Fruit, His Naughty Night, The Married Virgin, Don’t Blame the Stork, Up in Betty’s Bedroom, Sex, His Pajama Girl.…12
Many of these titles were dreamed up to sell to exhibitors before the films were even made. Thus, the content was often at complete variance with the title. The Night Club (1925), a Raymond Griffith comedy about a man running away from women, contained no shot of a nightclub from start to finish. The Bedroom Window (1924) was advertised in the usual way—a face leering in at a bedroom—but it turned out to be a story of a middle-aged woman writer of detective stories without a hint of sex.
Producers lacked the daring to make their pictures actually indecent, suggested Motion Picture Magazine, so they injected enough suggestiveness into their titles to draw a crowd.13 And the advertising copy in the newspapers often suggested a film far more lurid than the one on display: “She lured men. Her red lips and warm eyes enslaved a man of the world … and taught life to an innocent boy! Hot tropic nights fanning the flames of desire. She lived for love alone.”14 This habit harmed the industry. It was not eliminated even under Hays, who was supposed to control advertising.
The real immorality of the photoplay, according to the intelligentsia, lay in its lack of reality, its sugary sentimentality, its specious philosophy, its utterly false values. Happy endings were far more likely to corrupt the mind than love scenes.15 One might have added, too, that melodrama encouraged people to regard their neighbors in terms of black and white—good or evil—a habit with potentially disastrous results politically. But as long as moral behavior was associated in the public mind exclusively with sex, such arguments were meaningless. The conflict was particularly harsh in the twenties, for Victorians and religious fundamentalists were living in the same communities with flappers and their sheiks. The industry had the impossible task of appealing to both extremes. The Victorians would attend the Biblical films, only to be shocked by the orgies. The flappers would flock to the sex films, to be maddened by the moralizing.
Before the war, a number of films featured nudity—such as Purity (1916), with Audrey Munson. But the censors clamped down on these, and picture men tried the “educational” ploy. The helping hand was more often outstretched for greed than guidance, but the films offered fascinating insights into the mores of the period.
When Theda Bara initiated the vamp cycle, playing temptresses who lured men to their deaths, people began to identify vamps they knew in real life. One woman, accused of murdering her lover, called upon Theda Bara to testify to the mental attitude of a jilted vampire.16 (Bara declined.) The vamp cycle was short-lived; before it passed, the Essanay Film Company tried to capitalize on it by making a film about a self-confessed vampire from Butte, Montana, called Mary MacLane.
Born in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1881, as a child MacLane had moved to Minnesota and later Montana. She found Butte the quintessence of ugliness and saw no romance in its mining camps or its desolate hills and gulches. Her life was an “empty, damned weariness,”17 although she found a little fulfillment from writing. She wrote every day, and described herself as a genius—“although not of the literary kind.” She completed The Story of Mary MacLane when she was nineteen, and it was published in Chicago (the home of Essanay) in 1902.
In her confessions she admitted to feelings of sexuality toward women, she longed for the devil to visit her, and she acknowledged that she was a liar and a thief. The book brought her “astounding notoriety,” fueled by reports of girls who killed themselves after reading it. Any sign of revolt among young ladies was called “MacLaneism.”18
A New York newspaper called the book “ridiculous rot,” while a Winnipeg paper, at her death, said, “the wonderful thing about this book is not that it was written, but that this child of ignorance wrote it. Coming from this young girl, it should rather inspire a feeling of awe. You can no more explain Mary MacLane than you can explain Charlotte Brontë. Shut up there in a bleak and lonely moor, she is the genius she proclaims herself.”19
She wrote three more books. The last, I, Mary MacLane, a diary of human days,20 described her life in Boston and New York: “She was careless toward men in their crude sex rapacity in ways no ‘regular’ woman would dare or care to be. No man could wring one tear from her, nor cause a quickening of her foolish heart, nor any emotion in her save mirth.”21
This sounded as good as Theda Bara, and Essanay had a brain wave. It offered the leading role not to a vamp actress, but to Mary MacLane herself. And even though she described herself as a “plain-featured, insignificant little animal,”22 she accepted. Her book revealed that above virtually anything else, she longed for fame. She even wrote the script, for she was an ardent admirer of the motion picture.23
Men Who Have Made Love to Me was directed in the summer of 1917 by Arthur Berthelet and released early in 1918. The title was “as shocking as the reputation of its star” to the Chicago Tribune.24 Yet it was not quite so startling then as it appears to our eyes, oddly enough. For the euphemism “making love” did not apply solely to coitus, as it does now, but referred to any romantic approach.* Nevertheless, Essanay intended it to be a thoroughly sensational production. The image of Mary smoking was used in the advertising; this was little more than a decade since women had been arrested for smoking in the street, and the image symbolized decadence throughout the silent era.
(Kobal Collection)
It was an episodic picture, an account of six affairs: a callow youth (Ralph Graves), who quickly bores Mary; a self-obsessed literary man (R. Paul Harvey); a depraved gentleman (Cliff Worman); a cave man (Alador Prince) she is forced to give up; a bank clerk (Clarence Derwent) who wants a baby and a cottage but loathes her smoking and drinking. The sixth is “the husband of another [Fred Tiden] who gave her a thrill one night by breaking down the bedroom door, but spoiled the ecstacy by having stale liquor on his breath.”25
Wid Gunning, reviewer and publisher, admired the playing, the treatment, and even Mary MacLane’s qualities as an actress, but he noticed one great defect—“it is absolutely cold.”26 Mary regarded each man as a specimen to be stuck on pins and examined under a microscope.27
Variety was contemptuous of the whole thing: “The Butte brand of vampire is nix.… The picture is replete with radical and ultra subtle subtitles which smack of Mary’s authorship.”28 The opening title was certainly hers: “God has made many things less plausible than me. He has made the sharks in the ocean, and people who hire children to work in their mills and mines, and poison ivy and zebras.”29
But James McQuade, in Moving Picture World, found the film utterly gripping and stressed its one indisputable asset: “It is the first time in my remembrance that I have seen on the screen author and actress concentrated in the same person, and that person acting over again love scenes in her own life with a matter of fact realism.… Mary MacLane never laid claim to being an actress and never before risked an appearance before the moving picture camera, yet in my opinion no other woman could take her place in these episodes … for the simple reason that the author appears as her very self. True Mary has no fine stage airs … and her stage walk shows … an inclination to what might be termed a waddle, yet we welcome these seeming defects because they are really part of herself.”30
The picture was banned in censor-ridden states like Ohio. And on August 1, 1919, while Mary was entertaining a friend at her home in Chicago, two detectives arrived, armed with a warrant for her arrest. She was accused of stealing dresses by Madame Alla Ripley, the designer of the gowns for the picture. “Dressed in an embroidered Japanese kimono and a feathered hat, Mary was escorted to the Women’s Detention Home, where she was forced to remain until her friends could raise bail—for although she was said to be living in ‘surroundings of comfort and luxury’ she had only 85¢ in her purse.”31
This sad episode was typical of her last years. She was addicted to gambling, her books were no longer in demand, and she seemed unable to write more. In 1929, she was found dead in “a lonely room on the fringe of Chicago’s poorest quarter.… No one was at her bedside when she died. Death was due to natural causes.”32 She was only forty-eight.
Divorce was another word for disgrace. Yet by 1908, it ended one in ten marriages. Those who went through with it were either very desperate or very brave. Women, economically dependent upon their husbands, were often ruined, alimony or no alimony. They could be driven not only from their homes, but from the very districts in which they lived. As The Social Leper (1917) pointed out, a divorced man was also a social outcast. “As a result of our picturesque laws,” said a reviewer, “[divorce] is always an exciting and dramatic theme.”33
Newspapers were the acid in the wound of divorce. Upton Sinclair recalled what happened to him: “the newspapers invented statements, they set traps and betrayed confidences—and when they got through with their victim, they had turned his hair grey.”34
In The Woman’s Side (1922), a B. P. Schulberg production written and directed by J. A. Barry, a newspaper issues a threat to publish details of a divorce and a woman warns of suicide unless it is retracted. Divorce sometimes did lead to suicide, but then such deaths were understandable: “after all, she was divorced …”
The husband of a successful actress in Cecil B. DeMille’s What’s His Name (1914) finds himself being divorced, to his intense surprise, losing his home and his furniture, which were in his wife’s name, and even his much-loved daughter (Cecilia de Mille, Cecil’s daughter). His attempt at suicide only fails when the gas man disconnects the mains. And this was in a comedy!
Based on a Eugène Brieux story about the effect of divorce on a child, The Cradle, 1923, featured Charles Meredith as a doctor who falls for one of his patients and Mary Jane Irving as the child maltreated by that patient.
Loss of affection was not legally recognized as sufficient reason for dissolving a marriage until the late twenties,35 yet newspapers complained that divorce was becoming too easy. In some places, it did become less complicated. A divorced man in Indiana told Robert and Helen Lynd: “Anyone with $10 can get a divorce in ten minutes if it isn’t contested. All you’ve got to do is show non-support or cruelty and it’s a cinch.”36 But elsewhere, if couples made the mistake of agreeing that they wanted a divorce, the judge was likely to deny them a decree.37 The entire system was described by Judge Ben Lindsey as “bungling, dishonest and putrid.”38
A generation or two earlier, divorce had been virtually unknown. “Our great-grandmothers and fathers got along very well without divorce to a great extent,” commented Variety, “contenting themselves with cheerfully throwing the china at each other. Divorce … does not flourish in the tenement districts because it is too expensive. But it thrives in elevator apartments with three or four baths and maids leashed to lap dogs.”39 (This was why most divorce scenarios dealt with the upper middle classes.)
Hollywood was depicted by the press as the divorce center of the nation. (It wasn’t—that was in the Midwest.) In California, divorce was regarded as an evil, but not a stigma, which had to be tolerated, for so many resorted to it. Yet it seldom affected the popularity of the stars. “Who can ever again see Mary Pickford or Douglas Fairbanks,” asked the Santa Ana Daily Evening Register, “without mentally recounting the destruction of family ties and ideals that lie back of their marriage?”40 But seldom was a divorce so quickly forgotten, and Pickford and Fairbanks were soon the respected leaders of the motion picture community.
Divorce was an obviously commercial subject; the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company made what was probably the first essay on the subject with Detected (1903), an episode from The Divorce (a stage play): a wife becomes suspicious of her husband, hires a detective, and the two of them ambush the husband in a private dining room, where he is living it up so energetically with his girlfriend that the wife faints in horror.
But it took more than a decade for the subject to be treated with concern and its victims with compassion. The Children Pay was a Fine Arts production of 1916 starring Lillian Gish and directed by Lloyd Ingraham, from a story by Frank Woods. “Parents, consider your children before you enter the divorce court” was its message. It caught the poisonous atmosphere surrounding a family torn by divorce. Millicent (Lillian Gish) and Jean (Violet Wilky) are sisters placed in the care of a nurse in a small town, who are shunned by all the neighbors and their children, while they await the outcome of their parents’ divorce action. Who will win custody of whom?
The mother wins Jean, the father Millicent. The father marries again; his new wife is a social butterfly. Millicent leaves home in the middle of her coming-out party and runs away with her sister. They turn for protection to their old nurse. An officer of the court discovers them and takes them back, and another custody battle ensues. The hero (Keith Armour), a young lawyer, solves the problem by marrying Millicent, who is then awarded custody of her younger sister.
The Children Pay, 1916. Loyola O’Connor, Ralph Lewis, Lillian Gish, and Violet Wilkie. The parents quarrel over which child will go with which parent.
“The entire theme is absolutely without foundation in law,” protested Variety, “for if the court had jurisdiction over the older girl in the matter of her guardianship, then she was not of age and could not marry without the consent of her guardian or parents. As a picture it will get by … but the law students will have a good laugh.”41
Julian Johnson in Photoplay considered the film “the sanest, most humanly interesting” feature of the month and praised Lillian Gish as a real, believable young woman. “There are those who say the final legal situation is impossible. I don’t know. I do know that the body of the play is a page of life, of which the screen shows far too little.”42 According to Anthony Slide, the film is an impressive work, told in the simple style perfected by Griffith at Biograph.43 Ironically, when the film was released in the 1920s for home movie use by Pathex in America, the story was altered; the divorce element was removed and the children became orphans.
“And they lived happily ever after.”
Most Hollywood romances ended with that idea, if not that title. The Hungry Heart (1917), a five-reeler from a novel by David Graham Phillips, directed by Robert Vignola, began where such films usually ended. Pauline Frederick played the wife, left to her own devices by a husband who treats her as a child, despite her college degree. She asks to assist him with his work in chemistry, but he simply laughs at her. She has a child; the couple drift apart; she has an affair with one of his handsome colleagues. The husband sues for divorce and only then realizes how much she means to him. He admits to having neglected her and agrees to her working with him. The lover offers to marry her, but she goes back to her husband.44
In an era when a woman’s adultery, on the screen, often had to be paid for by death or ruin, this was a refreshing treatment. Variety, however, could not stand it. “It is just an impossible hodge-podge, much tainted with the atmosphere of improbability.”45
The paper preferred William Fox’s Blindness of Divorce (1918,) written and directed by Frank Lloyd, which was designed to show divorce “as a work of the devil,”46 echoing Theodore Roosevelt’s declaration that easy divorce was “an evil thing for men and a still more hideous thing for women.”47
Suffering from the producer’s customary delusion that he had made the picture, Fox told the trade press, “I have aimed to show just what the 24-sheets [posters] represent—a fiend pushing apart a man and a woman whom God joined together. In my time I have seen a good many divorce cases, but I am convinced that there was not one in ten that was justified. Good people everywhere agree with me. Our clergy, our prominent thinkers, our judges are crying out against this shattering of family ties and sapping of our national life by the divorce decree—a decree that is all too often lightly granted. Therefore I have produced this picture in an effort to arouse the public against this curse to men, women and innocent children.”48
The Blindness of Divorce, 1918. Bertha Mann as the wife who takes up gambling and prostitution when her husband (Charles Clary) divorces her. The child is Nancy Caswell. (Museum of Modern Art)
In Blindness of Divorce, John Langdon (Charles Clary) prefers to spend his time with friends at the club rather than with his wife and child. A young lawyer called Merrill (Bertram Grassby) takes advantage of this neglect and forces his attentions on the unwilling wife (Bertha Mann). Returning home unexpectedly, Langdon catches his wife in Merrill’s arms, and, despite her protestations of innocence, divorce follows. Langdon wins custody of the child, and the disgraced mother is scorned by society.
Fifteen years later, Langdon is living with his daughter, Florence (Rhea Mitchell), in another city. Florence marries a district attorney (Fred Church), who is campaigning for a second term. Unknown to Langdon, his former wife runs a notorious house of gambling and prostitution in the same city. An opponent of the D.A. blackmails Florence, eventually sending her to see her mother’s establishment for herself. The mother pretends not to know her, although her heart breaks. That night, the police raid the place and Florence is rounded up with the others. The D.A. fears the worst and sues for divorce. At the trial, however, the former Mrs. Langdon makes an appearance, tells the whole story, and roundly accuses “man-made” laws. Florence and the D.A. are reunited.49
Photoplay described the film as an attempt to prove that divorce was a great evil by showing a lot of stupid people doing a lot of stupid things. “It is incomprehensible that Frank Lloyd, the one directorial genius in the Fox organization, wrote and produced [i.e., directed] this hodge-podge.”50
Whatever its aesthetic drawbacks, Blindness of Divorce created a sensation in Brooklyn, where people recognized the story. It paralleled a divorce case which had occurred in the neighborhood a few years before: “The rumor that Blindness of Divorce was practically a picturization of this case, and even explained some of the mysteries connected with the subsequent careers of the principal parties, quickly spread all over the district and combined with the regular clientele to crowd the theatre to its utmost capacity for the four days shown. A repeat is likely.”51
The divorce pictures did not develop into a cycle of sensation like, say, the white slave films; the subject was too close to that mainstay of regular releases, the love triangle. But during the twenties, about 200 features involving the subject of divorce were put into production,52 and of them all, perhaps the strangest was The Lonely Trail.
THE LONELY TRAIL The official attitude toward divorce was perhaps best crystallized in the furor which surrounded the release of this film. An incident celebrated as the Stillman case was exploited by an independent producer, who had the idea of casting the handsome corespondent, Fred K. Beauvais, in the lead. Beauvais worked as an “Indian guide” on camping trips, and he played the same role in the film. The trouble was that he had become famous—or infamous—as the Stillmans’ Indian guide in the real divorce case.
The New York State Motion Picture Commission passed the film, which, by all accounts, was innocuous. But in December 1921, in the wake of the Arbuckle scandal, the picture business became nervous about such films. Members of the Motion Picture Theatre Owners Chamber of Commerce held a meeting and stated that they would not play it. The trade press wholeheartedly condemned the producers (whom they resolutely refused to identify). Eventually, the film was offered to Lewis J. Selznick for $1,500. They chose the wrong man, since he was currently negotiating to hire Will Hays away from the post office. Selznick turned it down, and it wound up opening at the Shubert Theatre—a vaudeville house—on New York’s 44th Street. The Shuberts were not fussy about the content of pictures so long as they drew the customers.
