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!

Handled by the Saturday Evening Post

'Woman-handled'
Arthur Stringer
The Saturday Evening Post, volume  197, issue 44

May 2, 1925

A critic writes: "In your New Year's Day post you urged readers to start off 2024 with Arthur Stringer. It's now fall and you haven't reviewed any book by Stringer. Have you even read one?"

I haven't, but smarting from the comment I've since tackled this short story. I'd always meant to read "Woman-handled" because of "Manhandled," a longer Stringer story that appeared in the Post the previous year (11 March - 29 March, 1924). It was brought to the screen by Paramount. Gloria Swanson played the lead.

The James H. Crank illustration the Saturday Evening Post chose to introduce "Woman-handled" is an odd in that it depicts the climax. 

The opening scene is urban. It's set in New York's Waldorf Astoria, where novelist Baran Bowerman, author of The Passionate Year, has just concluded the third of three talks to various ladies social groups. Amongst the rapt-eyed, fawning female readers he encounters sporty young horsewoman Glenna van Gelder, who ribs him for accepting these sorts of engagements with their pink carnations, hothouse violets, and macaroons.

"Why you're eating it up!" she says. "You love it! And if I don’t get out of the way of this adoring army they're going to trample me down.”

Baran Bowerman is drawn to Glenna van Gelder. The attraction has nothing to do with alliteration, rather that she is so different than the delicate women who typically attend his talks. Later, whilst walking down Fifth Avenue, Glenna's ribbing turns to mockery:

"You’re smothered in women... You're drowned in them. You’re like that Duke of Clarence who tumbled right into his vat of wine. You're so tangled up with petticoats you can’t breathe.”
   The handsome young author laughed, but his laugh was a defensive one. “Oh, I can still breathe,’’ he protested, with barricading lightness. ‘‘And there’s always safety, remember, in numbers.”
   “Is there?” asked the solemn-eyed girl at his side. “Isn’t there danger of getting your soul clogged up with talcum powder?”
   “I can’t see that it’s left any knock in the engine,” averred the pink-cheeked author. "I still have my two- hour work-out with my trainer every day.”
   “I know stout ladies who do the same.”

She later warns Baran that he's being "effeminized without knowing it."

From this point on Stringer's story becomes rather silly. The next morning they meet in Central Park, where Baran seeks to demonstrate his non-existent equestrian skills. This in turn leads to fisticuffs – not with Glenna van Gelder, you understand, rather with her riding partner. The novelist next makes for the west in order to toughen himself up. Interestingly, it is the Canadian west, not the American. More interesting still, is the arrival of a "movin' picture outfit," making a western.

My critic, a friend, will be pleased to learn that I've invested a further fifty-five minutes of life viewing Womanhandled, the Hollywood adaptation of "Woman-handled."

It was worth it.

More in next week's post.

Related post:

Gloria Gets Groped 

Pearl White is The White Moll!

The Moving Picture World
2 October 1920

A follow-up to last week's post on Frank L. Packard's The White Moll.

TheWhite Moll was the fifth Frank L. Packard book to be adapted by Hollywood. It followed Tinseltown's take on his 1914 novel The Miracle Man by a matter of months. The Miracle Man is considered one of the great lost silent films. I first wrote about it thirteen years ago, sharing the two minutes and twenty seconds of known footage. Since then a further thirty-nine seconds has been found.

Huzzah!

Here's what we now have:

 

Of the eight Packard novels I've read, The Miracle Man is the best by far. It concerns a faith healer in Maine whose activities attract the attention of a criminal gang. Wanting in on what the grift, they leave the Big Apple for the Pine Tree State, only to find that there is no grift. The White Moll is something altogether different. It was published in 1920, when Packard was all in on thrillers; The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917) and The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1919) had been his two biggest sellers.

As a novel, The White Moll has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, but the film was steeped in a baptismal font. I write with confidence, though I haven't seen Hollywood's adaptation. Like The Miracle Man, it's a lost silent. If anything, The White Moll is even more lost in that not so much as a frame has been found. Everything I know of the movie comes through reviews and descriptions found in one-hundred-and-four-year-old newspapers and magazines. 

The screenplay is credited to E. Lloyd Sheldon (1886-1957), who is best remembered for Tess of the Storm County (1922). It starred Toronto girl Mary Pickford; The White Moll starred Pearl White. She'd made a name for herself as "Queen of the Serials," the 20-chapter Perils of Pauline (1914) being the most popular. The White Moll was intended as White's first step toward becoming the Queen of the Features. 

Exhibitors Herald
4 August 1920

The best review I've read is also the worst. Published on in the Chicago Daily Tribune on August 16, 1920, it pulls no punches:

And thats just the start!

Critic Mae Tinée – real name: Frances Peck Grover – isn't completely down on the film. She praises the camera work and sets as "good," and describes Richard Travers, who played the Adventurer, as the only punk actor. It's the religious elements that offend:

Some things transpire in a church at the start of the picture that quite seriously offend one's good taste. The production will go better when the scenes utilizing the image of Christ crucified are omitted.

Christ crucified!

Reading through the reviews, I've managed to cobble together a plot that owes little to Packard's novel. William M Drew appears to have walked a wider trail, so I quote from his recent biography of Pearl White, The Woman Who Dared (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2023):

The White Moll cast Pearl as Rhoda, a thief from the underworld slums. Her life is transformed when she has a vision of Christ during a church robbery in which her father is killed. Becoming known as the "White Moll," she dedicates her life to reforming criminals. One of them, the "Sparrow," is a burglar who catches her fancy. Her activities as a settlement worker arouse the antagonism of the the "Dangler" (played by John Thornton  Baston), the leader of a criminal band, who clashes with her throughout the film. Her idealism wins out as she succeeds in bringing the "Dangler" to justice and finds love with the "Pug" (Richard C Travers), another reformed crook. In the course of these adventures, Pearl disguises herself as Gypsy Nan, a toothless hag who not "one fan in a million could guess" was the beautiful actress.

