A Japanese Nightingale on Stage and Screen

A follow-up to last week's post on A Japanese Nightingale. 

On 19 November 1903, A Japanese Nightingale, dramatist William Young's stage adaptation of the Otono Watanna novel of the same name opened at Broadway's Daly's Theatre. Critics were indifferent. A Japanese Nightingale managed only forty-six performances before closing on 30 December.

The New York Times, 20 November 1903

Of those I've read, the New York Times review is both the most unreliable and the most informative. The unreliable being limited to this paragraph:

To those who read the story there was something appealing in the simple, childish sweetness of the little maid Yuki, who, betrothed to a powerful man of her own people, weds instead the youthful and impetuous wooer from over the seas. In the dramatic version something of this same quality is reserved to the character of Yuki, and her love affair, Yuki's subsequent suffering, and her determination to leave the world and become a priestess in the temple that the man she loved may be spared suffering and persecution from her enemies and his, is likely to make an appeal to unsophisticated and sympathetic playgoers.

By "story," the unnamed reviewer refers to the novel on which the play is based. In that story, Yuki is betrothed to no one, never mind "a powerful man of her own people."

Illinois native Margaret Illington (née Young), who portrayed Yuki. 

The anonymous pen continues:

William Young, who made the adaptation for stage purposes, has used a familiar bag of tricks. The expedients utilized for stage climaxes are of the most ordinary and commonplace kind. One has at least the right to expect some ingenuity in matters of this sort, and here the dramatizer has failed signally.

   For example. The ultimate conflict in this play is due to the fact that Jack Bigelow, a young American, has married Yuki, the Japanese Nightingale. A record of the marriage has been filed with the United States Consul at Tokio. Bigelow's enemies kill the Consul and steal the book containing the record of the marriage. At the very time that Bigelow hears of the murder of the Consul he gives Yuki their marriage license, telling her never to part with it. Immediately thereafter she places it in a little box, the arch conspirator enters, she shows it to him, and he purloins it. When, a little later, Yuki's brother appears on the scene and refuses to believe that Bigelow has married the girl regularly, the box is opened for the proof that is to convince him. Lo! the paper is gone. Tableau and mutterings of vengeance.

   And so it goes throughout. Mr. Harker of California, who, with the assistance of Mr. Bobby Newcome, Ensign, U.S.A., eventually sets everything right, shows his daughter a revolver. She takes it from him and puts it in the drawer of a table. Later Mr. Harker tells the villain that he is going to detain him for a little confidential chat, and the pair sit down on opposite sides of the table. The Jap draws a knife and Harker whips out the gun and covers him. Another tableau that flashes in the pan.

Assuming the Times review is accurate, Young introduced several elements to A Japanese Nightingale, including:

• a record of marriage;
• a United States Consul;
• a murder;
• a marriage license;
• a theft;
• a man named Harker;
• a United States ensign named Newcome;
• a daughter of a United States ensign named Newcome;
• a knife;
• a gun.

Given early Hollywood's eagerness to adapt popular novels, it's surprising that A Japanese Nightingale did not appear on screens until 1918, seventeen years after publication.

"Written by William Long from the book by Onoto Watanna" – so sayss the poster – it was the work Ouida Bergère and Jules Furthman. The latter is known for Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Nightmare Alley (1947), and Rio Bravo (1959), while the former is remembered for, well, her forty-one year marriage to Basil Rathbone.

Reviews suggest that Bergère and Furthman relied on Long's play, then added something in introducing a new character, Baron Nekko, as Yuki's fiancé. 

The Winnipeg Tribune, 28 December 1918

This time out Yuki, not yet twenty in the novel, was portrayed by 47-year-old Fannie Ward of St Louis, Missouri, an actress renowned for her youthful appearance and ability to portray women decades her junior. Brooklyn boy W.E. Lawrence, age 22, played Jack Bigelow, Yuki's husband.