Variety’s reviewer “Fred” went to see it and reported that it had been cut to a mere forty minutes. “As a picture it is one of the saddest bits of screen production shown anywhere in a long, long time.”53 He added that curiosity about Fred Beauvais was pulling in money, but it would not entertain. And “The girl with bobbed hair must have been picked with an eye to resemblance to Mrs. Stillman, but it ends right there. As long as the program did not give her name it must remain a secret.…”54 If left alone, he said, the picture would die before the week was out.
It was not left alone. It arrived in Washington, but the theatre owners refused to touch it, their inappropriately named spokesman, Sidney Lust, stating that as long as they could get clean plays, with respectable players, it would not be necessary to fall back upon persons who possess “absolutely no histrionic ability, but are featured solely because they have figured in a nauseous scandal.”55
The New York State Motion Picture Commission justified having approved the film, saying that Beauvais’s participation did not make the film immoral. It would be a different matter, said the chairman, if the advertising drew attention to the fact that the hero of the picture was involved in the Stillman scandal. Of course, the advertising did just that, so the commission was able to save a little face by ordering the removal of the name Stillman from all references to the film.56
Mrs. James Stillman interviewed by A. A. Brown with her new husband, Fowler McCormick, at their honeymoon bungalow, Southampton, Long Island. A shot taken in the early days of talkies (and posed—the camera is so close to the microphone its noise would have drowned the interview!).
“If Clara Hamon and Roscoe Arbuckle are barred by popular sentiment from the screen,” declared William Brady of NAMPI, “the same holds good in the case of Fred Beauvais.… If one can become famous through murder, divorce or scandal, then encouragement only goes to spread the present wave of crime.”57 Clara Hamon† was accused of murder, Arbuckle of manslaughter; divorce was seen not as private grief, but as public crime, and bracketed with the most serious offenses it was possible to commit. The picture was banned in several states, and the incident culminated in a lawsuit, as the producers—at last revealed as the Primex Picture Corporation—sued the Shuberts in the U.S. Supreme Court for breach of contract.58 The only people to gain from such a case were the lawyers—as in divorce.
WHY CHANGE YOUR WIFE? To describe a divorce case as entertaining is perhaps unfortunate, but in the hands of William and Cecil DeMille it invariably was. Why Change Your Wife?, probably the best of the DeMille marital pictures, was shot in 1919 and released the following year. Written by William de Mille,59 it was graced with witty and elegant titles and a story packed with incident, and Cecil’s direction, although lacking the same elegance, conveyed his enthusiasm for the subject.
It would be a mistake, however, to regard it as a faithful portrayal of its time. Admittedly, DeMille directed it like a social historian, showing us details of perfume bottles, liquor decanters, razor sharpeners, shimmying dolls, and phonograph records. But he and his art director, Wilfred Buckland, created a land of the imagination, where a girl like Gloria Swanson could wear a bathing costume slashed to the thigh at the swimming pool of a big hotel, where the men clustering around her could include an aviator in leather coat and flying helmet.
Thomas Meighan plays Robert Gordon and Swanson plays Beth, his wife, “whose virtues are her only vices and who willingly gave up her husband’s liberty when she married him.” Like so many husbands, Robert is puzzled by the difference between his wife and the girl he married: “Molten lead poured on the skin is soothing compared to a wife’s constant disapproval.” Beth, whose pince-nez symbolize her frigidity, criticizes Robert ceaselessly, particularly his attempts to lay down a wine cellar.
“How can you spend money for all this,” she asks, “when you think of the starving millions in Europe?” Robert replies that they give constantly to the starving millions. “Why is it that anything I do for our personal pleasure robs people in Europe?”
He thinks a present might restore the smile to her face, but while buying a negligee in a fashionable store he meets his old friend Sally Clark (Bebe Daniels), “legally a widow and optically a pippin.” She sets out to ensnare him, and Beth does her inadvertent best to throw them together. She rejects the negligee and turns down his offer of tickets to the Follies, anxious instead to attend a musical soiree.
“Then I’ll dine at the club,” says Robert. “I’m sick to death of hearing that wire-haired foreigner torturing a fiddle.”
Sally calls, and they go to the theatre together. “When a husband has had his faults thoroughly and constantly explained to him at home, he listens more easily to an old friend tell him how wonderful he is.”
At Sally’s apartment afterward, he is invited in. “One teeny sandwich won’t take a minute.” An arm of her davenport hinges back to reveal a phonograph; the other contains a glittering decanter called Forbidden Fruit. (This was not a DeMille invention; it really existed.)60
This being a pre-Hays picture, DeMille manages to implant a genuine erotic charge into this scene, which is also very amusing. When Robert tries to light a match, Sally holds up her shoe, so he can strike it on the sole. She puts scent on her lips and his coat collar. Robert goes as far as a passionate kiss, but there he stops, to Sally’s (and the audience’s) disappointment.
Why Change Your Wife?, 1920. Bebe Daniels and Thomas Meighan, who is providing a remedy for Bebe’s headache in this risqué scene, which is not in the final film. (Museum of Modern Art)
He returns to his wife, who lies in bed, her book, How to Improve the Mind, beside her. She looks at the clock—1:45 A.M.—and demands to know where he has been. He shows her a ticket stub. Feminine intuition leads her to search his pockets for the incriminating companion to that ticket. “A friend went with me,” he says lamely. Beth is hurt and angry. He apologizes and calms her down, and she lays her head on his shoulder. It is then that she smells Sally’s perfume. This time, he confesses that the “friend” was female. Beth leaps out of bed, puts on her robe, and starts packing: “I don’t use vulgar perfume. I don’t wear indecent clothes. As you have evidently found someone who does, I won’t stand between you and your ideal.”
She is so implacable that Robert decides he should be the one to leave, and with that, at least, Beth agrees. “So when morning comes at last, merciless virtue proves stronger than love—and wrecks a home.”
Some time later, Beth overhears one gossip point out an item in the paper to another. “Oh look, Mrs. Robert Gordon has got her divorce. No wonder she lost him—she just wouldn’t play with him. Then she dressed as if she were his aunt, not his wife. Still, I’m terribly sorry for her, poor thing.”
“They pity me, do they?” sneers Beth. “Pity me because I’ve been fool enough to think a man wants his wife modest and decent. Well, I’ll show them!” Beth goes berserk; she tears off her sedate clothes and demands the latest styles—“sleeveless, backless, transparent, indecent—I’ll go the limit.” And after the divorce, she flaunts herself at a big hotel in Atlantic Beach, where she encounters Robert and his new wife. “When a woman meets her ex-husband she realizes all she has lost. When she meets his wife she realizes all he has lost.”
The story develops into a fight for possession of Robert. Injured in New York, he is taken home by Beth, and she and Sally fight for the door key like wildcats over his sickbed. Finally, Beth grabs a vial from a drawer and shouts, “Get away from that door, or I’ll spoil your beauty with this so that no man will ever look at you.” Sally cowers, and Beth wins custody of the invalid. But before she goes, Sally finds the vial and hurls the contents at Beth in a moment of vicious revenge. “It’s all right, dear,” Beth says to Robert. “It’s only my eyewash.”
Defeated in every way, Sally takes a roll of bills out of Robert’s trousers and stalks out with the remark, “There’s only one good thing about marriage and that’s alimony.”
Upstairs, the maid and butler reunite the twin beds, and a final title tells us, “And now you know what every husband knows; that a man would rather have his wife for a sweetheart than any other woman, but ladies, if you would be your husband’s sweetheart you simply must learn when to forget that you’re his wife.” Feminists then, as now, would have disapproved thoroughly of the whole dubious tale. But the moviegoing public adored it: the picture cost $130,000 and earned $1 million.61 If it was far-fetched, that was what they went to a DeMille picture for.
The final scene from Why Change Your Wife? The butler and maid reunite the twin beds and display the nightwear. This kind of touch would soon be associated exclusively with Lubitsch. (Museum of Modern Art)
Charles Higham claims in his book on DeMille that the fight at the end was based on a quarrel between two of DeMille’s mistresses, Julia Faye and Jeanie Macpherson. In this case, Jeanie threw not acid but ink.62
“DeMille caters for the sophisticated,” said Herbert Howe in Picture Play, “and, judging by the crowds patronizing this picture, we are a sophisticated nation. Why Change Your Wife? is a rouged, gemmed, silk, and sensuous reflection of the artificial life.”63 “Sophisticated and searching is the photoplay of 1920,” said Frederick James Smith. “Franker and franker does it become each month in dealing with that eternal theme—sex. The picture puritan may lift up his trembling hands in horror, but we see the photoplay as in its adolescent period.”64
Burns Mantle in Photoplay issued a prescient warning. He had no doubt the picture would be a best-seller, that women’s clubs would protest, and that the financiers would pay them no heed, but merely gloat over the night letters from exhibitors telling how they called the fire department to deal with the overflow mob. But sooner than we think, he said, we shall see a reaction against the society sex film: “Mr. DeMille and his studio associates know that the ‘moral’ they have tacked on to this picture—that every married man prefers an extravagant playmate-wife, dressed like a harlot, to a fussy little home body who has achieved horn-rimmed spectacles and a reading lamp—is not true of normal husbands anywhere in the world, however true it may be of motion picture directors. But there is enough hidden truth contained in it to make a lot of husbands and wives unhappy, and a lot of fathers and mothers uneasy. From which centers of observation the return kick is likely to start, and gather such momentum as it proceeds that when it lands the recipient will be surprised.”65
How right he was!
ARE PARENTS PEOPLE? One of the most sympathetic films about divorce was Mal St. Clair’s Are Parents People? (1925), based on a story by Alice Duer Miller, published in 1924. The story was radically different from the film, its attitude to divorce conveyed through clever dialogue. The charm of the film is that so much is conveyed visually.
The opening sequence gently observes the end of a marriage: love letters are torn up and thrown away. In a close-up of Mrs. Hazlitt (Florence Vidor), her eyes carry a hint of tears.
Next door, women’s slippers are emptied from a drawer by Mr. Hazlitt (Adolphe Menjou). His butler watches dolefully.
Mrs. Hazlitt opens a book and reads the inscription, “To my darling wife—may your love endure as long as mine.” She takes it next door, places it open on the table, and leaves without a word.
Hazlitt examines the inscription, grins ironically, and takes it back to his wife. He returns to his room and is followed by the book, which comes flying across the hall.
“I won’t need the car,” Hazlitt tells the butler. “I’ve decided to have dinner—alone.”
He spots a framed portrait of his wife which the butler has sneaked into his suitcase. Assuming his wife has placed it there, he enters her room and puts his own picture into her suitcase.
The maid sees this, and, thinking her mistress has packed it, is silently delighted. Hazlitt picks up the book, reads the inscription, and grins again. Mrs. Hazlitt, watching his every move, sees the grin and angrily slams her door. Hazlitt throws the book at the door. She opens it and slams it again. Cut to close-up of the exhaust pipe of the car. As the vehicle departs, Mrs. Hazlitt assumes her husband has left. “I’ve changed my mind,” she announces. “I’m going to have dinner alone.”
Hazlitt and his wife open their doors simultaneously and face one another, startled. Slam … slam. Hazlitt peers through his keyhole, then creeps out and turns the key in his wife’s door. Then, with a self-righteous nod of his head, he goes down to the dining room. Where he sees his wife, beginning her first course …
The film is concerned with the effect of the divorce on the Hazlitts’ daughter, Lita (Betty Bronson). “There’s nothing wrong,” her father tells her, “except your mother and I can’t agree. It’s what the lawyers call incompatibility.” Lita becomes a “grass orphan,” her only home a boarding school. When she is expelled, her parents meet and quarrel. “If you can’t cooperate about me, why bother about me at all?” demands the girl.
Lita has read in a book on divorce that parents may quarrel over trifles, but let danger threaten their children and the gulf is bridged. She runs away to the house of Dr. Dacer (Lawrence Gray). He is out, so she curls up in his reception room and inadvertently spends the night there. Dr. Dacer is furious when he discovers her in the morning. “I suppose you know you’ve compromised me … ruined my practice, my reputation?” Angrily, he drags her over to her anxious parents and rounds on the Hazlitts: “The trouble with you both is that you’re so busy being incompatible that you haven’t time to look after your own child. You ought to be ashamed.” The Hazlitts are abashed, the incident achieves the reconciliation Lita had hoped for, and the film ends with the suggestion that she will become Mrs. Dacer.
Are Parents People? appeared in the National Board of Review’s 40 Best of 1925, and several critics placed it in their Best Ten. All the reviews welcomed it, Picture Play calling it “one of the few good pictures of married life.”66 None of them criticized its attitude toward divorce, even though it portrayed it in such human terms. Perhaps, as William K. Everson said, this was because it was sparkling light comedy, “wagging an admonishing yet friendly finger at the audience for being possessed of the same human foibles that motivate the story.”67
Director Mal St. Clair managed to be warm and tender without waxing sentimental. To show the bond strengthening between the parents as they wait by the telephone for news of Lita, he has Hazlitt place his overcoat over his wife, who is half asleep on the couch. Mrs. Hazlitt touches it, then pulls it closer, smiling as she scents the familiar tobacco.
In an earlier scene, when both parents arrive at the school to take Lita on holiday, they are asked to wait in the anteroom. St. Clair builds up the tension with superbly played reaction shots, close-ups of Hazlitt’s swinging foot and, in the denouement to the scene, Hazlitt picking up his umbrella and sending a vase crashing to the floor. The headmistress smiles icily and politely inquires, “Accident?” St. Clair uses the query again to end the picture. Hazlitt knocks over another vase, and his wife asks the same question—with a smile. The shared joke is all that is needed to end the hostility between them.
Judge Ben Lindsey had aroused furious controversy over his juvenile court decisions in Denver, Colorado (see this page–this page). He aroused even more when he proposed something called “companionate marriage” in a book of that title, the sensation of 1927.68 Everyone assumed he meant trial marriage, but that was not quite what he advocated. A companionate marriage was one not primarily devoted to producing children, allowing the use of birth control and divorce by mutual consent. “People may live in the ‘companionate’ relation without enforced celibacy until they are ready to have children.”69
For this, he was beaten up in the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, by churchgoers aroused by an inflammatory, anti-Lindsey speech from the pulpit.70 They also tried to have him jailed. He was eventually thrown out of his court in Denver and lampooned on the vaudeville stage. A song written for Al Jolson had a young man serenading a girl beneath her bedroom window:
Companionate Marriage, 1928, based on Judge Ben Lindsey’s notorious book, with Richard Walling and Betty Bronson. (National Film Archives)
“Oh, my darling, oh, my dear, will you try me for a year?”
The window flies open and a man leans out: “Go away, you crazy freak. I’m on trial here for a week.”71
Lindsey was treated more kindly by Hollywood. He admired the moving picture, considering it of great benefit to mankind. And it was inevitable that some company would buy the rights to his book and involve him in its production.
Companionate Marriage was a seven-reeler made in 1928, directed by Erle C. Kenton from a screenplay by Beatrice Van. It starred Betty Bronson, of Are Parents People?, and was made by a poverty row company called Gotham, although it was credited to the “C. M. Corp” (Companionate Marriage Corporation). Behind it were E. M. Asher, who had once been involved in Last Night of the Barbary Coast (see this page), agent Edward Small, and Charles R. Rogers, in association with Sam Sax of Gotham.
Sally Williams (Bronson), the product of poverty and a broken home, works as a secretary for wealthy James Moore, whose son, Donald (Richard Walling), proposes to her. Embittered and cynical, Sally wants no part of marriage and turns him down. Ruth Moore (June Nash), Donald’s sister, impulsively marries Tommy Van Cleve (Arthur Rankin) during a drunken party at a roadhouse and is herself quickly disillusioned. After the birth of a baby, Tommy deserts her and she commits suicide. Moved by Donald’s grief and anger, Sally offers to marry him. He refuses until Judge Meredith (Alec B. Francis), a family friend, draws up a legal contract whereby if, at the end of a stipulated period, either party is dissatisfied, the marriage is legally abrogated. Several years pass, and Donald and Sally find nothing but happiness and joy together.72
Judge Lindsey appeared at the opening of the picture, and he was present during its production, but, according to Photoplay, he was not crazy over the results. Said Photoplay, “Neither are we.”73
Erle C. Kenton made a film called Trial Marriage (1929), written by Sonya Levien, for Columbia. There were also several exploitation films which suggested that trial marriage was only a step from prostitution.
In Marriage by Contract (1928), a husband in a companionate marriage goes philandering on the first night after the honeymoon, and the wife finds that “no decent man of her class will marry her.”74 Patsy Ruth Miller played the wife; her gradual aging through the picture impressed the critics. According to Miss Miller, the studio bought the rights to an episode in Lindsey’s book. The judge came out to Tiffany-Stahl to discuss the project; she met him and received a copy of his book. The material was then rewritten and retitled.75 She was not aware that it ended up as an attack on his theories, but that’s what happened. Picture Play called it “claptrap,”76 but Irene Thiers gave it three stars for timeliness, for Miss Miller’s splendid characterization, and, above all, for being a direct argument against Judge Lindsey.77
Trial Marriage, 1929, directed by Erle Kenton, from a Sonya Levien scenario. Sally Eilers and Thelma Todd auction themselves for a charity dance. (Museum of Modern Art)
The very term “birth control” entered the language as a result of the work of Margaret Sanger. “I never could credit the power those simple words had of upsetting so many people,” she wrote.78 Her name is most closely associated with the subject, yet it is not generally known that she made a largely autobiographical film about her campaign and appeared in it herself.