The Rhoda of the novel is a young woman who has been raised in comfort by a loving father, a well-positioned, well-respected mining engineer. She dedicates herself to caring for the poor after witnessing their squalid living conditions. The "Sparrow" appears late in the novel in her time of need. He is not someone who has captured her fancy. In the novel the "Dangler" is gang leader Pierre Dangler. He has no idea Rhoda is working against him. The "Pug" is not a reformed crook, rather an upstanding young man who has infiltrated Dangler's gang so as to bring them to justice.

The 7 August 1920 Moving Picture World reports:

The story is considered by Frank L. Packard, its author, to be the most powerful novel he has ever written, truly reflecting underworld existence.

What, one wonders, did the author make of such a radical departure from his story? As I've not had a chance to comb through the Frank L. Packard fonds at Library and Archives Canada, all I have to go on are these two paragraphs from a letter he wrote producer William Fox, as quoted in the 21 August 1920 edition of Moving Picture World: 

Note that praise does not extend E. Lloyd Sheldon.

I wonder whether Packard, a devout Anglican and congregant of Montreal's St James the Apostle, would have objected to the depiction of the crucified Christ (uncredited), or whether he would've embraced the religious elements, particularly after the success of The Miracle Man.

Le Canada
11 September 1920

On the other hand, The Miracle Man is so much better.

Right?

I suppose we'll never know.

Related post:  

A Feminine Jimmie Dale

Images of a Lost Film of a Forgotten Novel

A Feminine Jimmie Dale?

The White Moll
Frank L. Packard
New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1931
306 pages

Walt Disney failed to interest NBC in Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal. His biographers haven't made much of this, but evidence suggests it irked. He'd first read Jimmie Dale's adventures in adolescence, and would act them out with childhood chum Walt Pieffer. What roles they'd played are unknown. I like to think one of the Walts played Marie Lasalle, the Tocsin, but that's just me.

In 1952, fifty-one-year-old Disney purchased the rights to Jimmie Dale – “motion picture, photoplay, television, radio and/or any other adaptations of every kind and character” – and held onto them, even after NBC declined.

In an alternate universe, Disney managed to convince the network and Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal became a cathode-ray tube hit. The adventures of a millionaire masked crimefighter, it would've pre-dated and perhaps even inspired ABC's Batman and The Green Hornet. A Gold Key comic was pretty much guaranteed. In this alternate universe, it might've spawned spin-offs, some featuring the White Moll, which publisher George H. Doran positioned as "a Feminine Jimmie Dale."     

The White Moll
Frank L. Packard
New York: Doran, 1920

The White Moll is not Jimmy Dale en femme, though the two share the talent of impersonation. Both move though a grotty New York beset by poverty, drug addiction, alcoholism, and crime. The Gray Seal, Jimmy Dale is heir to a great fortune, while the White Moll, Rhoda Gray – note the surname – is of the lowly upper middle class. Her mining engineer father had worked for an English concern in South America until ill-health forced him to New York for medical consultation. Papa required an operation, but before it could take place petty thief  Pete "the Bussard" McGee broke into the Grays' flat. He was caught by father and daughter, spilled some sob story starring a sickly wife and hungry, unclothed kiddies, and was let go. The following morning, a curious Rhonda investigates to find Pete was telling the truth about his godawful life.

Sadly, Rhoda's father does not survive his operation. Left an orphan of modest means, she dedicates her young self to saving people like Pete from a life of poverty and crime. Rhoda comes to be known amongst the down and out as "The White Moll," the name coming from the Bussard, who'd introduced her to his invalid wife with these words:

“Meet de moll I was tellin’ youse about, Mag. She’s white – all de way up. She’s white, Mag; she’s a white moll – take it from me!”

Rhonda is about three years into her do-gooding when she visits a dying old hag known as Gypsy Nan. She soon learns that Nan is not the woman's true name, nor is she an old hag... but she is dying. In her final hours, the unnamed woman removes her disguise. As life slips away, the woman known as Gypsy Nan seeks salvation by telling the White Moll of a heist that will go down that very night. Rhonda tries to thwart the crooks, but is nabbed by Rough Rorke of the NYPD. She's saved by a seemingly drunken passerby who wrenches Rhonda from Rorke. Fleeing, she ends up in Gypsy Nan's hovel and adopts the role of the old hag.

The set-up, the only thing to add is that the seemingly drunken passerby was more than likely sober. The man who rescued Rhonda, referred to as "the Adventurer," weaves in and out of the novel, much like the Tocsin does in the adventures of Jimmie Dale.

I expect you know where that relationship will lead. Packard was a commercial writer and knew how to please his audience. 

Disney take note.

Trivia (or not): In 1920, the Fox Film Corporation released a film adaptation that that owed very little to the novel. The subject of next week's post.

Access: First published in the pages of The Blue Book Magazine (August 1919 - January 1920), the novel's first  edition is either the Copp, Clark (Canada) and Doran (United States). Both can be read online through the Internet Archive. My copy is one volume in the 1931 Gray Seal Edition set of Packard's works.

Two copies of Copp, Clark's Canadian first edition are currently listed for sale online, but no copies of the Doran.

Related post:

Whatever Happened to Jimmie Dale?