Happily, A Japanese Nightingale is one of the small percentage of silents that has survived. Unhappily, it has never been made available in Beta, VHS or DVD, nor is it streaming. And so, I rely again on reviews to provide a synopsis. The best I've found was published in the 30 August 1918 edition of Variety:

Yuki is a little Japanese girl of good family whom a heartless stepmother wishes to marry to a vicious old man of wealth and position. So Yuki runs away and becomes a Geisha girl and here meets a young American who falls in love with her. When an agent of the would-be bridegroom seeks to spirit Yuki away the American whose name is John Bigelow, takes things into his own hands and marries her. Thenthere are plots and counterplots. The consul, who has charge of the marriage records, is murdered and the records disappear, worthless papers being substituted. And at this time Yuki’s brother, who turns out to have been a friend of Bigelow’s at an American university, returns home and is made to believe that his erstwhile friend has wronged the girl. To save her husband from her brother’s vengeance Yuki flies to a temple, where she prepares to marry the old man of her mother’s choice. But the wedding records turn in the nick of time, and the brother is reconciled to the marriage.

The critic goes on to add: "Miss Ward, while she does not make up to look like a Japanese girl, is of a beauty sufficiently delicate and flowerlike to fit appropriately into the miniature gardens and cherry groves through which she wanders."

The December 1918 edition of Picture-Play Magazine, from which  the last two images are drawn, features an eight-page short story by American Fannie Kilbourne (1890-1961) that is "written from the Pathé picture play based on the story by Onoto Watanna." Available here courtesy of the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress, it may just provide the most accurate description of what we've been missing.

As always, I recommend the novel.

A Bonus:

The New York Times, 23 November 1903.

The New York Times, 15 November 1909.

Related posts:

A 'Japanese' Nightingale; Winnifred Eaton at 150

By Any Other Name: Otono Watanna's Hyacinth

Beauty Ignored and Neglected
Glassco's $9500 Library and the Montreal Eatons

Alberta Gothic

On an Eminent Author's Lost Film

A brief addendum to last week's post on Basil King's 1912 novel The Street Called Straight.  

Seven Basil King novels have made it to the silver screen thus far, the earliest being a 1915 adaptation of The Wild Olive (1910). The most recent, Tides of Passion, is based on King's 1903 novel In the Garden of Charity.

One hundred years have passed since Tides of Passion – last month marked the centenary of its release – and yet I hold out hope that further adaptations are on the way.

The film called The Street Called Straight was the first of two Basil King features produced by Eminent Authors Pictures Inc. EAP, as I'm sure it was never known, was the short-lived brainchild of Samuel Goldwyn and Rex Beach. Their idea was to focus less on big stars and more on the writers who'd penned the novels upon which the films were based. Other Eminent Authors included Gertrude Atherton, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Rupert Hughes, Gouverneur Morris, and Charles E. Whittaker. and of course, Beach himself.

Moving Picture World, 21 February 1920

In the early years of Hollywood – 1919 and 1920, to be precise – this might've seemed a great idea. It certainly appealed to me... but then I thought of how I'm nearly always disappointed by film adaptations. And, really, how many people saw Fight Club for not other reason than it is based on a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk?

Moving Picture World, 6 March 1920

The man tasked with reducing The Street Called Straight, a 415-page novel to 4986 feet of film, was Edward T. Lowe, Jr, (1890-1973). He's best known, I suppose, for House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). This is not to suggest that King played no part in bringing The Street Called Straight to the screen. If trade magazine accounts are to be believed, the author was an active participant and was often present on set.

King was so keen on the new medium that he came up with ideas for future films. Earthbound (1920), his second Eminent Authors picture, was based on an original story that reflects his growing interest in spiritualism. Sadly, it is another lost silent. One-hundred-and-five-year-old reviews suggest that it ranks with The Miracle Man, Hollywood's adaptation of fellow Canadian Frank L. Packard's novel of the same name, as one of the great lost silent films.