Born Margaret Higgins, she was one of eleven children. Her father, an Irishman, was a supporter of women’s suffrage and a socialist. Yet he opposed his daughter’s crusade, as she was indeed bitterly opposed by Catholics generally. But she felt that happiness or unhappiness in childhood depended on whether one belonged to a small or a large family, not so much on the family’s wealth or poverty.79 While working as a nurse she became aware of the dilemma of working-class mothers, desperate to avoid having any more children. In many cases, their health depended upon it. “The first right of a child,” she said, “is to be wanted.”80
She met architect William Sanger and married him, and, despite her own ill health, had three children. Ordered to have no more, she returned to part-time district nursing, specializing in obstetrics. More and more of her calls came from the Lower East Side, where pregnancy was a chronic condition and abortion methods were either ineffectual or dangerous.
It was against the law in New York to give information on contraception to anyone for any reason. And yet wealthy people not only knew about it, they practiced it. “The doomed women implored me to reveal the ‘secret’ rich people had, offering to pay me extra to tell them; many really believed I was holding back information for money. They asked everybody and tried anything, but nothing did them any good. On Saturday nights I have seen groups of from fifty to one hundred with their shawls over their heads waiting outside the office of a five-dollar abortionist.”81
Sanger was helpless. But one case changed her outlook. She saved the life of a twenty-eight-year-old woman dying of a self-induced abortion. The woman was overcome by depression, knowing that another baby would finish her. All the doctor would suggest was that her husband sleep on the roof. The woman pleaded with Sanger to tell her the secret, but, obedient to the law, the nurse declined to do so. Three months later, pregnant again, the woman killed herself. “No matter what it might cost,” wrote Sanger, “I was resolved to seek out the root of the evil.”82
She started a magazine, The Woman Rebel, and Anthony Comstock barred it from the mails, classifying a mention of contraception as pornography. Facing a trial for an article she didn’t even write, Sanger slipped away to England. Comstock imprisoned her husband because of her activities, and although this case was dropped, she was arrested again and again. Charities were terrified of her, but at last, on October 16, 1916, she opened the first birth control clinic in America, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. The vice squad promptly arrested her and her sister, Ethel (who was almost killed by forcible feeding). Sanger became concerned for the other inmates and, once she was free, set herself the task of changing the law through education.
One attempt to educate the public was the production of a motion picture, Birth Control (1917). With her associate Frederick A. Blossom, she wrote a scenario: “Although I had long since lost faith in my abilities as an actress, I played the part of the nurse.”83
Financed by an associate of Blossom’s and produced by the Message Feature Film Corporation, Birth Control was advertised with the kind of sensitivity that exhibitors appreciated: “You Don’t Have to Be a Film Buyer or Seller to Clean Up a Quick Profit on This. Everyone in the world will want to see it. It’s the Safest, Surest State Right Proposition Since Big Film Features Began, and We’ll Guarantee You It’s Law Proof and Censor Proof. Five Reels of Stirring, Varied and Picturesque Exposition of the Vital and Dramatic Phases of the Crusade That Sent its Martyr Heroine to a Prison From Which She Has Just Been Freed.”84
A statement by Sanger was included as a “certificate of genuineness”: “This is the only picture on Birth Control in which I shall appear. Part of the profits go to extending our cause.”85
Variety thought the title suggested a grim film with the atmosphere of a clinic: “The picture is anything but that. It is rather a combination of a New York travelog and the quite dramatic personal experiences of Mrs. Margaret Sanger, its heroine, who appears in almost every scene. The average observer is electrified with the intense convictions of the propagandist, taken hither and thither throughout New York’s teeming child streets, to the almost childless precincts of the informed wealthy.”86
One aspect of the film which struck the Variety reviewer was the pervasive sincerity of Sanger: “Playing a role that is herself, one looks for at least fleeting moments of artifice in the woman’s efforts to repeat for the screen the emotions she lived while conceiving her crusade and fighting for it until she fought herself into jail. But there’s no artifice in the Mrs. Sanger of the screen. She is the same placid, clear eyed, rather young and certainly attractive propagandist that swayed crowds at her meetings and defied the police both before and after her incarceration. And facts are given that if not making everyone who sees the picture a convert to her cause will certainly make everyone think twice before denouncing the movement.”87
The picture opened with a double exposure contrasting the struggling mother of the poor, lacking the money to buy the knowledge which would lessen her burden, and a middle-class woman with a small family. An interview with Sanger was illustrated by images of the weak and crippled children of exhausted, poverty-stricken mothers. There followed the story of the suicide of her patient, the persecution of Sanger by the authorities, scenes shot at her Brownsville clinic, and the trial. The film ended with shots of Sanger behind bars, with the subtitle “No matter what happens, the work must go on.”88
Birth Control was submitted to the National Board of Review, which passed it with the comment that it had been “handled with such a deft touch and intelligence” that there was no need to remove so much as a subtitle.89 It was this which encouraged the promoters to guarantee it as censor-proof. But just in case, they provided an alternative title, The New World, and issued alternative posters and advertising material.
Above: Margaret Sanger, 1916. Below: Margaret Sanger, in Birth Control, 1917. (Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College)
The day before the opening at the Park Theatre at Columbus Circle, New York City License Commissioner George H. Bell informed the licensee that the film was “immoral, indecent, and directly contrary to public welfare.” If it were shown, action would be taken. When the Park Theatre had exhibited The Inside of the White Slave Traffic, the police had arrested most of the employees, so the opening of Birth Control was cancelled.
Sanger staged a flamboyant coup twenty-four hours after the ban. She held a special showing of the film for newspapermen, so that they could decide whether or not it was “morally objectionable.” The distributors also applied for an injunction and Sanger sued the commissioner, to make him personally liable for damages suffered from the stigma placed upon the production and from the loss of receipts.90
Along with the press, 200 people came to the show, many of them concerned with social welfare. The entire audience voted emphatically in favor of the film, and they signed a letter to this effect.91
At the hearing, Bell held that the film should be suppressed because “it tends to ridicule the public authorities” and the state law. It also raised a class issue by “setting before the public the squalor, poverty and ignorance of the poor” compared to the luxury of the rich with their small families “[and] depicts the wealthy as contributing funds for the prosecution of those who attempt to enlighten the poor with respect to birth control and for the avowed purpose of maintaining the poor as the servant and laboring classes.”92 He added that it was going rather far to classify a birth control film as theatrical entertainment.93
Judge Nathan Bijur ruled that the commissioner’s action violated the constitutional right of free speech, but the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court overturned this decision, citing the by now famous Mutual Film Corporation ruling that the business was not protected by the First Amendment.94
Sanger said that exhibitors, “fearful lest the breath of censure wither their profits,” were too timid to show the film,95 and it was only seen by those who attended her lectures. It would have been illegal to show the film in public until 1965, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally overturned state laws making the spread of birth control information a crime96—by which time the film had long since turned to dust.
WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN? “The scavengers of the screen,” said Photoplay in April 1917, “availing themselves of every fetid air which sweeps up from the sewers of thought, have successfully sailed the sea of maudlin popularity in the rotten bottoms of impossible adventure, white slavery, morbid romance and nakedness for its own sake. The present conveyance is birth control, for and against, under a variety of tissue guises and prurient titles of the She Didn’t Know It Was Loaded order. Lois Weber, with her very fine and sweet play Where Are My Children? opened the door to the filthy host of nasty-minded imitators, who announce obscenities and present bromides.”
Where Are My Children? (1916),97 however else you described it, could hardly be called “sweet.” It was an unpleasant but extraordinary film—expressing support for birth control, but abhorrence for abortion. The impact of the picture is strong enough today; what it must have been like in the age of innocence one shudders to think. Its strength derives not so much from its filmic qualities—it is no better made than many other dramas of its day—but from its subject matter.
There are two prints in existence, both incomplete, but complementing each other, the American version and the European version. Because the film was made while the war was on, but before America had entered it, there are distinct differences between the two.
The American version opens with this exposition, missing from the European:
The question of birth control is now being generally discussed. All intelligent people know that birth control is a subject of serious public interest. Newspapers, magazines and books have treated different phases of this question. Can a subject thus dealt with on the printed page be denied careful dramatization on the motion picture screen? The Universal Film Manufacturing Company believes not.
The Universal Film Manufacturing Company does believe, however, that the question of birth control should not be presented before children. In producing this picture, the intention is to place a serious drama before adult audiences, to whom no suggestion of a fact of which they are ignorant is conveyed. It believes that children should not be admitted to see this unaccompanied by adults, but if you bring them it will do them an immeasurable amount of good.98
Variety urged Universal to cut this long and muddled title.
It was not often that controversy began at the very opening titles of a film. The first sequence shows swirling clouds and massive gates opening. This special effect, which recurs frequently, is shabbily done, even for 1916, with smoke standing in for clouds and gates, columns, and celestial figures all looking as though they have been cut out of a book of Victorian lithographs.
“Behind the great portals of Eternity, the souls of little children waited to be born.” The souls are represented by the faces of infants, with cherublike wings. Among the souls are “chance children,” who descend to earth in large numbers, “unwanted souls,” who are constantly sent back, marked as morally or physically defective and bearing the sign of the serpent.
“And then, in the secret place of the Most High were those souls, fine and strong, that were sent forth only on prayer. They were marked with the approval of the Almighty.” Surmounting the smoke and the little faces with wings, a single bright cross appears. Then the story proper begins: Richard Walton (Tyrone Power), a district attorney, is a great believer in eugenics. Standing at the door of a court as a working-class couple is led out, he tells his assistant, “Those poor souls are ill-born. If the mystery of birth were understood, crime would be wiped out.”
It is a great disappointment to Walton that his wife (Helen Riaume) is childless. “Never dreaming that it was her fault, the husband concealed his disappointment.” Whenever his sister visits to show off her new baby, he is careful to conceal his delight in case his wife feels upset.
A case comes to trial that greatly interests Walton. Young Doctor Homer (C. Norman Hammond) is accused of distributing indecent literature advocating birth regulation. Walton reads passages from his book, which are shown on the screen:
“When only those children who are wanted are born, the race will conquer the evils that weigh it down.”
“Let us stop the slaughter of the unborn and save the lives of unwilling mothers.”
Dr. Homer describes to the jury the slum conditions that prove to him “the necessity of worldwide enlightenment on the subject of birth control.” Nonetheless, he is convicted.
Intercut with the trial we see Mrs. Walton guiding her best friend, Mrs. William Brandt (Marie Walcamp), to her own obliging Dr. Malfit (Juan de la Cruz), a villainous-looking foreigner in a piratical beard (although one suspects the producers were just trying to make him as unlike any other doctor as they could). Mrs. Brandt is ushered into the examining room; next we see a soul ascending to heaven, and the portals closing.
“One of the ‘unwanted’ ones returns, and a social butterfly is again ready for house parties.”
Mrs. Walton’s rakish brother, Roger (A. D. Blake), seduces the housekeeper’s beautiful daughter Lillian (René Rogers). The onset of pregnancy is conveyed by a child’s face, framed by wings, superimposed on Lillian’s shoulder. Roger seeks help from his sister, who recommends Dr. Malfit. But this time, the obliging doctor bungles the operation. Just before Lillian dies, she confesses to her grief-stricken mother, who begs forgiveness for not having told her what she needed to know.
Walton institutes proceedings against Dr. Malfit, whose defense is that he worked for the improvement of mankind by “preventing motherhood for vain, pleasure-seeking women and degenerates.” Malfit is sentenced to fifteen years hard labor. As he is dragged away, he shouts at Walton that before he sits in judgment on other people he should see to his own household. Walton examines Malfit’s account book. An invoice for fifty dollars to Mrs. Richard Walton leaps off the page. There are further bills for “services rendered”: fifty dollars … seventy-five dollars … Walton is horrified. He drives home and interrupts his wife’s tea party: “I have just learned why so many of you have no children. I should bring you to trial for manslaughter, but I shall content myself with asking you to leave my house.”
As the women depart, protesting, he advances on his wife: “Where are my children?” She collapses. “I—an officer of the law—must shield a murderess!” He staggers out, and she faints.
She visits a church. “Prayerfully now, Mrs. Walton sought the blessing she had refused, but, having perverted Nature so often, she found herself physically unable to wear the diadem of motherhood.”
The District Attorney (Tyrone Power, Sr.) ejects his wife’s friends—“I should bring you to trial for manslaughter”—when he discovers the reason for their childlessness. From Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley’s Where Are My Children?, 1916. (Museum of Modern Art)
The picture ends with a shot of the Waltons seated before the fire. “Throughout the years, she must face the silent question—‘Where are my children?’ ” Mrs. Walton sees in her imagination a little girl clamber into his lap. Then her husband grows old, and three grown-up children gather, smiling, behind his chair. The scene is beautifully lit, originally toned purple, and is surprisingly touching.
Although this film is very strong medicine, which one wants to like because of Lois Weber, one chokes on its disturbing sentimentality. The district attorney spends too much of his time kissing little children in the park—in a more modern film he would be an object of suspicion. At the same time, there is an implication that certain children are undesirable.
Nevertheless, it is handsomely shot, with a spaciousness and use of light appropriate to its upper-class milieu. The limousines are as beautiful and elegant as the women who ride in them. If the acting is on the heavy side, somewhat more theatrical than in Weber’s later films, the subject needed an extra layer of seriousness to get it by the censors, for there is no happy ending. That alone contributed to its disturbing effect.
Universal was terrified of it. The National Board of Review rejected it for mixed audiences,99 and the studio feared the local censorship boards. So Universal held it back from release and presented it in an exclusive engagement at the Globe Theatre in New York,100 risking a ban by the license commissioner. The studio hoped to secure enough endorsements to protect the picture on its journey across the country. The risk proved worth taking; the film did record business. Four shows a day were not enough, and people were turned away in large numbers.101
Where Are My Children? received excellent reviews, although the name of Mrs. William Brandt had to be changed after a protest by a well-known New Yorker of that name. Titles in the print in the Library of Congress use the name Mrs. Carlo. The National Board of Review was obliged to look at the film again, and this time sixty out of eighty-one members of representative organizations approved it for adult showing.102
Adverse criticism concerned questions of fact. As Moving Picture World pointed out, physicians like Dr. Malfit were not patronized by women like Mrs. Walton and her friends: “Safe means of checking child-birth are not a problem for the well-to-do. They are taken as a matter of course. The whole purpose of a campaign of the kind being waged by Mrs. Sanger and Emma Goldman is to place the same means within the reach of the less fortunate.”103
And why does the district attorney call his wife a murderess because she chooses to remain childless? “According to his reasoning she has committed a crime, yet in the first part of the picture he unmistakably favors the publishing of a book on birth control. Surely the principle involved is not affected by the methods adopted?”104
Released on a States’ Rights basis, the film ignited fiery indignation all over the country, sparking off court actions from which, surprisingly, it usually emerged unscathed. One place it did not survive was Pennsylvania, whose censor, Dr. Ellis P. Oberholtzer, declared: “The picture is unspeakably vile. I would have permitted it to pass the board in this state only over my dead body. It is a mess of filth, and no revision, however drastic, could ever help it any. It is not fit for decent people to see.”105
Catholics were placed in a quandary by the film, for while it was the strongest possible propaganda against abortion, it defended birth control—which was one of the reasons why the Catholic mayor of Boston, James Michael Curley, who also served as municipal censor, found himself the center of a scandal. His censorship commission virtually ignored the film; they were waiting, they said, for a “proper complaint.”106 The film had been running to enormous business in Boston for months, even though ex-mayor John F. Fitzgerald objected to it.107 The turnaway on opening night was estimated at 2,000.108
At the height of the war, the film arrived in Great Britain, where the authorities were opposed to birth control, especially since the conflict had taken such a toll of the young men and the birth rate had dropped so dramatically. So the film was recut to eliminate the sequence of the defense of Dr. Homer, and these shots were inserted into the trial of Dr. Malfit. Dr. Homer was now apparently giving evidence against him, equipped with such titles as “All incurable mental defectives, drunks, criminals and suchlike must be prevented from propagating their defects in their descendants BUT NEVER BY UNLAWFUL MEANS.”
Many other titles were altered, too. When Walton marches in to the tea party, he is made to say: “I have just learned why so many of you have no children. You avoid motherhood out of selfishness. You are a thousand times more evil than the poor girl who had to pay for her ignorance with her life.”
