White slavery

Traffic in Souls, or While New York Sleeps: a Photodrama of Today 1913 U.S. Universal (87 minutes) directed by George Loane Tucker; story by Tucker and Walter MacNamara.

This unusual early silent six-reeler spins a quick-paced yarn about the sex trade in turn-of-the-century New York. It may be the first feature film in which police use wiretap evidence to help nab the bad guys.

The story also is advanced in its portrayal of two staples of what was becoming the American Century: technical wizardry and a quick-witted, resourceful young heroine. 

Tales of ‘white slavers’—operators who enticed and abducted naïve, unsuspecting young white women from the streets and impressed them to work in brothels—made for lurid headlines in early modern New York and other American cities.

This story reveals a complex network of white slavers in action, from spotters and smooth talkers on the street and whip-brandishing madams and enforcers in brothels to management that keeps the books behind legitimate fronts.

The film was shot using a stationary camera with a single lens, thus the action takes place within the context of a series of deftly edited medium-shot frames, without close-ups (which D.W. Griffith recently had invented). The images are surprisingly sharp and the motion fluid. The exposition of the story is conveyed by brief newspaper clips. A tense, climactic tenement gunfight between police and crooks that ends on the roof may be another cinematic first. 

After director/co-writer George Loane Tucker introduces his main characters in their natural settings, the narrative pace moves quickly, the straight life storylines intercut with vignettes from various tentacles of the criminal enterprise.

Mary and Lorna Barton (Jane Gail and Ethel Grandin) live with their widowed father, The Invalid Inventor (William Turner). The sisters work as shopgirls in Smyrner’s Candy Store. Mary, the more responsible elder sister, is engaged to Officer Burke (Matt Moore), a New York City policeman. Pretty, lovable Lorna, always late for work, is everybody’s darling.

A title card identifies William Trubus (William Welsh) as ‘The Man Higher Up.’ Trubus is a middle-aged reformer with a wife and daughter and social aspirations to match his ample muttonchop sideburns. He is head of the International Purity and Reform League, created ‘to clean the city of the infamous traffic in souls.’

In an office downstairs from Trubus’ headquarters, ‘The Go-Between’ (Howard Crampton) collects the sex trade operation’s daily take from a rogues’ gallery of ‘social outlaws.’ Trubus the anti-white slavery champion monitors this activity telephonically from a dictograph downstairs via a secret line to a headset at his rolltop desk.

Lorna is among a variety of women spotted by a ‘cadet’—a white slaver’s talent scout—and targeted for acquisition. It does not take long for Officer Burke to get on the case. The story is off and running.

The great wealth of and attention to detail make this early naturalistic silent film fascinating to watch. Shot on location in Manhattan and at Universal’s studios in Ft. Lee, New Jersey, the stylish and well-to-do characters appear in the fashions of the day. In contrast, cloth-capped, mustachioed lowlifes and nattily-dressed sharpers in bowlers and straw boaters lurk the streets to ‘aid’ lost young women. 

In addition to Lorna, among the ‘victims,’ two immigrant Swedish sisters with long braids arrive literally fresh off the boat dressed as though going to a rural Swedish village festival; an awkward young American ‘Country Girl’ (Laura [Luray] Huntley) comes into the grand new Pennsylvania Station (completed in 1910 and demolished in 1964) overdressed in a corset and bustle and an enormous flowery bonnet. 

Across the trolley tracks on Eighth Avenue from the station stands the new General Post Office Building (completed in 1912; this is now Moynihan Train Station).

The Country Girl takes the Eighth Avenue trolley from the train station to an area with apartment buildings on the west side and trees on the right, most likely upper Central Park West, where she encounters the lurking ‘Respectable’ Smith (W. H. Bainbridge), a ‘grey haired inspirer of confidence.’

Signs where the Swedish sisters arrive indicate Ellis Island, but people get off a vessel at a pier open to the city and the French Line terminal appears in the background, suggesting that the location is among the Manhattan West Side piers on the Hudson.

Officer Burke, independently pursuing another lead, notices a curious new sign on an uptown tenement building: ‘Swedish Employment Agency “Swenska talas her”.’

Mary and Officer Burke close in serendipitously on the unsuspecting, lascivious nefarians. Meanwhile, The Invalid Inventor has developed a device ‘for intensifying sound waves and recording dictograph sounds on a phonograph record,’ the title card says—or recording wiretaps on media which, at that time, were cylindrical tubes of wax or celluloid, about eight inches long and three inches in diameter…

The cast, few of whom continued to work in the sound era, perform their parts in universal gestures unique to the roles they play, mimed to a turn without ham fat. (David Denby provides insight on the lost cinema art of mime in his piece The Artists [Feb. 27, 2012] in The New Yorker, with reference to last year’s ‘silent film.’)

MP suggests watching silent films such as this without the rinky-dinky piano accompaniment, a cutesy distraction that unfairly handcuffs good cinematic storytelling to a reimagined yesteryear. An instrumental hip hop soundtrack works much better.

This movie comes with The Italian (1915) in a two-DVD set rereleased in 2008 by Film Preservation Associates and Flicker Alley, titled Perils of the New Land; Films of the Immigrant Experience (1905-1915).