Wild Geese on Film (Part 2): Ruf der Wildgänse

The second of three addendums to the recent post about Martha Ostenso's 1925 bestselling novel.

It's hard to know what to make of Ruf der Wildgänse, the 1961 Austrian-German film adaptation of Wild Geese; it comes and goes from YouTube, but never with subtitles. Because I know no German, some of what I have to say about the movie may be mistaken, particularly as I'm relying on memory.

We begin with the opening credits, which features the most disorganized flock of Canada geese I've ever seen. 

For those unfamiliar with the bird, this is more typical.

For those really unfamiliar, Canada geese look nothing like the drawings featured on the cover of the 1952 Deutsche Hausbücherei edition:

Back to the movie:

The first scene is extremely exciting. The year is 1886. Three men in red jackets and what look to be Prussian helmets ride in pursuit of a young man and woman through the dark forests of Manitoba. There's a good amount of gunfire. At least one of the men in red is hit and the man being chased is shot dead.

Who are the men in red?

No idea.

Why are they after the couple?

Ditto.

The important thing is that the woman, Amelia Jasper (Regine Felden-Hatheyer), is captured and receives a prison sentence. From what I've been able to glean, she gives birth to a son while incarcerated. The boy, whom she names after his father Mark Jordan, is seized and handed over to missionaries. 

I expect Amelia is released at some point because the next we see she's wandering about the countryside in search of shelter. She finds it in the home of Caleb Gare (Ewald Balser).

Cut to the sunny summer of 1910.

Amelia's dramatic, violent backstory owes its existence entirely to screenwriters Alf Teichs and Per Schwenzen. From this point on Ruf der Wildgänse adheres more closely to its source material. Nearly all of the primary and secondary characters are present, the exception being schoolteacher Lind Archer. Given her influence on Amelia's daughter Judith, this seems a mistake, but who am I to judge? Again, I don't know German. It may have been a stroke of genius.

Those planning to read Wild Geese may want to stop here. There will be spoilers.

In Ruf der Wildgänse the role of schoolteacher is assigned to Mrs Sanbro (Brigitte Horney). As in the novel, her son Sven (Horst Janson) and Judith Marisa Mell) have something going on, but work has taken him away from his family's farm. In Ruf der Wildgänse, Caleb intercepts letters the young man writes to his daughter. The apparent silence leads Judith to believe that Sven isn't as into her as she is in him.

Enter handsome Mark Jordan (Hans Neubert), who in this version of the story is a surveyor sent to map out the area. Caleb sees the unexpected appearance of Amelia's secret love child as a tool to be used for further control and humiliation, and so he invites Mark to visit. This move has unintended consequences, sending the film of in a direction that makes it an uncomfortable first date movie.

Mark falls in love with Judith, who he doesn't know is his half-sister. He wants her to be his wife and shares his intention with the woman he doesn't know is his mother. Amelia (played as an older woman by Heidemarie Hatheyer) puts a stop to all this in a great reveal.

From here the plot is more or less back on track, culminating in the fiery death of Caleb, thus liberating the rest of the Gare family. In the final scene, Judith and Sven ride off... but not into the sunset.

There's much more to Ruf der Wildgänse, of course. I've yet to mention that Sven is a singing cowboy. If interested, you can enjoy him break into song in the trailer.

 

The character Malcolm, described in the novel as having "Indian blood in his veins," is a subject of further study. Ellen's love interest, he's played by Ray Maa, an actor with no other credits on IMDb.

Then there's the presence of firearms, which do not figure in Martha Ostenso's novel.

Finally, there's the matter of typography and geographical features.

Ruf der Wildgänse was shot almost entirely in Canada, but this sure as hell ain't Manitoba:

The film's German-language Wikipedia entry informs that after her incarceration Amelia is exiled from Manitoba, suggesting that the screenwriters knew nothing about Canadian law.

It would appear poor Amelia crossed well over one thousand kilometres of Canadian prairie before being taken in by Caleb. 

Go west, young woman.

I've watched Ruf der Wildgänse twice. Next time I chance upon it on YouTube I'll watch it a third time. 

Here's hoping there are subtitles.

Related post:

Wild Wild Geese

Wild Geese on Film (Part I): Wild Geese

Wild Geese on Film (Part 1): Wild Geese

The first of three addendums to the recent post about Martha Ostenso's 1925 bestselling novel.

Released in the autumn of 1927, Wild Geese is a lost silent film, though you wouldn't know it looking at the IMDb entry:

My thinking is that the star ratings concern the novel; it's either that or they were left a couple of decades back by computer savvy centenarians who remembered the film from when they were young. 

Montreal Gazette, 21 May 1928

I doubt the latter is true, but let's pretend.