This meddling gravely upset the drama and by depriving the opening sequences of variety converted the first reels into a series of comings and goings of limousines.109
Despite, or perhaps because of the recutting, the reaction of the English press was excellent. Said the Pall Mall Gazette, “How the obvious difficulties of presenting such a theme for public exhibition have been overcome is a wonder. People who are used to photographic dramas will agree, one believes, that Where Are My Children? is far and away the most perfect film that has yet been exhibited. The usual weak sentimentality is absent, and in its place a fine and natural poem of the emotions.”110
Universal’s representative in England, John D. Tippett, made a deal with the National Council of Public Morals limiting exhibition of the film to adults in special halls; in return, it could be advertised with the council’s endorsement.111 Thirty thousand people paid to see it in Preston, Lancashire, and 40,000 in Bradford, Yorkshire.112 In Sydney, Australia, it played to 100,000 viewers in two weeks.113
In 1917, Lois Weber released another birth control picture, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, perhaps because she realized the shortcomings of the first. The story was based on the imprisonment of Margaret Sanger and her sister’s hunger strike. Weber and Smalley appeared in the leads, which makes it all the more frustrating that the film is lost. Said Wid’s, “Both make their characters very impressive because they have poise, authority and repose.”114
“Many of the scenes are exceedingly painful,” said the New York Dramatic Mirror, “and a few seem to invade the privacy of domestic life with unnecessary frankness, but the production on the whole has been handled with the utmost delicacy and skill.”115
The New York license commissioner, who had restrained himself over the earlier film, pounced on this one. Apparently, persons of high standing had reported that it was “contra bonos mores” (against good morals). Universal did manage to secure a temporary injunction and the picture was able to play out its engagement at the Broadway Theater, but the ban prevented it being shown anywhere else in New York.116 The state supreme court later denied Universal a permanent injunction, the judge declaring: “If the ignorant and uninformed are to be educated by being told that laws which they do not like may be defied, and that lawbreakers deserve to be glorified as such, there would be a sorry future in store for human liberty.”117 And he referred to the precedent established in the case of the Mutual Film Corporation that moving pictures were a business, pure and simple, and were not to be regarded as part of the press.
Margaret Sanger’s name was not used in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, but most of the reviews drew attention to the plot’s similarity to recent reports of her crusade. Variety accused the filmmakers of seizing the opportunity provided by the Sanger picture to make a quick dollar.118 But the fact that Lois Weber herself played the role so closely identified with Margaret Sanger is sufficient testimony to her admiration for the crusader.
The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, 1917. Lois Weber (center) plays a character based on Margaret Sanger, here being arrested on the platform. (Richard Koszarski)
GHOSTS At the pinnacle of the mountain of taboo subjects was what were euphemistically called “social diseases.” When the editor of Ladies’ Home Journal mentioned them in 1906, he lost 75,000 horrified readers.119 The less they were spoken of, the more they proliferated, for the majority of young people knew nothing whatever of the dangers. The result was that venereal disease became an epidemic without the public being aware of the fact. The obvious preventative, sex education, was regarded by many people, particularly the highly religious, as a crime: “The more we put such ideas into their heads, the more they will think of them.”120
In 1881, the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen published a play on the subject of hereditary syphilis, Ghosts. It was greeted with a torrent of abuse on the Continent and tight-lipped censorship in England, and that was before it had even been performed. (Chicago—of all cities—gave it that honor in 1882, albeit in Norwegian.)
When the Lubin Film Company stole the story and filmed it in America in 1911 as The Sins of the Father, Moving Picture World recognized its origin at once and printed what was probably the most vituperative editorial in its history: “If ever there was a case of perversion of genius it was Ibsen’s writing of The Ghosts [sic]. The ordinary human being would just as soon think of making himself comfortable in an asylum for incurables as deriving any pleasure or moral from looking at such a play. The subject is disgusting at best and Ibsen has used his marvelous dramatic powers to make it horrible and revolting. To film such an atrocity is to sin both against art and decency. A mother telling her ‘tainted son’ of the vicious life of his deceased father; the son developing ‘the taint’ by his undue indulgence in drink and his mild assault on a woman servant and the finish of a son asking the mother to help him in committing suicide—these are things that should have no representation either on the silent or the speaking stage.”121
D. W. Griffith’s Reliance-Majestic company released a version in 1915 which was described as “hardly Ibsen’s Ghosts, but a classic nonetheless.”122 Directed by George Nichols, and featuring Henry B. Walthall, this Ghosts omitted almost every reference to venereal disease. The play was so altered that denunciations of the film appeared in magazines like Current Opinion.123 Vachel Lindsay said that whenever in the play there were “quiet voices like the slow drip of hydrochloric acid, in the film there were endless writhings and rushings about, done with a deal of skill, but destructive of the last remnants of Ibsen.”124
Mary Alden and Henry B. Walthall in Ghosts, 1915. (John E. Allen)
Ghosts may lack the shattering impact of Ibsen’s play, but for anyone familiar with the subject it would have been disturbing enough. The visual emphasis is on Alving’s drinking, but Oswald, his son, suffers from “an hereditary taint” leading to blinding headaches; a title identifies the cause as “Locomotor ataxia.” He is only just prevented from marrying his half-sister. His mother has no part in his death in this version, but die he does, by suicide. The film is true to the spirit of Ibsen, even if the theme itself is a ghost.
DAMAGED GOODS Eugène Brieux, a French playwright, caused a similar sensation with his Damaged Goods (Les Avariés) of 1902. It was first presented in America at the Fulton Theater in New York, on March 14, 1913, under the auspices of the Medical Review of Reviews and its Sociological Fund. The star was Richard Bennett, who had brought the play to America and who had a hard job finding actors who did not consider a play about venereal disease to be professional suicide. Six actresses were rehearsed for the part of the prostitute; all six vanished. The role was eventually played by Bennett’s wife. “The effect of that single matinee performance was like a thunderbolt,” wrote Joan Bennett. “The ‘conspiracy of silence’ surrounding an objectionable subject had been lifted at last.”125
Bennett took the play on the road and had to fight the censors at every turn. He developed a curtain-call monologue which became famous. It concluded: “A respectable man will take his son and daughter to one of those grand music halls where they will hear things of the most loathsome description, but he won’t let them hear a word spoken seriously on the great act of love.… Pornography, as much as you please—science, never!”126
When the film version of Damaged Goods came out in 1915, reviewers found it “a tremendous shocker.”127 It was produced in seven reels by the American Film Manufacturing Company, directed by Thomas Ricketts128 and adapted by Harry Pollard.
Bennett regarded the picture business with a contempt fashionable among actors of the day: “Whenever you think there are movie scouts out front, let me know,” he used to say, “and I’ll stay home sick.”129 The chance to carry his crusade to millions more people, however, was irresistible. Joan Bennett credits him with writing the script and directing the film, and even though others are credited, he probably exercised a great deal of creative control. After all, no one but its author knew the play better than he.
“While the stage play was compelled to limit the intended lesson to a mere recital,” said Variety, “the film carries the audience into deeper details, giving vivid visual illustrations and a close view of the disease in actual action. The camera even invaded the sacred interior of an Institution where it pictured patients suffering from the so-called tertiary stage and brought forth the paralyzed and twisted form for ‘close-up’ inspection. Withal its expose of what has hitherto been a medical and scientific secret, Damaged Goods carries a ray of hope for the syphilitic and teaches the absolute necessity of early treatment.”130
The scenario followed the plot of the play. George Dupont (Bennett) graduates from law school and returns home to a clutch of love affairs and an arranged marriage to a senator’s daughter. At his bachelor dinner he gets drunk, goes to the apartment of a friend’s mistress, and meets a girl with whom he spends the night. He finds he has contracted syphilis, and is about to commit suicide when he is stopped by the girl (Adrienne Morrison),131 who tells him she deliberately infected him. She had been seduced, was refused treatment by hospitals, went half mad, and took revenge on the society which allowed such things. She sends George to the specialist who has regenerated (but apparently not cured) her. The doctor forbids him to marry for two years, but because his wedding is imminent, George goes to a quack who guarantees a cure in three months. The marriage takes place, a baby is born, and then comes the shock of learning that the infant has inherited syphilis. The senator comes to kill George, only to find that he has already committed suicide—walking into the sea, along the path of a moonbeam.132
Richard Bennett in Damaged Goods, 1915. (Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.)
The film, like the play, blamed nobody, showing sympathy even for the plight of the prostitute and demonstrating that the problem was a social one. In 1917, Bennett was asked by the War Department to appear with the film in training camps throughout the country. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who had banned the play from Annapolis in 1913, was obliged, by the soaring incidence of venereal disease, to combine forces with Secretary of War Newton D. Baker and to show the film as widely as possible. Later, Bennett was offered a commission to accompany the film to France and to lecture with it. He replied that if he was asked to serve democracy, he would like to start at home, where American suffragists, who dared demand political freedom, were held in vile conditions.133
When the British production of the play opened at St. Martin’s Theatre in London in 1917, with Ronald Colman in the lead, some of the scenes were considered “harrowing in the extreme.”134 The Samuelson film version of 1919, directed by the Canadian Alexander Butler, was praised for the opposite reason by the British trade press: “nothing has been introduced into this film that would be calculated to nauseate rather than instruct.”135
The British film survives, while the American has disappeared—another example of the vagaries of film preservation. The British version faced harsher censorship. It could therefore risk nothing in the way of illustration and came dangerously close to being a series of subtitles, interrupted merely by shots of appropriate characters. The story resembled the play, except the girl (Vivian Rees) was a country orphan, who seeks a job at a fashion house and is raped by the proprietor (by implication). Befriended by a prostitute, she becomes one herself after the birth of her child, whom she hands over to a convent.
The subtitles were overlong, but fascinating for the attitudes they revealed. When Dupont asks the doctor if it is certain his wife will catch the disease, the doctor replies, “Come, come! You are a man of business. Marriage is a contract. If you marry without saying anything, you will be giving an implied warranty for goods which you know to be bad. It would be a fraud which ought to be punishable by law.”
Toward the end of the film, the doctor’s ironclad attitude softens and he entreats the wife’s father (an M.P. in this version) to forgive Dupont: “Are you yourself without sin that you are so relentless to others?”
“I have never had any shameful disease, sir!”
“I was not asking that. I was asking you if you have never exposed yourself to one. Ah, you see! Then it was not virtue that saved you; it was luck.”
In order to effect a happy ending, the script has the doctor guaranteeing that in two or three years, the M.P. will be a happy grandfather (something he insisted in an earlier scene could not be foreseen). And three years later, the suicide episode quietly removed, the family is happily united.
Following the American technique of winning the support of churchmen, reformers, and the press, the producers held a special screening of Damaged Goods at Terry’s Theatre on December 16, 1919, followed by a luncheon at the Savoy Hotel. The main speaker was the Reverend Bernard John Vaughan, celebrated for his relief work among the poor and for his sermons attacking social evils. Unusually for a churchman, he supported the cinema. And he supported this film. “I want this wonderful film shown everywhere,” he said, “because it is destructive of vice, and I want encouragement to be given by its means to people to live clean, strong and straight lives.…”136
The picture was never passed by the British Board of Film Censors. The board had no more legal power to prevent exhibition than the National Board of Review, but since the exhibitors had created it the censors could exact penalties of their own. Defying the censor was a risky practice. However, D. W. Griffith had presented Intolerance without a censor certificate and got away with it, and Watch Committees in the big towns sometimes allowed a film which the censor had banned. Samuelson apparently took advantage of this loophole, suggests historian Harold Dunham, for his research has shown that when the picture was banned in Belfast, the corporation was told that it had already been shown in every other large city in the United Kingdom.137
Films like this soon found it harder to find a home in England, where even the local authorities cracked down on “prurient so-called propaganda films”138 which the censor refused to pass.
FIT TO WIN During the war, sexually transmitted disease rendered so many troops unfit for combat that propaganda films were ordered by the military authorities as a matter of urgency. The British had virtually ignored the problem until 1916. In the United States the following year, a major crusade was launched by attorney Raymond B. Fosdick, with full government approval, with the slogan “Fit to Fight”—the title of the first film produced for this campaign. Directed by Lieutenant Edward H. Griffith, it opened with a full reel illustrating the effects of venereal disease. The story concerned five young men; we see them first in civilian life, then in the army receiving instruction on V.D. All but one, Billy Hale, fall for the temptations of the town streetwalkers. Kid McCarthy resorts promptly to prophylactic treatment and escapes infection; the others contract diseases of varying unpleasantness. McCarthy accuses Hale of being a “mollycoddle.” They fight; McCarthy is beaten and agrees to reform. These two are the only members of the group fit for service abroad. “Back in the hospital,” concluded the synopsis, “are the ‘useless slackers’ who through weakness and disobedience of orders have made themselves a burden on the government by contracting venereal disease.”139 Many in the audience might have ruminated on the fact that unpleasant though the diseases might have been, a stretch in the hospital was preferable to an unspecified period of trench warfare.
Fit to Fight was revised after the armistice for civilian use and retitled Fit to Win. Extra scenes were shot at the Metro studios in New York. Kid McCarthy had died bravely at the front, and Billy, promoted to captain, brings his medal back for his sweetheart. He visits his old pals; now almost cured, they still have to face the shame of their parents. The picture ends with Billy and his fiancée at the altar.
The government entrusted the film to the Public Health Service for distribution to regular theatres. It was potential dynamite, for it dealt openly with the way the infection was spread; the titles spoke of seminal emissions, and the value of continence was discussed.140 To forestall the anticipated fury, a letter signed by the Assistant Surgeon General was circulated to the trade papers: “The United States Public Health Service asks the co-operation of State and Municipal governments and requests the abrogation or suspension of such censorships as might impede this very essential missionary work.”
Careful precautions were taken: the film could only be shown to segregated audiences—males one day, females the next—or the theatre had to be divided, with men in the balcony and women downstairs. No children were allowed. Solemn warnings were posted at the doors in case people wandered in casually to see a favorite actor (Raymond McKee played in this, as in Fit to Fight.)141 Poor Edward H. Griffith, the director, despite praise from reviewers for a powerful production, found his name had been removed to avoid confusion with his more illustrious namesake: “It is always better never to mislead in the slightest degree.”142
“No one but the Government could get away with it,” warned Wid Gunning. He thought it splendid, however, that the government had done it, because anyone else would have been accused of exploitation.143
No sooner had the picture opened at Brooklyn’s Grand Opera House than License Commissioner Gilchrist and the New York City Police Department threatened to revoke the theatre’s license unless it was taken off at once. The Opera House secured a temporary injunction.144
After viewing the film, Judge Learned Hand decided that it was a proper subject to present to the public, providing two scenes were removed—“the bawdy house ‘flashes’ and those wherein police protection is alleged to shelter such dens.”145 He would then grant a permanent injunction against the license commissioner. But opposition came from another quarter—District Attorney Talley, who contended that the V.D. pictures, and Fit to Win in particular, were made dishonestly. A great deal of their footage had been obtained speciously, if not fraudulently. The consent of naval and military authorities had been secured by the government because it was understood the films were to be shown to service personnel only and that “posing for a picture” was “a patriotic duty.”146
Talley ordered an investigation of the head of film distribution for the Public Health Service, Isaac Silverman. The sole distributor of Fit to Win when it was purely a government picture, Silverman had branched out as “a purveyor of social hygiene pictures for public consumption and private gain,” with his company, Public Health Films. Silverman had an original retort: he charged that the district attorney’s opposition to Fit to Win was the result of a move on the part of the “movie trust” to distract attention from the charges of graft made by the congressional committee.147 In fact, a congressional committee was about to descend on the whole subject of the “social hygiene” films, and questions were asked about the American Social Hygiene Association, which had first financed Fit to Win. Severe criticism was directed at the film industry, which was both unwelcome and unjustified, considering it had had nothing to do with any of the pictures.
In July, a decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Hand’s judgment and the film was banned in New York City. “Revolting details caused a storm of protest against Fit to Win,” reported Variety.148 The license commissioner had once more acted as unofficial censor.
In 1919, the federal government commissioned a report from the Psychological Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University to determine the effect of these V.D. films. Doctors Karl Lashley and John Watson showed Fit to Win to nearly 5,000 people. They discovered that the emotions aroused by the film—especially by the opening sequence—were horror and fear: “The fear of infection is the chief motivating agent to which the film appeals. The other possible incentives to continence which are touched upon in the film are given too brief space or too little dramatic value to impress any great number of men.”149
The doctors encountered an antipathy to the film from the well-informed, who dismissed it as “tedious and maudlin.” But they were struck by the value it had for more ignorant audiences. Twenty percent of the soldiers were either illiterate or could hardly speak English, and many men did not even understand the term “sexual intercourse” used in the titles. The film had the strongest appeal for blacks.
The doctors concluded that the film was “moderately efficient” in conveying information but that a lot of valuable footage was wasted by the drama. Only where the information was simple and clear did many of the men grasp it. Nevertheless, 70 percent gained a fairly accurate knowledge of the points made by the film. “We believe,” wrote the doctors, “that the results speak very well for the effectiveness of the film in bringing home the lesson which it was designed to teach.”150
But they believed the film exaggerated the dangers of venereal disease without giving accurate information about the cause or the possibility of a cure. “Some of those with whom we talked feel they have caught the authors of the film in a lie which shows that its purpose is to foist on them a moral code under the guise of hygiene.”
No lasting effects were found, either positive or negative. The main facts were remembered for periods of up to five months; otherwise, the picture seemed forgotten as quickly as the average entertainment film. (But then five months was the extent of their investigation.)
WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH Whatsoever a Man Soweth was a feature made in England for the Canadian army. Joseph Best, who had edited Pathé News, was released from the British army in 1917 to make the film for the War Office. “I wrote the story in twenty-four hours,” he recalled, “had it approved the next day, produced, did all the camera work, edited, made the titles, joined them in, and finally projected it myself to the Army Council—a one-man job if ever there was one. It was well liked, and some hundred copies were sent to all British and Allied fronts for showing to the troops. I made most of it at Richmond Park, using army huts, soldiers … hospitals etc.”151
One has to admire Best’s enthusiasm while acknowledging that the film is made with no skill whatever. As a social document, however, it is of exceptional value. Parts of the film are disturbing, even today, so its effect on soldiers seventy years ago must have been electrifying.
The majority of the five-reeler concerns the misadventures of a young Canadian soldier, Dick. Before he leaves home, his mother tells him, “You are going to fight for honour and principle … never forget it, dear, wherever you may be—do nothing of which you could be ashamed to tell your sister or your mother.”
There were an estimated 60,000 prostitutes in the County of London in 1917, 40,000 of them refugees from France and Belgium.152 One of them approaches Dick outside the National Gallery. A passing Canadian officer taps him on the shoulder and interrupts the proposition: “Do you realise, young man, the risks you run in associating with such women?”
Whatsoever a Man Soweth, 1917. Dick’s encounter with a prostitute in Trafalgar Square is interrupted by an officer. (Bob Geoghegan)
Dick shoos the girl away (and she walks off across Trafalgar Square, clutching her hat, which is flying off in the wind, and grinning broadly). The officer proffers him a card with the address of a doctor. Dick agrees to consult him and produces a photo of his fiancée. The officer declares, “Ah! I thought I had seen you somewhere before. Jane is my sister.” This startling twist was evidently concocted by the title writer, for Dick does not react at all.
Dick keeps his promise and visits Dr. Burns. He is conducted around hospital wards and shown victims of venereal disease in every stage. Censorship being lifted for troops, close-ups of rotting legs and hands spare the audience nothing. At this point the film turns into a textbook, and the pages of the Final Report of the Commission on Venereal Diseases fill the screen. We learn that hereditary syphilis, generally acquired from the mother, leads at an early age to blindness and deafness. We are shown the germs of the disease, threadlike bodies seen under a microscope attacking healthy corpuscles, and then a syphilitic sore, seething with spirochetes.
Dr. Burns directs Dick to the nearest school for the blind for further facts about what the film coyly refers to as “wild oats.” A title states that more than half the children contracted blindness because of hereditary venereal disease. The children are given the subtitle “Daddy took a chance.” The close-ups of the boys in their Eton collars are heartbreaking.
“There is no such thing as a ‘safe prostitute,’ ” says a title. “They are practically all diseased—some of them all the time and some of them some of the time.… A single exposure may mean a lifetime affliction.
“The man who carries disease to an innocent wife does worse than murder.
“FOR THE SAKE OF HEALTHY CHILDREN. Every child has a right to be born clean into this world, and that man is to be pitied whose own flesh and blood looks him in the face to say, ‘Curse you, Dad, I was dirty born and you are the reason why!’ ”
When the war is over, Dick’s brother, Tom, comes under scrutiny. We saw him consorting with prostitutes in London (and being robbed for good measure). Now he returns to Canada, and his wife falls ill with a strange malady. The doctor is called and reveals that she has been infected with syphilis. Tom confides in Dick, who urges him to undergo a cure. The cure is successful, and Tom returns from his “business trip” to see the baby born during his absence. But there is something wrong with the child—he is incurably blind. Tom is overcome with despair. The film ends with lines by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
And the child she bore me was blind
And stricken and weak and ill,
And the mother was left a wreck
It was they who paid the bill.
Whatsoever a Man Soweth also showed the danger of treating V.D. with patent medicine. Tom tries a brand before he leaves for the front and it seems to work, but the disease returns.
THE SCARLET TRAIL The sale of “quack” patent medicine was a lucrative racket which fed upon the victims of the white slave trade. John S. Lawrence wrote and directed a film about this problem, The Scarlet Trail, in 1918. He was inspired by a booklet—“Don’t Take a Chance,” by Charles Larned Robinson of the Social Hygiene Committee of the American Defense Society—2 million copies of which had already been distributed to the army and navy by the YMCA. Like the Canadian picture, this film showed the blind and crippled children who had resulted from the spread of venereal disease.
“Out and out preachment,” said Wid’s, “the entertainment value registers somewhere near the zero mark.… Everybody concerned in the somber tragedy is so apparently keen to point a moral that they don’t get to you as real human beings.”153 But the review pointed to an intriguing aspect of the film; as in Traffic in Souls, the patent medicine racketeer had contacts in the reform movement. They help him frame the woman who exposed him by accusing her of endangering the morals of children to whom she teaches sex hygiene.
OPEN YOUR EYES Backed by the state health authorities, Warner’s Open Your Eyes (1919) attacked those who felt that V.D. should never be mentioned. “Silence is not golden,” was its message, “it is criminal.” It opened with a convention of medical men, one of those “talkie” sequences jammed with titles which were considered so necessary in these propaganda pictures. The titles declared that syphilis could be contracted through kissing, public towels, and drinking cups, that 10 percent of young men were syphilitic and had contracted the disease from prostitutes, and that 28 percent of the insane were victims of syphilis: “It is time for moralists to stand to one side and health officials to roll up their sleeves.”154
The story by S. L. (Sam) Warner and C. L. Mintz was straightforward—and therefore shocking—and yet the director, Gilbert P. Hamilton, felt it necessary to impose coy visual euphemisms. When a mother explains the facts of life to her daughter, he cut to a hen hatching chicks. When the girl, Kitty Walton, reaches eighteen, she falls for a boy who is a “rounder‡ along Broadway.” He had caught syphilis and consulted a quack instead of a proper doctor. He had also had an affair with a girl in the suburbs and had set her up in an apartment before she realized she had been infected.
Variety’s laconic description of the film should be quoted verbatim: “The suburban kid finds herself in the dreaded ten percent class and she dramatically crabs the rounder’s marriage with Kitty by exposing him as a syphilitic before the assembled wedding guests. In the end, the rounder goes to the nut factory while the girl victim (after being cured) marries a youth who had gone to the city and had been bitten by a prostitute who worked more rawly than the cops permit these days.”155
The picture played in several cities before it opened in New York. Everyone invited to the opening received a testimonial from officials in the other cities, together with a speech from Louis Brownlow, President of the Board of Commissioners for the District of Columbia: “One little streetwalker will spread more disease, cause more misery, ruin more lives, bring about more deaths in the course of two or three years than all the lepers who have been in the District of Columbia since the foundation of the Government.”156
END OF THE ROAD Director Edward H. Griffith, who had made Fit to Fight and Fit to Win, also directed End of the Road. Taken from a story by Dr. Katherine Bement Davis, former commissioner of correction in New York,157 it was based on actual cases and was aimed primarily at women. Scenes of infected women were filmed at Blackwells Island, New York City. The interiors were shot at the Famous Players studios in New York.
Helen Ferguson, who played an Irish servant, admitted she knew nothing of the subject. “If I’d had to ask my mother what V.D. was, she would have had to look it up in the dictionary. That was the age of innocence, genuine innocence.158
“The makeup man came over and put what looked like a great big fever blister on my mouth. Richard Bennett, playing the doctor, and Claire Adams were in that scene. Griffith came over and said, ‘I don’t think there’s any sense in rehearsing this. I think I’ll just keep the closeup camera on the kid here and let her take it from there. And you just tell her what’s the matter with her.’
The End of the Road, 1919. Richard Bennett as the army doctor, Claire Adams as Mary Lee, the nurse, and Joyce Fair as a victim of syphilis. (Museum of Modern Art)
“I was pretty doggone curious; what could be the matter that I would go to see a doctor because of a cold sore? Claire was playing the sympathetic friend and being very tender, and the doctor was very sweet and gentle, so something bad was obviously the matter with me. The doctor asked me where I’d been. I told him I’d taken this cab to Yaphank and the cab driver—that’s how they protected the boys in the army from any connection with what was the matter with me—dragged me out of the cab and into the woods on the way to the camp. Then the doctor explained that the thing on my face—they’d done tests, and I had a very bad disease called syphilis. He put his arm round me very gently and told me also I was pregnant.
“Well, it didn’t take an awful lot of acting, you know. I knew the camera was on me. But at the end, Griffith threw down his megaphone and jumped up and down and shouted ‘Hooray’ and some of the prop men started cheering and I knew I’d gotten through the scene all right. And I was a lot wiser than when I went into it. The tough studio manager came bursting through the door. ‘What’s going on here? We haven’t had so much excitement round this studio since Pickford was a pup.’ ”159
The idea behind the film was to emphasize the importance of childhood character training on later life—one girl has a mother who instructs her truthfully; the other has an ambitious mother concerned only to find her a rich husband. The first girl becomes an army nurse, the second becomes a hospital case, affected by advanced syphilis.160
The reviewers thought the picture rambled, and, while it showed flashes of intelligence, lacked flair. Some details were “nauseating.”
“I believe the government is making a mistake in trying to handle propaganda work of this sort through the medium of the regular film theatres,” said Wid Gunning. “The government apparently believes in making these productions so frank that they will shock people into paying attention to their propaganda.”161
The St. Paul Auditorium in Minneapolis was due to open at 7:00 P.M. Half an hour earlier, someone picked the lock. When state Board of Health officials arrived, they were astounded to find 2,000 people already in their seats. The rest of the house filled up at once, and by 7:30 officials had to lock the doors. Outside, another 4,000 people surged around, hoping for a second screening. Officials tried to oblige, but in vain. “The disappointed crowd became so insistent that police reserves were called to quell the riot. It required nearly two hours to clear the streets.”162
As Public Health Films offered End of the Road to city after city, the local authorities became more and more nervous. The first “civilian” showing was supposed to have been in Syracuse, New York, even though it occurred after the Minneapolis affair. (Perhaps every city was offered the first “civilian” showing!) The Syracuse exhibitor took no chances and showed it first to a local “semicen-soring” committee of churchmen, dramatic editors, and city officials. They all gave it their approval except Assistant Commissioner S. T. Fredericks, who wanted to think about it overnight. Next morning, he had made up his mind; the picture was unfit to be shown in public.
Edward H. Griffith had taken the precaution of accompanying the film as “War Department Representative,” and he and the exhibitor organized a showing for society women and clubwomen. “There was a near riot as a result,” said Variety, “but the picture came through with one hundred percent approval, including the hearty indorsement [sic] of Commissioner of Public Safety Walter W. Nicholson.”163
With admission from 25 cents to one dollar, the picture continued on its highly profitable propaganda course. In Philadelphia, one theatre scooped $9,000 in the first week.164 But at the start of the following week, with several hundred people lined up outside the Garrick Theatre, the police announced the film would not be shown. The state Board of Censors, assuming it was government property, had caught up with it a little late. The exhibitors insisted that since it was “educational,” it did not need the endorsement of the censors. They threatened injunction proceedings against the board. After all, they had permission from the state Board of Health. Under a storm of criticism, including a letter from Archbishop Dougherty describing the film as “indecent and dangerous,” the commissioner of the Board of Health ordered the picture to be taken off. The manager turned a blind eye to the order and continued to sell tickets until he received a personal note from the commissioner; then he obeyed out of fear of losing his license.
The task of returning everyone’s money caused as much of a crush as the show itself. Ticket speculators—known as “specs” in the business—had made a killing, charging $1.50 for 25-cent tickets. But customers received only the face value of their tickets, and their anger at the specs was only slightly mollified later by the news of a police raid, which netted three of them.
The closing of The End of the Road was a great relief to those exhibitors showing regular entertainment pictures in Philadelphia.
Great Britain had even harsher censorship than Philadelphia, yet so serious was the postwar V.D. crisis that the Ministry of Health gave its approval and the picture was shown under the auspices of the National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases. The censor, however, refused to pass it, and that very fact brought enormous crowds to the Polytechnic Theatre, Regent Street, where Vivian Van Damm risked his livelihood by booking it.
“We had to cope with the fact that at each performance someone was almost certain to faint,” wrote Van Damm. “The proportion of faints was ten men to one woman.”165
Van Damm had the questionable habit of removing sequences from the print at one show and putting them back at another, sparking disputes and obliging people to see the film again to settle the argument.
A group of medical students from Middlesex Hospital told Van Damm that they resented him making V.D. a public spectacle: “We’re going to stop you by smashing up the theatre.” He calmed them down by promising to take it off if, once they’d seen it, they still felt it to be against the public interest. The police were tipped off, just in case. But when it was over, the students were clearly moved by what they had seen. They gravely thanked Van Damm and sent staff from the Middlesex to see it. Van Damm kept a doctor and two nurses on duty at every performance.
But the film encountered more vocal opposition. According to Dr. H. W. Bagley, president of the Society for the Prevention of Venereal Diseases: “The End of the Road is a terrible film which suggests that every man who indulges in irregular sexual intercourse will get venereal disease, will commit suicide, or get covered with sores, or end in a madhouse.… We are very much against it because it terrifies people. I myself know of several suicides which have occurred because the poor people had seen the film and thought there was nothing but the madhouse lying before them.”166
In September 1919 the Public Health Service withdrew its endorsements of the venereal disease pictures. “This action had been taken,” explained Surgeon General Blue, “in order that the educational, medical and legislative phase of the venereal disease program of the various states and municipal health organizations could be co-ordinated.”167 The vague verbiage of the bureaucrat camouflaged the intention of the Public Health Service to withdraw the films from commercial distribution and save itself a great deal of aggravation. By now, the National Catholic War Council had added their fuel to the fury.
Despite the terrifying numbers of troops returning with disease—one in four officers, for instance168—the government bowed to the forces of reaction and ended the campaign. Although The End of the Road was later reissued in an abridged form, and although the occasional warning was sounded (as in the film T.N.T., The Naked Truth [1924]), few people could expect to see them since their release was so restricted. Meanwhile, venereal disease continued to sweep through the population, in many cases unreported. By 1936 it was estimated that one American in twenty-two was a victim.
A theatre in Crookston, 1914. (Q. David Bowers)
“In every large city,” wrote Jane Addams in 1912, “thousands of women are so set aside as outcasts from decent society that it is considered an impropriety to speak the very word which designates them.”169 Prostitutes were called “scarlet” or “sporting” women or, by the very fastidious, “midinettes.” “White slavery” described coercive prostitution. (While it was a form of slavery, by no means were all the slaves white.) Procurers were “traffickers”;170 pimps were “cadets” (a shortened form is more familiar, “cad”); a brothel was known by a range of terms, from “resort” to “house.”
Society used euphemisms to cloak these activities and segregation to camouflage their existence. Confining prostitutes to red-light districts in rundown parts of town meant that respectable people never needed to encounter them. Prostitutes served as a safety valve, keeping sensuality at a discreet distance from the community. Almost every major city had a red-light district; New York and Chicago had several.
In the 1890s, the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, minister of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, investigated New York’s brothels, saloons, and gambling houses and came to the conclusion that such places could not exist without the cooperation of the police.171 Graft payments amounted to between $4 million and $5 million a year. This and other exposures of the Lexow Committee,172 which studied the Parkhurst revelations, led to a rebellion against Tammany Hall, headquarters of the Democratic party. But Tammany, “corruption with consent”173 as Lincoln Steffens described it, survived a brief reform administration, and prostitution in New York was flourishing as profitably as ever.
Few women chose to become prostitutes, but many, trapped by desperate poverty, accepted the life, thus placing themselves beyond the law. Pimps could beat them up in broad daylight and no policeman would interfere, as was illustrated in The Girl Who Went Astray (1902).174 A pimp attacks a prostitute on the street at the very moment that her aged parents find her. The father is knocked down, the girl dragged off, and the mother faints. A cop, casually tossing his nightstick, passes the melee and takes no notice whatsoever.
Any treatment of this subject was inflammatory, for political bosses had property interests in the red-light districts; police chiefs and judges, not to mention the man on the beat, were on the take, the liquor interests were implicated through the saloons, and even big corporations and banks were involved.175 But Tammany boss Charles Murphy, forced to act after the 1912 Rosenthal murder,§ began to move against New York’s red-light district. And when Tammany was ousted in 1913, the white slave issue exploded. Indeed, 1913 proved a significant year in many respects. In March, the Eugène Brieux play Damaged Goods had opened in New York. This was so violently controversial that it filled the theatre for months, and ensured that other “frank revelations of vice” would follow, among them The Lure, The Traffic, The Fight, The Battle, and The House of Bondage.176 Then the report of the Rockefeller Commission was released; it concluded that police corruption was the single most important factor in the operation of the traffic. “Prostitution,” said Jane Addams, “was the unbreakable bank to which every corrupt politician repaired when in need of funds.”177
It was into this volatile atmosphere that George Loane Tucker launched his sensational feature production Traffic in Souls.
TRAFFIC IN SOULS George Loane Tucker (real name George S. Loane) was one of the most charismatic of the early directors. Born in Chicago in 1881, he had been a railroad clerk and freight agent before entering the theatre in 1904. Although strikingly handsome, he had an undistinguished career as an actor. He joined the picture business around 1908 and in 1911 began to direct. His most famous picture—The Miracle Man—would appear in 1919, but a career of exceptional promise was cut short by his early death in 1921.