Moving Picture World, 11 December 1920

The Street Called Straight is also a lost film. In fact, every screen adaptation of a King novel – In the Garden of Charity, Let No Man Put Asunder, The Inner Shrine, The Wild Olive,  The Street Called Straight, The Lifted Veil, The Dust Flower – is lost. And so, given that it is likely no one alive has actually seen The Street Called Straight, we rely on contemporary reviews to give some sense of what we're missing.

What surprises most is that every review describes a film that in no way deviates from the source material. Hell, Fight Club deviates from the novel. Do not get me started on 1998's The Patriot.

Screenwriter Lowe's adherence to the plot is unlike anything I've seen in a silent film. The longest description I've found, published in the 21 February 1920 edition of Moving Picture World, could serve as a summary of the novel itself:

Did that serve as a spoiler? You knew Olivia and Peter would end up together in the end, right? 

Related posts:

The Long and Winding Street
The Barefoot Fugitive and Other Mysteries
Basil King's Silent Unseen World

The Miracle Man on Paper and Nitrate Film

Not Very Occult
A Gentleman's Gentleman Cultivates a Lady
Reluctantly Revisiting Canada's Great Virus Novel

The Long and Winding Street

The Street Called Straight
By the author of The Inner Shrine [Basil King]
New York: Harper, 1912
415 pages

Olivia Guion seems a most dislikable character. As a young woman of eighteen she quite literally turned her back on a marriage proposal. Olivia had not said a word, rather she'd stood up and, "fanning herself languidly, walked away."

See what I mean?

The young man left seated awaiting her reply was Peter Davenant. His love for Olivia was such that he could not help himself, even though he expected rejection.

But silence?

At thirty-three, Davenant is again seated next to Olivia, this time as the last minute substitute at a dinner party hosted by her father. She pretends that they've never met, while Davenant is so modest as to believe that she does not remember him. Olivia engages in polite conversation – "Twice round the world since you were last in Boston? How interesting!” – before turning to the other guests with animated talk about her forthcoming marriage to dashing Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley of the Sussex Rangers.

After the final course, the ladies retire to another room leaving Davenant alone with Olivia's father Hector Guion and her much older cousin Rodney Temple, Director of the Department of Ceramics in the Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts. Davenant's evening becomes still more uncomfortable as unwitting and unwilling witness to Guion admission that he.... Well, what exactly?

Hector Guion is one of the most respected men in Boston. He heads an investment firm, established by his grandfather, which handles the old money of Old Money. Guion appears to have brought the business to new heights, as evidenced by his increasingly lavish lifestyle, when in fact Olivia's papa has been embezzling his clients' investments. Now, the jig is up. Guion expects the evening will be his last as a free man.

Peter Davenant is an entirely different sort. His entrée to the dining table shared by Guoins and Temples comes by way of adoption. Born Peter Hallett, "his parents according to the flesh" were missionaries in China. Both died young, leaving their church to care for their son. He spent several years in an orphanage before being taken in and given a new name by childless Bostonians Tom and Sarah Davenant. Thus was the boy elevated to a level that would, at age twenty-four, bring the humiliating marriage proposal.

As the narrator notes, "the years between twenty-four and thirty-three are long and varied." In those nine years, Davenant amassed a significant fortune through an investment in a copper mine somewhere in the region of Lake Superior. These newfound riches cut Davenant loose from all moorings, setting him adrift. He has indeed been twice around the world since leaving Boston. On his second tour du monde Davenant returns to the Chinese city of Hankou, his birthplace.

Hankou, China, c.1880, about the time Davenant would have been born.

Before then, he'd known very little of his schoolteacher mother and physician father. Davenant reads hospital records written in his father's hand, visits his mother's grave, and finds the place at which their modest home had once stood:

It was curious. If there was anything in heredity, he ought to have felt at least some faint impulse from their zeal; but he never had. He could not remember that he had ever done anything for any one. He could not remember that he had ever seen the need of it. It was curious. He mused on it – mused on the odd differences between one generation and another, and on the queer way in which what is light to the father will sometimes become darkness in the son.
   It was then that he found the question raising itself within him, “Is that what’s wrong with me?”
   The query took him by surprise. It was so out of keeping with his particular kind of self-respect that he found it almost droll. If he had never given himself to others, as his parents had, he had certainly paid the world all he owed it. He had nothing wherewith to reproach himself on that score.