What would they have seen?

I've had to rely on ninety-eight-year-old reviews, none of which are terribly long or contain much detail. The one published in the 7 December 1927 edition of Variety is the most interesting:

The reference to a "Minnesota household" intrigues. The novel is set in the fictional farming community of Oeland, which is generally accepted to be in the very real province of Manitoba. 

Judging from surviving stills, "poor wig outfitting" seems fair.

Eve Southern played Judith Gare. That's Anita Stewart as Lind Archer on the right. Of the cast, Russell Simpson, who portrayed Caleb Gare, is hands down the best remembered today. He was cast as Pa Joad in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath.

Russell Simpson as Caleb Gare and Belle Bennett as wife Amelia in Wild Geese.  

The reviewer makes no mention of the film's ending, but others do. Apparently, it isn't nearly so positive as Ostenso's.

Returning to those IMDb ratings, I note that no one left an actual review. My thinking is that the one star ratings were left by frustrated high school students looking for a shortcut. This and other Goodreads reviews suggest as much.

And so, this anecdote:

In 1985, I work part-time in a Montreal video store. For context, this was the year in which Betamax was suffering death throes. Come autumn, kids who'd previously rented Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Risky Business abruptly shifted focus to The Natural, the 1984 Barry Levinson film about a middle aged has been who becomes a baseball legend. Set in the early twentieth century, 48-year-old Robert Redford played the lead.

The sudden demand caught the store's owners off-guard. We had eight copies of The Breakfast Club and nearly as many of Police Academy but just one of The Natural. As it turned out, students in nearby Bialik High School had been assigned the Bernard Malamud novel upon which the film is based. 

A young man not much older than the kids I was serving, I'd seen The Natural. Much as I like Levinson and Redford, I did not like their collaboration. My issue was wasn't so much with the body rather the ending, which is diametrically opposed to Malamud's perfect, perfectly depressing conclusion. 

It's also very over the top.

Let this be a lesson, kids.

Read the book.

Related post:

Wild Wild Geese

Wild Wild Geese

Wild Geese
Martha Ostenso
New York: Dodd, Mead. 1925

358 pages

The winner of the inaugural $13,500 Dodd-Mead-Famous-Players-Pictorial Review Prize, Wild Geese was a sensation. Consider this from my book's copyright page:

There were many, many more printings to come.

In 2009, the year the Dusty Bookcase began, I would not have considered Wild Geese eligible for inclusion. Wild Geese was neither neglected nor forgotten.

It is now.

Look no further than the late New Canadian Library for evidence. An early addition – #18! – the novel was something of an NCL staple. Today, aging copies printed in 2008 await purchase in Penguin Random House's Ontario warehouse.

The 1961 first NCL edition (left); the 2008 final NCL edition (right).

Wild Geese was not on the syllabi of my Canadian Literature courses. I felt I'd dodged a bullet. A young man living in cosmopolitan Montreal, I had no interest in stories of struggling farming families on the prairies.

Wild Geese is a story of a struggling farming family on the prairies. Caleb Gare is the patriarch. Hardworking, cold, cruel, and miserly, he is a character we've seen before. Angela is Caleb's cowed wife. Drained of all joy, she too is familiar. Caleb keeps their four children close, but not to his heart. He sees them as little but unpaid labour and is ever ready to smother all aspirations and dreams in order to keep them on the farm. None have ventured farther than ten miles, except to bring cattle to Nykerk, a larger small town than nearby Yellow Post. Caleb does not allow his wife and children to attend services in the Yellow Post church. He brings home sermons which he alters to serve his purpose.

Twenty-year-old twins Martin and Ellen are the eldest and so have suffered the longest. Martin shares his father's dedication to farming, but nothing more. When not attending to the crops and livestock, he works at improving the various outbuildings. Martin has been salvaging wood and fragments of old windows with the hope of one day constructing a proper home for the family. Ellen is broken. She sees a blurred world through second-hand glasses as she stumbles about, all the while thinking of Malcolm, a boy who once kissed her. Charlie, by far the youngest of the four Gare children, is something of a ghost. As a character, he barely exists, yet is Caleb's favourite. Between the twins and Charlie stands Judith, the problem child. Caleb considers this daughter during a late night survey of his land: 

Caleb lifted the lantern and examined the wick. Things would turn out to his liking. He would hold the whip hand. Judith, yes, she was a problem. She had some of his own will, and she hated the soil . . . was beginning to think she was meant for other things . . . getting high notions, was Judith. She would have to be broken. She owed him something . . . owed the soil something. The twins, they would stay—no fear of their deserting. Martin and Ellen would not dare to leave; there was no other place for them. And Amelia, she was easy . . . yes, yes, she was easy, Amelia was!