Tucker is credited by Terry Ramsaye with the idea for Traffic in Souls (1913), the background of which Ramsaye described in his entertaining, but not always reliable, history of the industry, A Million and One Nights: “Tucker saw everything on Broadway including The Lure and The Battle, both of which were so highly colored that they brought police intervention. He was afire with inspiration. He would make a great revealing motion picture, dealing with the white slave traffic.”178
Another vital figure in the drama was Jack Cohn. Brother of the soon-to-be-notorious Harry, and later vice president of Columbia Pictures himself, Jack was the chief cutter at Universal. His father, a cutter of a different sort, had been a tailor of police uniforms. As a boy, Jack had been fascinated by the police, and as soon as he was old enough he became a reservist, taking part in raids. Cohn was all for making the picture and, with his contacts, undoubtedly helped smooth the path for police cooperation. To proceed with the Ramsaye version: Tucker approached the head of Universal, Carl Laemmle, for authority to put the picture into production. It would be a feature-length picture—an idea Laemmle opposed. The prospect of spending $5,000 on a single film—an amount that would pay for ten one-reelers—was, to Laemmle, the height of stupidity. He rejected Tucker’s proposal.
When Tucker reported his defeat, a conspiracy was born. A filmmaker’s combine was set up, five investors putting up $1,000 each. If Laemmle was not impressed by the final film, they would pay the costs themselves and recoup from the anticipated profits. Apart from Tucker, the investors were director Herbert Brenon, actor King Baggot, Jack Cohn, and William Robert Daly, an actor-director.
Ramsaye says that the studio manager (Julius Stern) went abroad and that his replacement (Mark Dintenfass) was too involved with the internecine warfare at the Broadway headquarters to notice what was going on at the Fort Lee studio: “The boys at the studio were merrily engaged in photographing Traffic in Souls, a scene at a time in odd moments when opportunity permitted, keeping up meanwhile the continuous grind of one- and two-reel pictures.”179
In four weeks the picture was photographed by Henry Alden Leach. It was ten reels long without titles. Tucker and Dintenfass had a row, and Tucker left the company and set sail for England.180 Cohn cut the picture down to six reels, working at night and hiding the negative in his safe. Full of apprehension, he took it to Laemmle, who talked to his lieutenants all the way through and hardly noticed the picture. In desperation, Cohn visited Laemmle again that night and talked him into another showing. This time the boss was duly impressed. But what on earth was he going to do with it? Universal distributed one- and two-reelers; features had to go into legitimate theatres. His opponents accused him of squandering the company’s money on “Tucker’s Folly.” Laemmle offered to take the picture off Universal’s hands for $10,000. But “if you put up ten thousand, it must be worth a million,” replied the studio, raising the ante to $25,000. The picture thus remained the property of Universal.181
Ramsaye wrote his account only a decade or so after the film was made, and he had the inestimable advantage of having talked to some of those involved—in particular Jack Cohn—while their memories were fresh. But he was a dyed-in-the-wool newspaperman, anxious to play up the drama in any story, and those who talked with him knew it. His tale was recounted in John Drinkwater’s 1931 biography of Carl Laemmle, but this version made Laemmle the hero, fighting for the film against all opposition and seeing it triumph in New York.
Where did it triumph? At the Joe Weber Theatre, owned by the Shuberts, who had had a big success with The Lure. And, as Lee Shubert said, “We were in Traffic in Souls from the beginning.”182 Walter MacNamara, who not only wrote the film but also produced it, said that the picture was his idea and that he approached the Shuberts about distributing it.183
Traffic in Souls cost not $5,000, but $25,000. The chief investors were Lee Shubert; Joseph L. Rhinock, an officer of the Shubert Theatrical Company and a former senator; and a Cincinnati businessman, George B. Cox, a major backer of the Shubert interests. Each invested $5,000 privately, testing the waters, before becoming more involved in film production.184 These investments appear to have been made after production began, so it is still possible that Ramsaye’s filmmakers’ combine initiated the project.
But Ramsaye, no filmmaker, did not realize that to produce a ten-reel picture in a mere four weeks one would have to work at the speed of a crew making a modern TV series. And Traffic in Souls was one of the most elaborate features so far produced by the American film industry—there were so many two- and three-reel vice films around that a big feature was required to scoop them all. Hardly anyone had done it before; even D. W. Griffith had progressed only as far as four reels.
Unfortunately, none of the technicians is alive to be consulted. I have questioned one of the players, Ethel Grandin, but her memories were too vague to be reliable. Ernest Palmer, cameraman for Tucker’s later films, told Jack Lodge that he never heard any talk of the film being made without the knowledge of the front office.185 The studio heads may indeed have been so involved in their political battles that they ignored the project. But to say that such a big film was made in secret is clearly absurd.
Documents and publications of the time give a different impression of how the film came about that is no less fascinating than Ramsaye’s account.
Between 1907 and 1910, the United States Immigration Commission endeavored to find out the effects of the increasing wave of immigration on American life. The White Slave Traffic Act (later known as the Mann Act) was a result of this investigation; Congress passed it in 1910 to prohibit the transportation of women for immoral purposes from state to state or by foreign commerce.186
A congressional committee of enquiry, headed by Professor Jeremiah Jenks of Cornell University, concentrated on female immigrants and the fate of those who traveled alone. Its report187 was a shock to politicians and public alike, for it revealed that thousands of young women never reached the end of their journeys. A few came with the intention of becoming prostitutes, but many were forcibly abducted. The traffickers would start their operation in Europe, becoming engaged to or even marrying young girls. The trafficker would leave for America, promising to send for his “bride.” And sure enough, a ticket would arrive; the girl would travel to New York and be met and escorted to her new “home.” Once inside the brothel she was deprived of her street clothes and money. Having no friends, not knowing the language, she could not escape. (Or the trafficker might pose as an immigrant on a ship, winning a girl’s confidence during the voyage. Upon landing, he would spirit the girl away in a cab during a specially arranged diversion.)
To warn the immigrant girls, pamphlets and tracts were printed by the thousands, but they were of little help—even when printed in the appropriate language, they could hardly alert the many girls who could not read.188 The president of the Immigrant Girls’ Home in New York City, Mrs. S. M. Haggen, came up with a striking alternative—a moving picture—and sought the help of Walter MacNamara, “special photoplay writer” (scenario editor) at Universal.‖
Among MacNamara’s scenarios was a police story, The Rise of Officer 174,190 which used the notion of detection via dictagraph. Several important court cases had recently hinged on evidence from dictagraphs,191 and a couple of other recent pictures had exploited the invention.192 For Traffic in Souls, MacNamara repeated the dictagraph idea but included a bugging device to give greater audience appeal to Mrs. Haggen’s grim case histories. Since these centered around prostitution, he had the idea of approaching the Shuberts who had staged The Lure (it would be filmed by Alice Blaché in 1914) and discussed with them a feature with the same box-office potential. He shifted the emphasis from immigrants to white slavers, but this made the story more commercial. It also brought up the vexing matter of the police. Being an Irishman—and didn’t every Irishman have a relative on the New York City force?—he would hardly have wished to make villains of the police. Nor would Jack Cohn. In any case, with the police able to shut theatres, such an attack would never have seen the light of day. But a story which left their pride unimpaired would have a flying start and would ensure cooperation for all the location shooting in the streets of New York.
The story of Traffic in Souls was so fast-moving and so packed with direct and veiled references to the vice trade that it is a wonder audiences could keep pace with it. Modern audiences are lost, submerged by a welter of detail from a forgotten era, unable to focus on one before being swept away by another. They assume they can follow so apparently simple a plot, but it is not so. I had to see it several times and study the background before I could understand the whole thing.
Of course, lost footage missing from the recently available (Blackhawk) version makes it all seem snatched and hurried. I have examined the English release version, at the National Film Archive, which is more complete, and the picture makes more sense. It is better paced, has a few more explanatory titles, some good domestic scenes with Mary and her father and some extra touches of humor—together with the complete ending. (The Blackhawk version ends two scenes before the original finale.)
The picture opens in the modest home of an invalid inventor (William Turner) who has two daughters. Mary (Jane Gail), “the head of the house,” is enamored of a policeman, Officer Burke (Matt Moore). She keeps an eye on Lorna (Ethel Grandin), very pretty and very lazy. Lorna has been spotted by the local white slavers, who begin to close the net.
An impressive figure by the name of William Trubus (William Welsh) inhabits a luxurious mansion with liveried footmen and devotes his life to reform. He has a daughter (Irene Wallace), too, who has just become engaged to Bobby Kopfman, “the greatest society catch of the season.”
By contrast, we glimpse the denizens of a brothel—“They who traffic in souls,” as a title puts it. And we meet a cadet, “the most infamous type of man,” called Bill Bradshaw (William Cavanaugh).a The house has been made much bleaker than we know such places to have been; there is no sign of the plush furniture, the gilt mirrors, the piano. One woman tries to escape, and it takes the threat of brute force to keep her inside her “cell.”
Trubus is revealed as the controller of the traffic. He operates from a private office with INTERNATIONAL PURITY AND REFORM LEAGUE on the door (a reference, perhaps to the International Reform Association, which was so hostile to the moving picture). Downstairs is a similar office where the Go-Between (Howard Crampton) receives the money from the brothels. He has all the latest equipment, such as a dictagraph, and even a sort of telegraphic pen by which he transmits the latest figures to “the man higher up.”
Two Swedish girls are ensnared on board an immigrant ship by a trafficker disguised as a Friendly Old Swede. He shows them a communication from the “Swedish Employment Agency”—a couple of jobs have fallen free. They are only too eager to accept them, and he signals a colleague (Walter MacNamara), who alerts headquarters with a coded Marconi cable which he gives to the ship’s wireless operator (George Loane Tucker).
At the Ellis Island ferry dock, the immigrant girls are met by their brother. Waiting lookouts push and punch the brother, and when he tries to defend himself, the police arrest him. The Friendly Old Swede is kind enough to escort the girls to the Employment Agency. Once inside the building, the girls are set upon. But Officer Burke’s suspicions are aroused by the Swedish Employment Agency sign which has suddenly appeared outside the house. He arrives at the door, and a cadet tries to bribe him. Burke laughs and sticks the money back in the man’s pocket before smashing him over the head with his own signboard. A fight breaks out, and Burke, revolver drawn, escorts everyone to the precinct house, where the girls are reunited with their brother.193
Traffic in Souls, 1913, frame enlargements by Gerald McKee. Arrival at the Battery from the Ellis Island ferry.
An unsuspecting woman from the country is shadowed by a respectable looking pimp.
Officer Burke (Matt Moore) suspects the sudden appearance of a “Swedish Employment Agency.”
The shootout in the brothel from Traffic in Souls, 1913. Matt Moore (center) with Ethel Grandin. This picture was posed; the film is more realistic. (National Film Archive)
Meanwhile Bradshaw makes off with Lorna, whom he drugs and delivers, semi-conscious, to the brothel. When she recovers, she tries to escape and is roughed up.
Mary, desperately anxious about Lorna, asks that Burke be assigned to the search for her. Mary loses her job as a result of her sister’s presumed disgrace and is immediately offered a position as a telephonist—in Trubus’s office. Left alone while the reformers confer next door, she discovers a set of earphones and, putting them to her ear, recognizes the voice of the man who abducted her sister. She follows the wire to the fire escape and through a window below sees Bradshaw taking money from the Go-Between.
That night, Mary and Burke borrow her father’s invention for intensifying sound waves and recording dictagraph sounds on phonographic cylinders. They break into the office and conceal the equipment. Next day, Mary hands over the incriminating cylinders to the police and a raiding party moves into action.
In the brothel, Lorna is being threatened with a whipping. Outside, the raiding party is poised, crowbars and axes at the ready. Burke climbs the fire escape and blows his whistle from the roof. Bradshaw, about to whip Lorna, looks up in alarm. The crowbars smash the front door and the police pour in. Burke descends from the roof and rescues Lorna. A gun battle rages. Burke chases Bradshaw to the roof and shoots him as he reaches the fire escape. He falls over the parapet to his death on the street below.
At “the proudest moment of his life,” Trubus settles his daughter’s betrothal arrangements and beams on the assembly when the police burst in and arrest him. The fiancé and his parents depart in horror.
The traffickers are locked up; Trubus is later released on bail. Outside the courthouse he is nearly lynched by an angry mob (one of the most convincing scenes in the picture). When he returns home he discovers that his wife, to escape his shame, has killed herself. His daughter, distraught, will have nothing to do with him. Overcome with remorse, he collapses by his wife’s deathbed, and the picture slowly fades out.
As the National Film Archive version shows, however, this was not the original ending. We cut to a newspaper in a trash can:
TRUBUS A SUICIDE
His go-between and associates sentenced.
His mind unbalanced by the death of his wife, whose heart gave way under the shock of his exposure; his daughter insane from shame and grief and fearing to face his trial, he evidently determined to end everything. His go-between and the entire unsavory crew have had sentences meted out from five to twenty years.
Burke and Mary visit the police captain, and Burke asks for a leave of absence. The captain hesitates a moment, causing Mary some nervousness, then gives his warm assent, congratulating them both. As Burke goes out the door, he says, “We’ll name the first after you.” The captain throws his arms in the air and roars with laughter.
Traffic in Souls was a potential sensation. Universal proposed to set up a separate operation to handle it, spending $1,000 a week on a national advertising campaign194 that was gleefully mendacious: “The sensational motion picture dramatization based on the John D. Rockefeller White Slavery Report and on the investigation of the Vice Trust by District Attorney Whitman—a $200,000 spectacle in 700 scenes with 800 players.”195
None of these facts is correct. But official endorsements were essential for a film as risky as this, and Universal had none.196 The publicity department went so far as to quote Rockefeller as saying that the scenes in the brothels, including that in which the kidnapped girl was beaten into submission, were exactly as witnesses had testified before his committee.197 Rockefeller later issued a disclaimer, denying that this film, or any of those which followed it, was based on his commission’s investigations and adding that in his judgment the films exercised an evil influence.198
This was not the opinion of the National Board of Censorship, which agonized over Traffic in Souls but eventually allowed it to be shown with only minor excisions.199 The board had decided to pass films which presented the problem of prostitution in a sincere, dramatic manner.200
The film opened in New York at Joe Weber’s Theatre on Twenty-ninth Street and Broadway on November 24, 1913, becoming the first film not taken from a novel or a play to receive a Broadway opening.201 It was an immediate smash hit—a thousand people were turned away the first night. Thirty thousand saw the film the first week, many of them girls of between sixteen and eighteen. “Fully two-thirds of the audience are women,” said the New York Times.202
While Moving Picture World greeted the film with awe, Variety was less respectful: “There’s a laugh on the Rockefeller investigators in the personality of one of the white slavers, a physical counterpart of John D. himself so striking as to make the observer wonder whether the granger of Pocantico Hills really came down to pose for Universal.” The reviewer thought the film showed in motion picture terms what the newspapers printed from day to day of the barter of women: “Anthony Comstock will probably yell murder the first time he sees ’em, one particular turkey trotting boy and girl in a cabaret scene. Despite its choppy form, the drama moves along briskly, concluding with a fine piece of movie staging in a raid by a squad of cops on one of the vice dens.”203
Traffic in Souls outraged such pillars of the theatrical establishment as Oscar Hammerstein, who sued that other pillar, David Belasco, for permitting it to be shown at the Republic Theatre, into which it moved on December 22, 1913. This theatre was contracted to produce only first-class performances, and Hammerstein charged Belasco with forfeiting its reputation. Belasco countered that he considered the motion picture on a level with the stage; he did not therefore feel that the tone of the theatre had been lowered.204 Hammerstein won in the first court, but lost on appeal.205
Within a month, twenty-eight theatres in the New York area were showing the film, although it was banned in such cities as Chicago. Business dropped to a trickle within a few weeks, however, as the public realized it had been fooled, that there was no sex in the film whatever, and it was merely an elaborate police drama. But by this time, Universal had made a great deal of money; the picture eventually grossed about $450,000.206
The most valuable aspects of the film today are its scenes of documentary realism, such as that at the ferry dock, shot while real immigrants were coming ashore. The cooperation of the police and immigration authorities enabled the players to mingle with the crowd. We are fortunate that an account of the filming survives:
“An unusually green looking immigrant, apparently a youth of twenty, came out of the Ellis Island ferry-house, escorting two pretty girls … He looked and acted so green that even the Battery Park loungers, used as they are to seeing every costume and every race of the world passing out of the little ferry-house, turned to stare in wonder and amusement!
“Suddenly, in full view of the crowd, a roughly clad man walked up and deliberately pushed the young immigrant, then struck him a violent blow. The act was so unprovoked, so outrageous, that the loungers jumped up from the benches and made for the scene. The immigrant and the man who had struck him were now fighting and scuffling, and a crowd began quickly to gather. At this point a third man stepped up, and, taking the two girls by the arms, tried to escort them off the scene. Cries of indignation arose from the crowd, the old game was so obvious. The two men who interfered with the immigrants were about to be roughly handled by the crowd, when someone on its outer fringe cried out:
‘Let ’em alone; it’s all right!’