And yet, Peter Davenant (né Hallett) does reproach himself.

Back in Boston, in the aftermath of the dinner party, he decides to rescue Hector Guion by giving him his riches. Olivia is another beneficiary in that the gift will enable the Guion family to dodge a scandal that might otherwise endanger her engagement to Rupert Ashley. Hector Guion is eager to accept the offer, but not so his daughter... until she realizes that several elderly women might be cast out on the street as a result of her father's transgression. 

All looks to work out until Ashley arrives from the Old Country and thrusts a spanner into the works.  

There is much to admire about Basil King's novels, intricate plots being foremost. The Street Called Straight is an exception. Though simple, it is no less enjoyable owing to the ways in which the story affects its characters. Hector Guion is the first to undergo transformation.

Harper's Magazine, February 1912

The years between twenty-four and thirty-three are indeed long and varied, but so too are the years between eighteen and twenty-seven. No one character is stronger and more attractive than the woman who at age eighteen walked away from a marriage proposal fanning herself.

Bloomer: This one is far longer than the norm. Bear with me.

We begin with Devenant being in "a position from which he could not withdraw," facing "a humiliation to be dislodged from." I'm probably making too much of his moments "face to face with Olivia Guion" and am really going out on a limb with "laying up the treasure," but the final two sentences most certainly qualify as a bloomer:

As he was apparently able to shoulder it, it would have been better to let him do it. In that case he, Peter Davenant, would not have found himself in a position from which he could not withdraw, while it was a humiliation to be dislodged from it. But, on the other hand, he would have missed his most wonderful experience. There was that side to it, too. He would not have had these moments face to face with Olivia Guion which were to be as food for his sustenance all the rest of his life. During these days of discussion, of argument, of conflict between his will and hers, he had the entirely conscious sense that he was laying up the treasure on which his heart would live as long as it continued to beat. The fact that she found intercourse with him more or less distasteful became a secondary matter. To be in her presence was the thing essential, whatever the grounds on which he was admitted there.

Trivia: Published anonymously in May 1912, all that was known was that the same hand had penned The Inner Shrine, which had been biggest selling novel of 1909. There had been suggestions that Edith Wharton or Henry James had written that novel and its follow-up The Wild Olive (1910).

In 1912, The Street Called Straight was the second biggest selling novel in the United States. In 1910, The Wild Olive had made only number three.

Object and Access: An attractive hardcover in crimson boards with gold type featuring eight illustrations by American artist Orson Lowell (1871-1956).

A first edition, I purchased my copy in error. What I'd meant to order was a signed first edition from the very same bookseller. It set me back US$100. The signed copy was US$125.

I regret nothing.

The book's healthy condition was no doubt aided by the notice that appears on its front flap (right).

As I write, just one copy of the first edition in jacket is listed online. Price: US$100. A jacketless copy in not so great condition is being offered by a Nova Scotia bookseller at C$5, which seems an incredible bargain. 

The British first, published in 1912 by Methuen, is nowhere in sight, though later printings are available for purchase.

In 1920, Grosset & Dunlop issued a photoplay edition with plates from the film. Copies start at US$13.50.

The novel first appeared – or began appearing – as a serialization that ran in Harper's Monthly Magazine during the first seven months of 1912. The book landed in bookstores in the fifth month of that year.

The Street Called Straight is available online in both book form and serialization courtesy of the Internet Archive. Those who choose to read the novel in serialization will be rewarded with four Lowell illustrations that were not included in the finished product. I've included one of the February 1912 illustrations above, but this one from January 1912 is by far my favourite:

Related post:

Wither the Canadian Bestseller?
Not Very Occult

The Barefoot Fugitive and Other Mysteries

Elinor Glyn Saturday Movie Matinee

An addendum to last week's post on Beyond the Rocks by Elinor Glyn.