Caleb's hold on Amelia has to do with a secret.

As a young man he'd pursued Amelia only to place a distant second to gallant Des Jordan. Tragically, Jordan's life was soon cut short by a bull. Unmarried Amelia gave birth to a son who was handed over to Catholic priests. How Amelia ended up Caleb's wife is left up to the imagination. I expect her family's extreme poverty had something to do with the marriage..

Only Caleb knows about the child. For more than two decades he has used this knowledge to render Amelia subservient. She lives in fear of exposure and the disgrace it will bring her and the children she's had with Caleb.

Twenty-four-year-old Martha Ostenso
Canadian Singers and Their Songs
Edward S. Caswell, ed.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1925

Into this toxic household comes Lind Archer, the new schoolteacher. She will be lodging with the Gares as their home is one of the closest to the school (and because Caleb, a trustee, will be getting money from the school board). Martin and Emily avert their eyes during Miss Archer's first meal in the Gare home, but not Judith; she is intrigued. Later in the evening, circumstance forces Judith to share her bed with the new teacher:

She watched Lind taking off her trim outer clothing. When she saw that she wore dainty silk underthings she glanced at her more covertly. She made no comment.

   After both girls had undressed, Judith picked up a string of amber beads Lind had placed on the stand near the bed.

   There was also a pair of ear rings of the same limpid yellow substance.

   “Wild honey! Drops of wild honey!” Judith exclaimed in a whisper. “Just the color of you!”

The arrival of pretty young Miss Archer, her jewelry, tailored clothing, and dainty dainties provide a glimpse of a world quite unlike her own. In an early scene, Judith removes her rough work clothes and lies naked beside a pond. Thoughts turn from her father, Lind, hunky neighbour Sven Sandbro, then back to her father: 

Oh, how knowing the bare earth was, as if it might have a heart and a mind hidden here in the woods. The fields that Caleb had tilled had no tenderness, she knew. But here was something forbiddenly beautiful, secret as one’s own body. And there was something beyond this. She could feel it in the freeness of the air, in the depth of the earth. Under her body there were, she had been taught, eight thousand miles of earth. On the other side, what? Above her body there were leagues and leagues of air, leading like wings—to what? The marvelous confusion and complexity of all the world had singled her out from the rest of the Gares. She was no longer one of them. Lind Archer had come and her delicate fingers had sprung a secret lock in Jude’s being. She had opened like a tight bud. There was no going back now into the darkness.

   Sven Sandbo, he would be home in May, so they said. Was it Sven she wanted, now that she was so strangely free? Judith looked straight above her through the network of white birch and saw the bulbous white country that a cloud made against the blue. Something beyond Sven, perhaps . . . Freedom, freedom. She dipped her blistered hands down into the clear topaz of the pool, lifted them and dipped them and lifted them, letting the drops slip off the tips of her fingers each time like tiny cups of light. She thought of the Teacher, of her dainty hands and her soft, laughing eyes . . . she came from another life, another world. She would go back there again. Her hands would never be maps of blisters as Jude’s were now, from tugging a calf out of a mud-hole. Jude hid her hands behind her and pressed her breast against the cold ground. Hard, senseless sobs rose in her throat, and her eyes smarted with tears. She was ugly beyond all bearing, and all her life was ugly. Suddenly she was bursting with hatred of Caleb. Her large, strong body lay rigid on the ground, and was suddenly unnatural in that earthy place. Then she relaxed and wept like a woman. . . .

Given the year of publication, it's unsurprising that the homoerotic elements of the novel were not remarked upon by reviewers. They were most certainly not acknowledged decades later in Carlyle King's inept 1961 New Canadian Library introduction. 

In a later passage, Lind admires Judith in turn:

Lind thought how wildly beautiful she looked in the unnatural glamour: the able grace of her tall young body; her defiant shoulders over which her black hair now fell; the proud slope of her throat and breast.

This is likely the most homoerotic passage in Canadian literature up to 1925:

Afterwards Judith came up to Lind in the loft and sat down on the bed, watching the Teacher wash her face and neck and long smooth arms with a fragrant soap. Lind turned and surprised a peculiar look in the girl’s eyes. Judith grew red and leaned back on the pillows.
   “It makes my mouth water to watch you do that,” she said. “It’s so—oh, I don’t know what it is—just as if somebody’s stroking my skin."

   “Why don’t you use this soap, Judith? I have lots of it. I’ve told you so many times to use anything of mine you like. Next time you expect to meet Sven—” Lind lowered her voice and smiled roguishly at Jude—“let me fix you all up, will you? Nice smelling powder and a tiny drop of perfume in your hair. He’ll die of delight, Judie! Just die.”
   Judith chuckled and ran her hands over her round breasts.
   “It doesn’t take perfume to kill him,” she murmured.
   Lind looked at her, stretched full length across the bed. What a beautiful, challenging body she had! With a terrible beginning of consciousness, like a splendid she-animal, nearly grown.