“A roar of laughter arose. Even above the noise a peculiar rattling buzz could be heard. Then came another voice:
‘Let ’em alone; it’s the movies!’
“The crowd drew back, laughing and good natured. Then the immigrant boy and the other man continued their shuffle, and the third man walked off with the pretty girls. A policeman stood off to one side watching them, curling his mustache and grinning.
“Presently the two men stopped wrestling and walked off to an automobile, in the back seat of which the two girls were seated, laughing. The three men climbed in, followed by the operator and his machine, and the automobile shot away from the curb, up Broadway.”207
Tucker clearly had such trouble with these crowds that he later restaged his fight scene on a deserted part of the New York waterfront, on the French Line pier.208
Seeing the film nearly eighty years after it was made, one is aware of its shortcomings: the painted interior scenery which clashes with the vivid reality of the exteriors, the imaginary inventions which make the factual quality of the story less convincing, the overacting of Ethel Grandin as she rolls around her bedroom in the last stages of despair. Most of the acting is naturalistic, however, and Tucker shows considerable flair in his direction, especially in the final assault on the brothel, which is pure cinema, edited by Jack Cohn as well as anything Griffith had achieved.
Traffic in Souls gives a fascinating glimpse into life in New York before the war. From this point of view, it is priceless. As an exposé, it is hollow. The Rockefeller Commission’s revelations of police corruption were entirely suppressed.b And Tucker and MacNamara deliberately hurt the reform movement with their depiction of “the man higher up.” (In this, they anticipated D. W. Griffith’s The Mother and the Law, which was shot the following year and also included a portrayal apparently based on Rockefeller.) However hypocritical some may have been, no reformer is known to have run a vice ring. Many are known, however, to have harassed the police, who were involved up to their necks. The film, which so strongly attacks hypocrisy, is thus hypocritical itself.
Matt Moore, Ethel Grandin, and Jane Gail became stars overnight. (By 1916, their stardom was over,209 although Matt Moore continued to play leads into the 1920s.) George Loane Tucker directed films in England, then faded from view, to make a triumphant return with The Miracle Man in 1919. Walter MacNamara had the satisfaction of seeing Traffic in Souls become the first film to be used as the basis of a novel.210 He was promoted to director and made a child labor film.211 He then left Universal, set up his own company, and made a sequel to Traffic in Souls, The Heart of New York,212 which had none of the success of the original.
Although MacNamara had altered the emphasis of Mrs. Haggen’s original idea, the immigration people were evidently gratified, for they later commissioned other films and showed them, as well as Traffic in Souls, on board steamers, at the quarantine station, and in the detention sheds of Ellis Island, where unaccompanied girls were held until claimed by their friends.213
But the sociological aspect was the least of the concerns of those who made the picture. And what must have been galling for all of them was the speed with which the imitations appeared—especially The Inside of the White Slave Traffic, which, by 1914, was beating the original film at the box office.
THE INSIDE OF THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC Of all the films sparked off by the white slave controversy, The Inside of the White Slave Traffic caused the greatest commotion. It opened in New York at the Park Theatre, Columbus Circle, in December 1913, and was soon taking in twice as much money as Traffic in Souls. The film was no better than its predecessor, but, as its title indicated, it went to the heart of the matter. As Variety said, “It goes in for the utmost fidelity in picturing the evil which has been its inspiration.”214
The film was more documentary than melodrama and, although not nearly so well made as Traffic in Souls, it had impeccable credentials. It was written and produced by Samuel H. London, who headed the staff of the Rockefeller Commission.215 Before that, he had been director of the Secret Service, the federal agency which combated vice.216 London posed as the man solely responsible for the film, but it was actually directed by Frank V. Beal. Edwin Carewe (later a famous director) played the lead, with Virginia Mann, Jean Thomas, Ninita Bristow, and Elinor D. Peterson. It was filmed in New York, New Orleans, and Denver.217
To armor-plate his film against criticism and censorship, London opened it with a statement to the effect that it had been based on facts gathered during his intensive investigations of the white slave traffic, in close cooperation with the U.S. Department of Justice. A series of endorsements followed, including those of Eugène Brieux, author of Damaged Goods; Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont; and Inez Milholland Boissevain, socialist and suffragist.
As further protection, London called the company which made the picture The Moral Feature Film Company, and the distributor, Harry White, named his releasing outfit The Sociological Research Film Corporation. After such precautions, London might have been forgiven for thinking his film would have no trouble. He was wrong.
Looking at the film today, it is not too hard to see why it caused such a furor. Although only two chopped-up reels survive of the original four, and although the most controversial material has disappeared, what remains is startling enough.
Because of the missing footage, the story is hard to follow. It opens with a scene of George Fisher (Carewe), a procurer, climbing wearily out of bed and getting dressed. He makes a phone call, and a girl in street clothes walks in and hands him a wad of money. He examines it and snarls at her: too little. The girl, young and attractive, removes her hat, and we realize with a sense of shock that she is preparing to take over the very bed he has vacated.
George goes out and takes part in a game of “Stuss,” the gangsters’ favorite game, a New York version of faro.218 He loses, with ill grace, the money he got from the girl. We see him walking through the crowded streets of lower Manhattan and calling at a cigar store. The owner is a friend. He telephones the girl in his room, and she goes to meet him, carrying yet more cash, which presumably she has earned in the interval.
The girl is later arrested and taken before the night court,219 but this strand of the plot disappears with the missing footage. A new episode begins with the title “The innocent in danger.” A girl visits the cigar store, and George asks his friend to identify her. Apparently, she’s a sewing machine girl. To make her acquaintance, George arranges a fake fight on the street, from which he rescues her. (This episode is also missing.) He takes her to a restaurant and slips something into her drink. There is a direct cut, due to more missing footage, to the bedroom. The girl, Annie, is alone. She looks at the bed, and makes it obvious to the audience that she realizes what has happened.
“The home of yesterday. Parents, beware the ‘out of my house’ policy.”
Annie is welcomed back by her mother, but when she relates what has befallen her, the mother is appalled. Annie’s father, even more shocked, throws her out of the house. She has nowhere to go but to George. He agrees to marry her but, as the title says, “The marriage ceremony is seldom genuine.”
George takes Annie to a fake parson, who responds understandingly to his wink.
“Two weeks later, the Trafficker tells Annie he is without funds, and must place her with friends until his next payment.” He takes her to a brothel. “And in time the usual developments.” Admittedly, there is footage missing, but the sight of Annie, in a lovely white dress, streetwalking on a sunlit New York thoroughfare, comes as a bit of a shock. (Variety even identified the street—Ninth Avenue near Thirty-fourth Street!)220
“The method employed by procuring Traffickers is the ‘turnover.’ ” Annie is horrified to receive a note from George saying that he is leaving the city for good. She breaks down in tears. The messenger, Felix, offers her an alternative: “If you will come with me to New Orleans, I will have your marriage to Fisher annulled and I will marry you.”
Annie agrees, and they shake hands on it. The turnover completed, we see Felix paying George $300.
They set out for New Orleans, which has the only district in the United States set aside by law for prostitution.221 Here, further missing footage commits further offenses to the plot. We see a flash of Annie, wearing a kimono, about to be beaten, when suddenly a title says “Denver.”
Annie has run away. There are some striking shots of her wandering the streets and being turned away by brothel keepers because news of her escape has filtered through the system. She pawns her last possession, her wedding ring, and travels to Houston, but the system is everywhere. She cannot even get a job in a saloon. She spends her last dollar on lodging.
Meanwhile, Felix uses the system to locate her. He walks straight into her room. At first scared, she then falls on his shoulder with relief and remorse. He merely laughs. They return to New Orleans, and she goes out slaving for him again.
After more missing footage, and fragments of a subplot concerning the fate of an immigrant girl, we find Annie working in a department store. She takes her pay home to Felix, trying to pass it off as money earned on the streets. Felix realizes her subterfuge and leaves her dreaming miserably of the life—and the children—she might have had.
“And in the end she was laid away, an outcast in Potter’s Field.”
This abrupt end is presumably due to further missing footage. We see a communal graveyard of wooden posts, all marked anonymously with a set of official numbers, and the story is over.
Variety—which called these films “patchouli and kimono pictures,” after the scent and costume worn by the girls—warned that this one, like its predecessor, would lower the esteem in which film plays were held. But if it kept clear of trouble, it would do land-office business.222
They were right. On the second night at the Park Theatre, 2,000 people had to be turned away. Exhibitors who had no vice films to show were furious. They worded their protest to the trade press in the form of a legal document, each clause beginning with “Whereas.”
“Whereas …” the police had stopped the stage plays The Lure and The Fight because of scenes set in bawdy houses, then those scenes were a violation of the penal code. If that was the case, then the same applied to the scenes in the white slave films “even to more extreme degrees of vicious exposure.”223
A final “Whereas” betrayed the real cause of indignation, the fact that these highly profitable films were invariably booked into legitimate theatres rather than motion picture houses.
So successful was the New York run that the promoters booked The Inside of the White Slave Traffic into a second theatre, the Bijou, starting on December 22. But in January 1914, the picture suddenly disappeared and the employees of the Park Theatre found themselves under arrest, waiting to go before a particularly fierce magistrate.224
The last time the picture had been in court, this same judge had censured the film but had allowed the theatres to remain open. The Bijou had promptly doubled its admission price. But the legal problems gave the management second thoughts; they canceled the film and substituted a foreign picture which they renamed The Exposure of the White Slave Traffic.225 It did them no good. The Bijou employees were also rounded up by the police, although all but the manager were later released.226
The state and municipal censors were no better disposed toward these vice pictures. In Chicago, Major Metellus Funkhouser showed The Inside of the White Slave Traffic to a committee of prominent people before he banned it. The committee had decided that it contained a moral lesson of great value to girls, so why ban it? Funkhouser said the effect on boys might be injurious.227
Samuel London countered with an impressive coup. He persuaded the Sociological Fund of the Medical Review of Reviews, the fund that had been behind the staging of Damaged Goods, to organize a private exhibition in Chicago. Moving Picture World sent along a reporter, James McQuade, who recorded the interchange that resulted:
“When the manager read from the stage a number of telegrams purporting to have been received from a distinguished Eastern sociologist, a bald-headed man in the audience exclaimed:
‘That’s a lie. No decent man would send such a telegram.’
‘Put him out,’ said an excited woman.
“An usher induced the man to refrain from further interruption.
‘I think this motion play is too indecent to be shown even in this sort of private exhibition,’ said Alderman James A. Kearns. ‘Major Funkhouser performed a public service in prohibiting it.’
‘There is nothing indecent so far as I can see,’ said Mrs. Herman Landauer. ‘Certain unsophisticated women ought to see it, but it ought not to be shown in theatres to all women.’ ”228
There is no record of it ever being shown in Chicago.
The very authenticity of his film caused trouble for London. The girls of the red-light district in El Paso, where scenes had been secretly photographed, protested to their mayor against the presentation of their pictures on the screens of New York. It was not the invasion of privacy which upset them; they were identified as denizens of the legal red-light district of New Orleans, and the ladies resented being connected with New Orleans even socially.229
Such revelations did nothing to help London and his beleaguered colleagues. In denying their application for a permanent injunction against the police in New York City, Judge Gavegan handed down the following opinion: “Some of the films [sic] depict scenes supposed to be enacted in a resort where women are subjected to involuntary degradation. As it is well known that to maintain such a place is of itself a criminal offense, I am unable to perceive why the public exhibition for money of scenes supposed to transpire therein should be entitled to the protection of a court of equity.”230
A grand jury was shown the film, and soon afterward Samuel London, with his manager, the manager of the Bijou, and six others, appeared in court on a charge of holding an exhibition tending to corrupt morals.231 London was convicted, but the jury recommended leniency. The judge said that what was really on trial were the vicious films, and these he consigned to oblivion. London and the others were released.232
Seeing the film today, one is struck by the matter-of-fact way it deals with its inflammatory subject. London set out to show the ramifications of the system “without exaggeration or fictional indulgence.” In this respect, he was successful. It is oddly compelling to see characters who might have strayed from a Griffith Biograph film behaving as though caught by a cinéma vérite camera. Not all play realistically—the father, in particular, seems struck by a coronary when ordering his daughter out of his house. But perhaps the overemphasis was deliberate. London intended the picture to attack the “out of my house” policy of so many parents.233
London saw no lasting value to his film. In 1924 he sold the rights to his distributor, Harry White, who saw little value in it, either. White eventually sold the rights to James B. Leong for the sum of one dollar.
But as late as 1920, London was still paying for his film. A Mrs. Nettie Hechter sued him, charging that the film led one to believe that her husband’s restaurant, which had been used as a location, was the headquarters of this traffic—coupled with the fact that she was also shown in the film. She won her case and was awarded $5,000.
THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE Judge Gavegan, considering The Inside of the White Slave Traffic, declared that some people would pay to see the workings of a sewer. Such remarks proved mild when set against the reaction to The House of Bondage.
“It is impossible to describe the contents of this ‘feature’ without soiling the pages of a reputable journal,” wrote W. Stephen Bush. “After seeing six reels of this vile and revolting stuff, I was glad to get out into the fresh air and any persistent attempt to recollect all the filthy details of the production might act as an emetic. How any human being can have the base effrontery to offer such a digest of dirt for public exhibition is utterly beyond my comprehension.”234
Adapted from a book by Reginald W. Kauffman, and written and directed by Pierce Kingsley, the film was produced by the Photo Drama Motion Picture Company. The story concerned Mary Denbigh (Lottie Pickford, Mary’s sister), a young girl rebelling against her tyrannical school, who yields to Max Crossman (Armand Cortez) and his promises to marry her. Crossman, a cadet, delivers Mary to a brothel run by Rose Legere (Sue Willis). Mary manages to escape with the help of a sympathetic client. She tries to get a regular job, but is pursued by her misfortune and is fired again and again. Her own parents throw her out. She returns to Rose Legere, who rejects her because of her physical condition.235
“To aid the reader to make an assay of the mental and moral calibre of the promoters of this infamy,” wrote Stephen Bush, “I think it is well to set down an incident that occurred during the running of the ‘feature.’ The country girl, ruined by the procurer, is now walking the streets and she meets him and they go to a dive for a drink. The procurer is soon under the influence of the cheap alcohol and the girl says, via a title, ‘Come on, Max, come to my room—you can sleep it off there.’
“One of the film men spoke to a colleague, ‘Say, maybe this title is a bit raw.’
“ ‘Naw,’ came the reply. ‘That’s all right.’
“Thus was the day saved for morality,” concluded Mr. Bush. “If this sickening monstrosity is permitted to be publicly shown it will do more harm to the motion picture art than it is possible to calculate … whoever has charge of the screen where this mass of corruption was shown will do well to disinfect and fumigate the projection room … For the men whose ‘avaricious enterprise’ has made them lose sight of the commands of ordinary public decency we have as much contempt unmixed with pity. They really have brought reproach upon the human species.”236
Far from deterring them, such remarks generally had a galvanizing effect on exhibitors. But The House of Bondage was a flop. The company had set much of the story in a brothel, and the courts had ruled that such scenes constituted an obscene exhibition, likely to corrupt the morals of the young.237 So the picture had to be recut and “partly disinfected,” and, to Bush’s delight, it failed to elicit “the slightest response of encouragement” from the public.
Variety and Moving Picture World refused to advertise any more vice films after February 1914: “They are intended to stimulate and exploit the morbid interest in the harrowing details of a sickening and revolting aberration of the human soul.”238 The white slave cycle was about to take a new turn.
“I have been accustomed to seeing women exploited all my life,” said settlement worker Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett, president of the National Florence Crittenton Mission, “and especially to seeing unfortunate girls exploited by unprincipled men and women and by greedy corporations; but in all this blood-sucking I have never seen anything to equal the exploitation of unfortunate girls by so-called philanthropic organizations and uplift movements, such as moving-picture shows, problem plays and so-called saviors of the white slave.”239
Streetwalking practically disappeared, wrote Benjamin Hampton, when five-cent shows spread across the United States in the thousands, “the girls finding in the movies amusement and recreation and a new outlook on life that propelled them away from the red-light districts and into homes of their own.”240
It would be comforting to believe that the movies performed this astonishing feat—wiping out the oldest profession overnight—but the nickelodeons and the red-light districts passed into history at about the same time, being replaced by the neighborhood theatre and the question “Who’s your neighbor?” Movies, and prostitution, had simply moved closer to home.
By bringing the vice problem to the attention of those who had been untouched by it, the white slave movies undoubtedly contributed to the drive to eliminate the red-light districts. But segregation disappeared primarily because of the vice commission reports and the resulting publicity. In 1913 alone, ten cities embarked on this program. One was San Francisco.