A lost film found!

I first read about Beyond the Rocks in university, well before I'd heard of Elinor Glyn or her Guelph, Ontario, girlhood. Back then, by which I mean my early twenties, Beyond the Rocks was one of the most sought after lost silents, mainly because its frustrated lovers, Theodora Brown and Hector Bracondale, were played by Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino.

In 2004, by which time I was a deceptively young looking dad, nearly complete nitrate reels were discovered amongst recent donations to Amsterdam's EYE Filmmuseum. The restoration, nothing less than remarkable, is the subject of this short documentary:

All to say, that I've now seen this once lost film in something approaching its entirety.

You can, too:

As is typically the case, the differences between novel and film are numerous. Here they are particularly interesting in that Mrs Glyn not only co-wrote the screenplay but "supervised."

She rearranged sets, brought in flowers, had costumes altered, and on one occasion picked up a brush and applied dark paint to an extra's hair in order to better match the character she'd envisioned. Remarkably, there's no evidence that any of this behavior brought frustration, tension, resentment or a slap across the face. Indeed, photographic evidence suggests quite the opposite. Here she is goofing around on set with Swanson, Valentino, and director Sam Woods:

What fun!

Mrs Glyn's first change of note is locale. The opening scene is set in a village on the Dorset Coast, most certainly not Bruges, where Captain Dominic Fitzgerald "lives on the meagre pension of a broken and retired guardsman." For context, I present this image of the Fitzgeralds' modest seaside home (it's the one on the right):

I know, I know... different times.

Where in the novel Bracondale does not appear until the second chapter, here he features in the second minute.

You don't make people wait for Valentino.

In the scene, Hector rescues Theodora, who has somehow fallen out of her rowboat within sight of his yacht.

Apparently, Swanson performed the stunt herself, resulting in this saucy shot:

The adventure, which is not in the novel, takes place before her marriage to Josiah Brown. In the book, Hector first meets Theodora one year into the union.

In another scene not found in the book, Hector saves Theodora's life a second time during her honeymoon in the Swiss Alps.

It almost seems unfair to point out departures from the source material; the similarities are far more numerous. Glyn's accomplishment - and here I give credit also to co-writer Jack Cunningham, along with Swanson, Valentino, and Woods - is that Beyond the Rocks on film and paper share the same romantic atmosphere. If the book is better... well, isn't that almost always the case.

I admire Elinor Glyn's talent. She displays such great ability to condense, often adding scenes that aid in shortening the story. They fit so perfectly that, had I not recently read Beyond the Rocks, I might've thought they were in the novel.

To think she accomplished this when screenwriting was in its infancy. She has much to teach, and does in the four-volume Elinor Glyn System of Writing (1922).

I once passed on a copy being sold for a dollar.

Will I never learn? 

Related posts:

No Holiday Amusement

Freedom to Read Week: Embracing Elinor Glyn
Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's
Guelph: City of Galt, Gay, Glyn, Graves, and Girdles
Three Weeks a Lady

Three Weeks in Thirteen Images
Elinor Glyn's Chrustmas Ghost Story (and others)
Gloria Gets Groped

Gloria Swanson's Subway Scene

No Holiday Amusement

Beyond the Rocks: A Love Story
Elinor Glyn
New York: Macaulay, [1922]
327 pages

In the afterglow of Valentine's Day comes a tale of forbidden love between a nineteen-year-old newlywed and a somewhat older extremely handsome lord who is not her husband. Its heroine, Theodora Brown, is the daughter of Captain Dominic Fitzgerald, who is himself extremely handsome. Twice a groom, twice a widower, the captain has fathered three daughters, Theodora being the youngest and fairest of them all. Such is Theodora's devotion to dear papa that she agrees to be the first to wed, the groom being Josiah Brown, a fifty-two-year-old English grocer who has amassed a great fortune through a chance investment in an Australian mine.