   “Let me comb your hair, Lind, will you?” Jude asked.

   The Teacher sat down on the floor beside the bed and Judith loosened the long skeins of bronze hair that fell all about her shoulders. Judith loved to run her fingers through it, and to gather it up in a shining coil above the white nape of Lind’s neck. Lind talked to her about things of the outer world, as she often did when they could be alone together. But presently Ellen’s voice came up from below, the thin, usual protest. Judith fastened Lind’s hair up with a single pin and left her. Lind thought that her step was a little lighter than it had been.

Far more erotic than anything in 1928's The Well of Loneliness, is it not?

I don't mean to suggest that Wild Geese be categorized a lesbian novel. This straight cis male saw Judith's attraction toward "the Teacher" as something other. In Lind, overall-wearing farm girl Judith sees the fantastic. It isn't that she wants to be with Lind, rather that she wants to be like Lind or perhaps even wants to be Lind.

Both young women have romantic relationships with men. Judith and Sven's begins in the backstory; Lind's is with...

I'm hesitating...

Lind's is with Mark Jordan, the son Amelia had with Del Jordan. I'm sharing this only because it is revealed early on. 

This can't be considered a spoiler, right?

It's interesting that Lind is so often referred to as "the Teacher." I don't believe she has a great deal of influence on the events that lead to the climax, though her "dainty hands" push gently toward the inevitable. From the first page, a dark cloud hangs over the Gare farmland. Caleb is calculating, manipulative, and cruel, crossing and at times threatening his neighbours.

He will reap what he sows. The day of reckoning is coming.

Ten months ago, I posted a list of what I considered the best Canadian novels of the 1920s. I listed nine because I'd not yet read Barney Allen's They Have Bodies and The Magpie by Douglas Durkin, Ostenso's future husband.

Still haven't.

In any case, I was certain that one would make it an even ten.

Martha Ostenso beat them to it.

Wild Geese is one of the best Canadian novels of the 1920s or any decade.

Trivia I: Wild Geese bested over 1500 other submissions to win the Dodd-Mead-Famous-Players-Pictorial Review Prize. The US$13,500 awarded Martha Ostenso in 1925 is the equivalent of roughly US$240,000 today.

Trivia II: Wild Geese has enjoyed no less than three movie adaptations, the earliest being the 1927 lost silent film of the same name. The most intriguing is the second, Ruf der Wildgänse (1961), which IMDb claims is the first Austrian movie to be filmed almost entirely in Canada.

I don't doubt it.

The novel was last adapted in 2001, as the made for Canadian made for TV movie After the Harvest starring Sam Sheppard.

Object: An attractive hardcover in printed boards, I really like the endpapers:

I purchased my jacketless copy for roughly fifteen years ago. I can't quite remember where, but I do recall paying one dollar.

Access:  The novel first appeared in the August and September 1925 numbers of Pictorial Review. 

That autumn, Wild Geese was published in hardcover by McClelland & Stewart (Canada) and Dodd Mead (United States). Hodder & Stoughton's British edition appeared as The Passionate Flight, the novel's working title.

Wild Geese is still available Penguin Random House, but there's no need to give Bertelsmann SE & Co KGaA any more of your money; plenty of used copies are listed online at prices ranging from C$4.00 (the 1989 NCL edition) to £77.00 (first UK edition, sans jacket). The best buy is a copy of the 1925 McClelland & Stewart first Canadian edition, avec jacket, at $13.00.

In Canada, the novel entered the public domain in 2014. It can be read here – gratis – through the wonderful faded page.

There have been several translations: Norwegian (Graagass), German (Ruf der Wildgänse), Danish (Vildgæs), Spanish (Almas sometidas), Polish (Krzyk dzikich gęsi), and Slovinian (Klic divjih gosi), 

I read Wild Geese for the 1925 Club, the tenth anniversary club of clubs dedicated to reading and reviewing books published in a specific year. 

Remarkably, of the 43 books from 1920s that have been covered on this blog over the years, Wild Geese is only is only the second to have been published in 1925. The other is:

The Black Magician - R.T.M. Scott

Related posts:

Wild Geese on Film (Part I): Wild Geese

About Those Old New Canadian Library Intros

(with some stuff on Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese)

The Nine Best Canadian Novels of the 1920s

Martha Ostenso's Forgotten Masterpiece?

A 49-Year-Old Fifty Shades? S&M from M&S?

The Pan Jalna (and the careening Jalnawagon)

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 says 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