The city had been chosen as the site for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. To make it appear respectable enough for women and children to visit, the city fathers decided to close down the notorious Barbary Coast, even though the district had already changed, from a center of prostitution to a conglomeration of rowdy dance halls. “By 1910,” wrote Herbert Asbury, “the City had gone dance crazy … There were three hundred saloons and dance halls crowded into six blocks centering on Pacific Street.”241
A vice crusade was led by William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, but the most significant campaign was the work of the Reverend Paul Smith, who declared that 25,000 people had a livelihood from vice in San Francisco—a figure embracing liquor trade employees as well as prostitutes, “and undoubtedly exaggerated for publicity purposes.”242
The last night of the Barbary Coast was to be marked with a celebration. San Francisco film promoter Sol Lesser decided to make a film of the event and hired a young cameraman named Hal Mohr,243 who later recalled: “I went to the Public Works department and got two of those street arc lamps. And I built a couple of things like hangman’s scaffolds that I could hang these things on, and believe it or not, with these two arc lights down on Pacific Street, and down all these alleys where the prostitutes’ houses were, we’d haul these arcs and stand them up on their stands, and I’d run wires, connect them up somehow—I don’t know where the hell I connected them to—but with these arc lights I photographed the last night of the Barbary Coast.”
A film about juvenile delinquency, sponsored by a New York policewoman, Mary E. Hamilton, who was involved in the rehabilitation of wayward girls. Mrs. Hamilton played in the film, Lilies of the Streets, 1925, directed by Joseph Levering. This scene shows Virginia Lee Corbin as a wild young flapper brought to heel. (Museum of Modern Art)
Mohr was told there were about 10,000 prostitutes in the area, but according to Herbert Asbury, the number of girls employed in the dives ranged from 800 to 3,000: “Their principal duties were to dance and drink with the customers and to appear in the ensemble numbers of the shows.… It is doubtful if there were many prostitutes in the dance halls.”244
The prostitutes operated from the “fast houses.” Said Mohr: “The main entrance was the parlor, where the girls displayed themselves, and then upstairs were the rooms where the work benches were, where they would take the men. And these fast houses operated, believe it or not, for a one-dollar fee. So for these shots, I went down on a Sunday morning, and I had photographed several shots of these streets and had fellows going up the steps and ringing the bell and one thing and another. And finally, as if it were a cue, those upstairs windows of the places where I had the camera set up all opened and I was deluged by chamber pots being thrown at me to chase me out of there. So I picked up the camera and got the hell out of there in a hurry.”245
The film was 1,400 feet long and sold for twelve cents a foot. The advertisements said that it had been made under police protection, but emphasized not so much the vice as the modern dances which had originated in the district: “See the famous Turkey Trot, Texas Tommy, Bunny Hug. See the negro dance halls with their own styles of dancing never before seen. Interior and exterior day and night scenes of the famous Midway Cafe where 500 dancing girls were employed. See Glimpses of Chinatown.”246
The Last Night of the Barbary Coast was released by Lesser’s Progressive Film Producing Company in November 1913. “Seldom has a two-reel feature aroused more interest among the critics,” said Moving Picture World. “The distributor was greatly troubled about possible objections from a moral point of view. To ease his mind, he summoned the critics. They were on hand with rare but commendable promptness. Old and blasé critics who gossip and dally with cigarettes while an ordinary supply of pictorial art is being displayed on the screen, hung with mute and undivided attention to these two reels. It was only at the very last scene that they relaxed their moral vigilance and came to the conclusion that there was not an improper or illegitimate shock in the entire production—though some of the critics used very unparliamentary language in recording their opinion.”247
The leading figure in the campaign to close the Barbary Coast, the Reverend Paul Smith, was a Methodist minister whose parish was close to the district. Four years after his success had been trumpeted across the nation in the newspapers, he found himself the author of a film called The Finger of Justice (1918), which purported to show why the Barbary Coast had to be closed down and how much good resulted.
Grace Marbury Sanderson, a scenario and short story writer, approached Smith and asked him and his church to produce it. According to Geoffrey Bell, the plot centered on “Crane Wilbur [the “Fighting Parson”], [who] sought to destroy a ring of vice operators whose aim was to exploit girls and drag them into the depths. Because of these efforts, the parson was framed by the vice boss.… The parson’s zeal in exposing the vice ring was finally crowned by his marriage to a wealthy social worker, who had joined him in his cause.”248
W. L. Shallenberger, who released the film through his Arrow Film Corporation, said that the picture, which was produced under Smith’s direct supervision and directed by Louis W. Chaudet, contained not a foot of film that was offensive: “It depicts in a straightforward and dramatic manner incidents in the lives of the women who inhabited this vice district, events leading up to the vice raid; the part which corrupt politics played in the episode, and the tragic scenes following the ousting of hundreds of women who knew no other homes than the home of vice and corruption.”249
The picture was promptly banned by the New York State board. Despite Smith’s protests, the ban was not lifted for five years.250
The former lieutenant governor of Illinois, Barrett O’Hara, was largely responsible for The Little Girl Next Door (1916), which was based on a report by the Illinois Vice Commission.251 Moving Picture World called it “a noxious effusion,” exhibitors condemned it, and Photoplay called it “dirty flubdub paraded right by the censors wearing a sanctimonious false face called ‘Vice Exposure.’ ” But it was so successful that O’Hara hired George Siegmann, an associate of D. W. Griffith’s, to make not one but two more films, based on the same report.
It was the last straw for the National Board of Review, which announced that it would no longer pass white slave films. This failed to stop them. Pictures simply became more and more dependent on highly moralistic introductions (Katherine Karr calls them the “square-up”),252 endorsements by respected figures of religion or medicine and, ideally, a presentation by an outstanding sociologist.
The Reverend Dr. Charles Parkhurst, whose investigations in the 1890s had created such a sensation, was placed in charge of the presentation of another 1916 film called Is Any Girl Safe? It was financed by Universal, hiding behind a company calling itself the Anti-Vice Motion Picture Corporation.253 Is Any Girl Safe? was a five-reeler, written and directed by serial specialist Jacques Jaccard and featuring Raymond Nye and Mina Cunard. The most significant member of the cast was a self-confessed white slaver, Yusha Botwin, who was photographed making his confession in the district attorney’s office.
“Botwin informed the District Attorney that a private plot in the Washington Cemetery, Brooklyn, was used by the New York Benevolent Association for the burial of the victims of the white slavers,” said Variety, “and scenes of this are shown in the picture.”254
Dr. Parkhurst and representatives of the New York American, who were behind the picture, were shown, in an opening sequence, discussing the vice racket. The story dealt with two cadets and revealed their system for trapping girls. One takes a girl to meet his mother, and drugs her. The other uses an accomplice to molest the girl on the street, so he can intervene and take her under his protection. The story develops into high melodrama when the first cadet interrupts the second to find his own sister being seduced. Both cadets subsequently realize how wrong they have been, and, after a full-scale battle in the brothel, broken up by the now statutory police raid, they marry their victims.
“It can’t be done,” said Wid’s,255 who found the film painfully slow and declared that were it not for the prestige given it by Dr. Parkhurst, it would have been passed over as a very ordinary picture.
A prostitute was the subject of Who’s Your Neighbor?, a six-reeler of 1917. When her brothel is raided she moves into an apartment house and causes havoc in the lives of a young boy and his father. At the end she pleads to be put where she can do no more harm. Ben Grimm, in Moving Picture World, considered it “one of the most insidious, moral-destroying” films ever produced. “It will lower to the level of a bawdy house any theater in which it is shown. It reeks with a filthy sex element that struts across the screen in the sheep’s clothing of alleged propaganda advocating the segregation of vice. It is good propaganda for procurers and their ilk, for it makes vice attractive.”256
Directed by S. Rankin Drew, a promising young director who was killed while on active service in the war, Who’s Your Neighbor? was written by Willard Mack. “The fact that the picture is well produced makes it even more harmful,” said Grimm, “in the sense that a well dressed criminal is less likely to be suspected than a poorly dressed one.”257
Like many others, Grimm was upset by the film’s implication that the drives against the red-light districts had not eliminated vice. Prostitutes had merely scattered into tenements and apartment houses all over the cities, so the identity of one’s neighbor was sometimes a suspicious mystery. The story, he admitted, was unusual and strong—“so strong that persons of refinement will turn away.”258 The New York Dramatic Mirror thought it “remarkably clever, powerful but cynical.”259
Who’s Your Neighbor? has the hallmarks of an important social film; let us hope this lost film will be rediscovered.
After the war, with the change in the political climate, vice films faded away. In routine dramatic films, it was usually possible to recognize a prostitute only by a coded signal—a girl placing a folded bill in her stocking260 or an ambiguously phrased title, such as “A woman who has known no good man … a man who has known no good woman.”261
In the 1920s, the Hays Office kept any serious study of the subject at bay.262 But one or two were made by brave, or unscrupulous, independent producers.
Lilies of the Streets (1925), written by Harry Chandlee and directed by Joseph Levering, was a return to the old days—and was even equipped with endorsements from prominent people. This story of a wild young flapper (Virginia Lee Corbin), mistaken for a prostitute, who ends up facing the death sentence, was sponsored by Mary E. Hamilton, a New York police matron with the rank of captain who was involved in the rehabilitation of what were then known as “wayward girls.” Mrs. Hamilton supervised the writing of the scenario and played herself in the picture, saving the flapper from death by persuading the true culprit to confess.
“I got the Police Commissioner to lend me for this job, because there are evils which can only be remedied through publicity,” she said. “I especially want to show up the wrong of mixing first offenders with hardened crooks in the detention pens, before they are brought to trial.”263
Photoplay was more cynical. “Anyone who believes the film was made as an altruistic warning to keep good girls out of dance halls is entitled to free admission.”264
THE RED KIMONO One of the strangest attempts at a serious social study, The Red Kimono (1926), also had a strange history. It was made by Mrs. Wallace Reid. Having lost her husband under tragic circumstances (see this page), she embarked on a crusading film, Human Wreckage (1923), which made enough money to set her up as an independent producer. And she made The Red Kimono as part of her “Sins of the World” series.265
The Red Kimono, 1925. A scene, missing from surviving prints, of Priscilla Bonner, as Gabrielle Darley, in jail. (National Film Archive)
Why did she make it? An exposé of the curent prostitution racket might have fulfilled her purpose as a cinematic reformer. But an exposé of the white slave traffic as it had existed nearly a decade earlier was, to put it mildly, a curious exercise. The story was set in 1917, but no attempt was made to depict the period. The cars were current, the fashions those of the twenties.
In a 1976 interview, Mrs. Reid frequently referred to “dirty films”—or exploitation films—and while she did not admit to making any, she did say, “A lot of fancy business goes on. They sell a picture and they haven’t left a thing with the audience. But that’s beside the point. We’re making entertainment—we have to be forgiven for some of that.”266
The film was set in Storyville,c the red-light district of New Orleans that had been shut down in November 1917.268 Was The Red Kimono a serious study of prostitution or a thinly disguised exploitation film?
The leading actress was Priscilla Bonner,269 who said that Mrs. Reid had emerged from her tragedy with universal respect and admiration: “She had two small children to support and no money, but great strength of character and spiritual strength. She was a Davenport, and she had friends who came to her aid. One was Thomas Ince … [and] Adela Rogers St. Johns was a close friend. She had been a police reporter for Mr. Hearst. A few years before, there was a sensational murder trial. Mr. Hearst sent Adela to cover it.
“A young and lovely looking girl had shot her lover. She had no money and no high-powered attorney. She took the stand and told her story—the truth, as it happened. She was acquitted. Adela suggested they use this. It was another plea for compassion. Adela wrote the story. The truth was so dramatic it needed no changes. They told it as it happened. The only fiction was the chauffeur, whom the girl marries in the picture.”270
Dorothy Arzner, a film editor soon to become a director, wrote the scenario. The director was a newcomer, Walter Lang (who later made The King and I). He co-directed with Mrs. Reid at the old Fine Arts studios, where Griffith had made his masterpieces.271 They worked on a very low budget.
The Red Kimono opened, like a nickelodeon morality play, with a brief allegorical scene of Hades, the shades begging for mercy. Then we fade in to Mrs. Reid in what is supposed to be the file room of a daily newspaper, but whose book-lined walls are all too obviously painted.
In a rare camera movement, we track over her shoulder to a volume dated “1917.” She opens it to reveal a headline about the Gabrielle Darley case. This true story is not unique, she explains, but is occurring even now to hundreds of unfortunate girls.
The film uses Gabrielle’s court appearance to tell her story in flashback. The moralizing tone is reflected in Malcolm Stuart Boylan’s titles, which are as pious as Victorian samplers. “Home is a place where a mother smiles at children. All others are guest houses.…” “Three little words—‘I love you’—sometimes a sacred prayer, sometimes a cowardly lie.”
As a young schoolteacher in a small southern town, Gabrielle Darley attracts the attention of Howard (Carl Miller272), a nattily dressed ladies’ man. She accepts his offer of marriage and goes to live with him in New Orleans. The manner in which she is lured into white slavery in Storyville is not illustrated in the surviving version, which is incomplete. But after “two years of bondage, sorrowful, sordid,” we find Gabrielle in her crib. She reacts with horror when the doorbell rings. She stands symbolically across the door, arms stretched against the threat, until, realizing the hopelessness of her situation, she removes her wedding ring and powders her nose.
Abandoned by Howard, Gabrielle follows him to Los Angeles and discovers him in a jewelry store, in the act of buying a wedding ring for someone else. She shoots him, and as he dies she reveals to us that she still loves him.273
The jury acquits her, but she refuses to return to New Orleans. The war is on, and she decides the only way to erase the past is through service to her country. She joins the Red Cross.
A wealthy society matron, Mrs. Fontaine (Virginia Pearson, the former vamp), befriends Gabrielle. She is interested only in her publicity value and invites her friends to meet her. Their questions are prurient: “Do you poor dears have to—?” (The titles are cautious.) Gabrielle’s situation is symbolized by a dissolve to a kitten surrounded by hostile cats.
She forms a close relationship with the chauffeur, Frederick (Theodore von Eltz), but soon the society matron tires of her. “You lasted longer than most,” she is told. “The bank robber only lasted a week.” Gabrielle finds herself on the street again. Branded by her past—a huge “A” sizzles over her breast in one encounter274—she cannot get a job and decides to return to New Orleans. Fred races to the station to stop her, misses the train, and follows on the next. Gabrielle is now set to face her Gethsemane. No sooner has she arrived in New Orleans than a former client (George Siegmann) tries to rape her. Trying to escape, she is knocked down by a car and taken to the hospital. Fred searches the red-light district, but eventually abandons all hope and volunteers for the army.
Gabrielle recovers and becomes a cleaner at the hospital. The flu epidemic is raging, and Fred, now an ambulance driver, is detailed to take victims to the hospital. He and Gabrielle are reunited. But not before a last dose of morality. Having had sexual relations with countless men, Gabrielle now refuses to consummate her love for Fred until he returns from the war.
Mrs. Wallace Reid reappears and concludes the picture with a final plea for tolerance and education for wayward girls.
Historian Anthony Slide points out that not once is there any condemnation of Gabrielle or any suggestion that she might have chosen another life-style.275 This is true; if only the treatment had been more skillful.
The picture suffers from a lack of realism, mainly in its art direction. It would have been a relatively simple matter to re-create the red-light district on location in a rundown part of town; instead, it is reproduced on an unconvincing set. Perhaps Mrs. Reid remembered the lawsuits that followed the first spate of white slave pictures, when owners of restaurants used as locations took companies to court and won. The trouble with this film is that all the other exteriors were shot on location, and this blatant artificiality destroys conviction.
The picture was not produced by a member of the MPPDA, so it bypassed Will Hays. It was savaged by the censors, however. It was subjected to no less than twenty-five cuts in Pennsylvania, where the censors changed the entire plot, for good measure, by ordering all the titles to be reshot.276
Although Variety thought the film rather well directed, it added that “Mrs. Reid … may believe she is doing something for the fallen women in turning out a picture of this sort. But the chances are that she will do tremendous harm to the picture business as a whole and herself in particular because she sponsors it by permitting it to continue.”277
Said the New York Times: “There have been a number of wretched pictures on Broadway during the last year, but none seem to have quite reached the low level of The Red Kimono, a production evidently intended to cause weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Possibly it might accomplish its purpose if the theatre doors were locked, but so long as one knows one can get out of the building, it is another matter.”278
The most ill-advised action of the people involved in this picture was to retain the actual name of the leading character. Gabrielle Darley had recovered from her experiences and had remarried. One day she and her husband went to a movie—The Red Kimono. She sued Mrs. Reid, and she won.
“She took everything,” said Priscilla Bonner, “including her home.”279
* There was a 1917 series called How the Great Stars Make Love.
† Clara Hamon was accused of the murder of her husband—she even admitted to it—but was acquitted. She made a film called Fate (1921). See this page–this page.
‡ A man who goes the rounds of the bars.
§ Rosenthal was a minor gambler who talked to the press about the police protection racket and was shot—allegedly on the orders of a police lieutenant. See page 185.
‖ Born in Lismore, Ireland, in 1876, MacNamara began his working life as a blacksmith and later became a marine engineer.189 One of the first vice presidents of the Gaelic League, a founder of the Fabian Society, he had been a war correspondent in South Africa and an actor on and playwright for the stage.
a Cavanaugh was a policeman from Venice, Calif., according to Swedish historian Bo Berglund.
b It is a trifle ironic that Officer Burke should be offered a wad of bills by one of the pimps, even if he turns it down. The fact that such a scene could be included hinted at the real problem. Curiously, no reviewer drew attention to this whitewashing of the police.
c Named, to his disgust, for Alderman Story, who set the area aside for prostitution in 1897.267