Not to disparage Captain Fitzgerald, but the union benefitted him financially. He's a bit of a rogue, and has never been much good with money, which explains why his daughters were raised in Bruges and not Mayfair.

The Browns' honeymoon on the Continent was not a success. Josiah took ill, though he did manage to consummate the marriage. Mercifully, the author provides no details, though she does make it known that Theodora found it "a nightmare, now happily a thing of the past."

The deed was done, but as backstory ends and action commences the Browns have yet to make for home; Josiah has been advised by physicians to make a gradual reentry to England. As young Theodora whiles away the hours, days, and months her limited orbit brings her within the sights of  Hector Bracondale, the aforementioned extremely handsome lord.

As portrayed by Rudolph Valentino in the 1922 film adaptation, he really is extremely handsome. Gloria Swanson, who played Theodora, is extremely beautiful.

Ten years Theodora's senior, Lord Bracondale seems the sort of fellow you'd keep away from your sister, his engagements with the opposite sex being nowhere near as innocent as hers:

Usually when he had been greatly attracted by a married woman before, he had unconsciously thought of her as having the qualities which would make her an adorable mistress, a delicious friend, or a holiday amusement, There had never been any reverence mixed up with the affair, which usually had the zest of forbidden fruit, and was hurried along by passion.

Will Hector not settle down? His mother, Lady Bracondale has been pressuring her son to marry dull and heavy heiress Morella Winmarleigh. This campaign has been going on for so long that London society sees the two, who are anything but a couple, as more or less engaged. Hector himself had been or less resigned to marrying Morella at some point in the distant future... but then came Theodora.

Beyond the Rocks is to be enjoyed more for the writing than the plot. There are many slow patches, though it picks up from time to time. Nearly every character, members of the English upper class and aristocracy, is portrayed as dull and uninteresting. This middle class Canadian found it intriguing that pretty much every one of their number was having it on with someone else's spouse. The lone interesting figure of their set is Colonel Lowerby. Commonly called "the Crow," he is a man of strong opinion, as exemplified in this exchange with Anne, Hector Bracendale's sister:

“It is too bad, Crow," said Anne. “You take it for granted that Hector has the most dishonorable intentions towards Mrs. Brown. He may worship her quite in the abstract.”
   “Fiddle-dee-dee, my child!" said Colonel Lowerby. “Look at him! You don’t understand the fundamental principles of human nature if you say that. When a man is madly in love with a woman, nature says, ‘This is your mate,’ not a saint of alabaster on a church altar. There are numbers of animals about who find a ‘mate’ in every woman they come across. But Hector is not that sort. Look at his face —look at him now they are passing us, and tell me if you see any abstract about it?”

Lowerby is the most forthright character in the novel.

The most generous and kind are Theodora and Josiah Brown.

It culminates in tragedy, though I very much doubt that the author saw it as anything other than a happy ending.

Fun fact: Gloria Swanson, whom I'd assumed to be too old to play nineteen-year-old Theodora, was all of twenty-one when the film was shot.  Coincidentally, it was her twenty-first feature.

Object: A bulky hardcover in crimson boards with black type containing three "illustrations From [sic] the Paramount Photo-Play." A fourth illustration, not from the Photo-Play, appears as the frontispiece:

The jacket features an ad directed at Valentino fans.

Access: Long out of print, the cheapest copy of Beyond the Rocks listed online is what I assume to be the photoplay edition, sans jacket, at US$5.00. Copies of the Duckworth first UK edition begin at US$18.00. Copies of the Harper first American start at US$27.60.

My photoplay copy, with jacket, was purchased last year from a Minnesota bookseller. Price: US$35.00. I paid nearly the same amount in shipping.

It was worth every American penny.

Don't have the time to read 327 pages? Not to worry, the August 1906 edition of The Novel Magazine whittles it down to a couple.

