07 November 2024

Mishandled by Hollywood?


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.

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06 November 2024

Turns out Leonard Cohen was wrong...

... or maybe not


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01 November 2024

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.

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31 October 2024

This Harlequin Halloween, a Dick in a Box


If the Coffin Fits
Day Keen [Gunard Hjerstedt]
Toronto: Harlequin, 1952
The cover copy lays it straight:
Central City specialized in vice, legal gambling and easy divorces.
   Teen-age "B" girls in low-cut evening gowns drank with the suckers. If the sucker's bank account was substantial enough, he would be drugged and "found" in a hotel room with a scantily clad bit of Jail Bait. This badger game served the dual purpose of enslaving the girl and exacting a considerable income from the victim. Free-lance crime was not tolerated in Central City; all such activities were conducted on a highly organized basis headed by the anonymous "Mr. Big".
   When Tom Doyle, Chicago Investigator, accepted a blind case in Central City, he ran head on into Mr. Big's organization. Doyle was greeted on his arrival by the Karney twins, who pistol-whipped him into a pulpy mass of bruised flesh and gently invited him to leave their fair city...
   Doyle soon learned that the solution depended on getting Mr. Big. Many people were murdered to prevent Doyle from accomplishing this, and before the case was over, Tom had cause to wonder - IF THE COFFIN FITS.
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25 October 2024

Grant Allen: 125 Years



Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen departed this mortal coil 125 year ago today, rising a metre then stepping aside at his home in Hindhead, Haslemere, Surrey. He wrote many of the very best novels in nineteenth-century Canadian literature. Were I to make a list of the top ten titles, Allen would dominate. That he also wrote some of the very worst is a mystery easily solved. Like fellow Ontarian Arthur Stringer, Allen looked to make a good living from his writing. For every British Barbarians (1895) there is A Splendid Sin (1899).

If you've not seen Allen's Hindhead, Haslemere home, here it is:


Allen's early writing dealt primarily with with science and nature Physiological Esthetics (1877) was his first book. The Colour-Sense: Its Origin and Development (1879), Evolutionist at Large (1881), Vignettes from Nature (1881), The Colours of Flowers (1882), Colin Clout's Calendar (1883), and Flowers and Their Pedigrees (1883) followed. Credit goes to publisher Andrew Chatto for suggesting the author try his hand at novel writing. Allen's first attempt, Philistia (1884), is well worth a read, but I recommend beginning with The Devil's Die (1888). After that, move on to The Woman Who Did (1895), his most notorious novel. Those drawn to black comedy will enjoy For Maimie's Sake (1886) and Michael's Crag (1893).


Allen died at age fifty-one. His thirty-three novels were written in his last fifteen years. Hilda Wade, novel number thirty-four, was being serialized in The Strand at the time of his death, It was completed by friend Arthur Conan Doyle, who followed Allen's outline of the final two chapters. The last is titled 'The Episode of the Dead Man Who Spoke' (February 1900).

Allen's death inspired tributes, Richard Le Gallienne's being the longest. It begins:
Our fears for Grant Allen were too true. He is dead. He died on Wednesday, the 24th, after a long and painful and obscure illness, to which the doctors are still unable to give a name, England thus loses a rarer sprit than she had yet realized the possession of.  
Le Gallienne is off by a day in that Allen died on the 25th. The "long and painful and obscure illness" was determined to have been liver cancer.

Le Gallienne continues:
England is apt to take some time in recognition of its rarer spirits, She throughly stones them first, to try their mettle, and then when they are happily beyond hearing of their funeral orations – usually spoken by respectable gentlemen fit to provoke the dead to disturb with kindly laughter their own obsequies – she grudgingly erects bad statues in their honour. It is comforting at least to think that it is a long while yet before a statue is erected to Grant Allen. It took nearly a hundred years for men to think of a statue to Shelley. 
Well over a century later, there is no statue to Allen, but there is something better. Erected in 2008, it takes the form of a metal arch designed by Lucy Quinnell spanning Allen Court in Dorking, the closest town to the author's Surrey home. Look closely at its base and you'll see the author in the midst of composition. 


I have fellow plaque enthusiast Nick Harrison to thank for these images:


England may be apt to take some time in recognition of its rarer sprits, but here in Canada they are seldom recognized at all. This country has no statue, no arch, no court to the memory of Grant Allen; there is not so much as a plaque. In this one way, Grant Allen, the most remarkable Canadian writer of the nineteenth century, is anything but unique.

Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen
24 February 1848, Wolfe Island, Canada West - 
25 October 1899, Hindhead, Haslemere, Surrey

RIP
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19 October 2024

Darkness on the Edge of Town



Barnabas, Quentin and the Crystal Coffin
Marilyn Ross [W.E.D. Ross]
New York: Paperback Library, 1970
157 pages

The back cover poses a question: 


Knowing nothing about Betty Ward, I was stumped. What's more, I wasn't at all sure about Collinwood and its evil forces. Dark Shadows, the gothic soap that spawned this novel, was cancelled when I was eight. All I knew about the series came from a Gold Key comic bought when I was nine:


The featured story is titled "The Thirteenth Star." I remember it as my introduction to the Golem. After that, I thought no more about Dark Shadows for a half-century. My interest as an adult has to do with the discovery that Dan Ross, who penned Barnabas, Quentin and the Crystal Coffin and the thirty-one other Dark Shadows novels, was a son of St John, New Brunswick.

My childhood memories of Collinwood being in Collinsport Bay, Maine proved correct. It's the family home of the Collins family, Barnabas Collins being the oldest member. As a vampire, I suppose he might be considered one of the house's "EVIL FORCES," though he proves every bit the gentleman when accompanying pretty blonde Carolyn Stoddard. One of Barnabas's youngest relatives, Carolyn is keen on visiting the ruins of Frene Castle, located on the vast Collinwood estate bordering the town of Collinsport Bay.

Carolyn Stoddard (Nancy Barrett) and Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) in Dark Shadows episode #351, broadcast 30 October 1967.
"Tell me about Frene Castle and the Frenes," says Carolyn. Barnabas begins, is interrupted by six asterisks, and then an omniscient narrator takes over.
      

Aptly named London orphan Betty Ward is at the centre of the story. She and twin sister Georgette have been under the care of Reverend Prit since their parents died. Bumbling and ineffective, he hasn't been the best of guardians. Prit's opposition to Georgette's desire to study art in Paris was easily overcome and he's heard little from the girl since. Betty, who is more on the ball than the clergyman, gleams through letters home that her sister is falling in love with American sculptor Jeremy Frene; still, their elopement takes her by surprise.

Georgette and Jeremy set sail for his home at Frene Castle. Meanwhile, Betty makes for Paris because she wants to investigate whatever went on before the newlyweds departed. The fact-finding mission doesn't make much sense, though it does bring the very best scenes of the novel. My favourite has to do with an artistic dwarf named Dulez who has been commissioned to create a wax sculpture of Georgette for wealthy French Count Lissay, whom she had rebuffed.

Dulez imprisons Betty because a warm, living, flesh and blood likeness of Georgette is much better than a waxwork, right? Won't the Count Lissay be pleased!

Betty is rescued by Quentin Collins of the Collinsport Bay Collinses. He's the novel's most physically attractive male, though as anyone familiar with the television series will tell you, Quentin is both a bad boy and a werewolf.

For reasons unknown, Quentin does his best to dissuade Betty from setting out for the New World and Collinsport Bay. Failing this, he books a passage on the very same ship, then begins terrorizing his fellow passengers.  

Writing propels the plot with sentence structures that would have not passed muster in my high school English classes:
She didn't refer to it again. But when she was back in her own cabin doing the last of her packing she did think of that bandaged hand. And an odd thought flashed through her mind. The sailor on deck claimed he had shot the werewolf in the front right paw. She stood frowning into space for a moment. And this morning Quentin appeared with a bandaged right hand? Could there be any connection between the two things?
     She at once decided there couldn't.
Barnabas, Quentin and the Crystal Coffin is one of thirteen – thirteen! – "Marilyn Ross" Dark Shadows novels published in 1970. That not one is based on the soap's storylines makes the accomplishment all the more impressive.

Betty Ward wasn't a character in the television series. She exists only in this novel, making the question posed on as the back cover a bit unfair.

Carolyn Stoddard, of course, was a character in the television series. She was born and raised raised at Collinwood, yet in this novel had not so much as seen the ruin of Frene Castle. And so, I have a question of my own:
JUST HOW LARGE IS THE COLLINWOOD ESTATE?
Object: A mass market paperback. The novel itself is followed by three pages of adverts for "Other Great Gothics By Marilyn Ross," along with My Life With Jacqueline Kennedy by Mary Barelli Gallagher. My signed copy was purchased last year as part of a lot of twelve Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows paperbacks.


Access: The Popular Library edition enjoyed a single printing. As of this writing, fifteen copies are listed for sale online ranging in price from US$5.00 to US$24.50.

Condition is not a factor.

This collector, who suffered gouging in the purchase of the aforementioned lot of Dark Shadows paperbacks, notes:
  • A California bookseller is charging US$50.00 to ship his US$13.41 copy to Canada. 
  • A Texas bookseller is charging US$13.01, then asks US$100.00 for shipping.
USPS First-Class International Package Service from their addresses to mine is US$17.00.

Caveat emptor!


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09 October 2024

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.

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