(cliquez pour agrandir)

As far as I know, there has been just one translation, Za úskalím, first published in 1912 in the Czechoslovak Republic, and then again in 1914. 

Remarkably, it was republished a third time eighty years later. The cover is, um, not as good.

Related posts:

Freedom to Read Week: Embracing Elinor Glyn
Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's
Guelph: City of Galt, Gay, Glyn, Graves, and Girdles
Three Weeks a Lady

Three Weeks in Thirteen Images
Elinor Glyn's Chrustmas Ghost Story (and others)

Mishandled by Hollywood?

An addendum to last week's post on "Woman-handled" by Arthur Stringer. 

Much of yesterday was spent reading 'The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912-1929,' a 2013 study by historian and archivist David Pierce. It was a disturbing yet pleasant distraction from the mess that is the republic to the south.

I could hear it from my Canadian home. 

David Pierce's findings brought focus to the awful truth that the vast majority of silent films are likely gone forever. Seeing it all laid out with such accuracy chilled the bones. 

This year alone, I've written about lost silent film adaptations of Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks, Frank L. Packard's The White Moll, and no less than three Gilbert Parker novels (The Money Master, The Translation of a Savage, and You Never Know Your Luck), all the while struggling to get some sense of what they were like through century-old trade magazines, reviews, stills, and adverts.

Happily, the adaptation of Arthur Stringer's Womanhandled (1925), subject of last week's post, is readily available on YouTube. The same can be said – for now, at least – of Stringer's Manhandled (1924), which was reviewed here eleven years ago. By great coincidence, Manhandled is singled out in Pierce's study as an example of a film that has survived, but in a lesser format.

Manhandled began as a longish short story spread out over two issues of the Saturday Evening Post. Russell Holman expanded it to novel-length in a movie tie-in published by Readers Library (UK) and Grosset & Dunlap (USA).

Womanhandled had no movie tie-in, which is just as well as there are only the faintest traces of Stringer's story in Luther Reed's screenplay.

Stringer's story begins in New York's Waldorf Astoria, at which novelist Baran Bowerman has just given a talk. He is approached by young Glenna van Gelder, who warns that he's being made soft by fawning female fans. Baran tries to toughen himself at a ranch outside Calgary only to find that the cowboys he seeks to emulate have decamped for more lucrative jobs in Hollywood westerns. Coincidentally, Hollywood comes to Alberta to shoot a western. Baran is injured whilst saving the film's leading lady from certain death when a stunt goes wrong. Glenna, who just happens to have been vacationing with her father in Banff, visits our hero as he recovers. It's implied that their story doesn't end there. 

Like "Women-handled," Womanhandled opens in New York, but in Central Park, where well-dressed man of leisure Bill Dana is feeding squirrels. He rescues a small boy who has fallen into the lake. Molly Martin, the boy's, um... she can't be his sister, can she?

Anyway, Bill notices that Molly's carrying a copy of Emerson Hough's North of 36, and so pretends to be a Westerner in order to impress. This works to his advantage as Molly, herself a Westerner, came east as a child after daddy died. She has a thing against Easterners, especially the men:

Bill, like Baran, goes west to make a man of himself in order to win over the girl; and, like Baran, discovers that the true cowboys have decamped for Hollywood. He finds himself working with Bowery bums who round up cattle in flivvers.

Bill ends up spending more time on the links than the range, and is about to board a train east when he receives a letter from Molly saying she is on her way west.

I'll write no more because I don't want to spoil things entirely, except to say that a scene in which the African-American housemaid's family is pushed to pass themselves off as Native Americans has become the subject of some debate amongst those who've seen the film.

Is it racist or a comment on racism?

Wherever you land, keep in mind that it has nothing to do with Arthur Stringer.

Related posts:

Handled by the Saturday Evening Post
Gilbert Parker's Hollywood Ending

Behold the Translation of a Savage on Film!

Oh, Lucky Man!

Three Weeks a Lady

Pearl White is the White Moll!