The Perils of Pauline is a 1914 American melodrama film serial produced by William Randolph Hearst and released by the Eclectic Film Company, an American subsidiary of the French group Pathé Frères, shown in bi-weekly installments, featuring Pearl White as the title character, an ambitious young heiress with an independent nature and a desire for adventure.
The serial had 20 episodes, the first being three reels (30 minutes), and the rest two reels (20 minutes) each. After the original run, it was reshown in theaters a number of times, sometimes in re-edited versions, through the 1920s. Today, The Perils of Pauline is known to exist only in a condensed, reformatted 9-chapter version (approximately 214 minutes), released in Europe in 1916 by Pathé Frères.
Despite popular associations, Pauline was never tied to a railroad track in the series, an image that was added to popular mythology by scenes in stage melodramas of the 1800s, in serials featuring the resourceful "railroad girl" Helen Holmes in her long-running series The Hazards of Helen, and in other railroad-themed Holmes cliffhangers such as The Girl and the Game. The images of Holmes' railroad adventures were blended in the public mind with Pearl White's cliffhanging adventures, probably because White became the bigger celebrity.
In 2008, The Perils of Pauline was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Contents
Plot
Before Pauline will agree to marry Harry, who proposes marriage to her on the tennis court, she says that she wishes to be allowed to embark upon activities of her choice for a year and then write about them afterward. She proceeds then to plan to ride in a balloon, fly an airplane, drive a racing car, ride in a horse race, go on a treasure hunt, act in a motion picture, and tour a submarine, among other things, and frequently ends up in trouble after being assaulted by henchmen of Raymond Owen, her adoptive father's scheming secretary, who wants to dispose of Pauline and gain her inheritance for himself.
Owen hires the disreputable Hicks, who owes Owen money, and later a Gypsy king called Balthazar to sabotage Pauline's plans, or kidnap or murder her, and often Harry ends up coming to her rescue when she is trapped on a cliff or tied up in a house set afire, but as the series goes on she is also shown to be able to extricate herself from various predicaments as well. Finally, after she ends up trapped on an abandoned ship being used for target practice by the Navy and is genuinely terrified by the experience, Pauline decides she has had enough of adventuring and agrees to marry Harry. Owen is drowned by a sailor he has refused to allow to blackmail him, and all is well.
Cast
Pearl White as Pauline Marvin
Crane Wilbur as Harry Marvin
Paul Panzer as Raymond Owen (Called Koerner in the European release)
Edward José as Sanford Marvin
Francis Carlyle as Owen's Henchman, Montgomery Hicks
Clifford Bruce as Gypsy Leader Balthazar
Donald MacKenzie as Blinky Bill
Jack Standing as Lieutenant Summers
Eleanor Woodruff as Lucille
Chapter titles
The original serial episodes had no titles, only episode numbers. Titles for episodes have been applied to them from the condensed Pathé release of the serial or sometimes as derived from novelizations of the serial.
The original 20 episodes contained the following story elements:
MUMMY CASE/WILL Pauline's ambition to have adventures and write about them before marrying, Egyptian mummy speaks to Mr. Marvin, Death of Marvin and Owen's plot to kill Pauline and gain her inheritance
AIRFIELD Owen tampers with an airplane he thinks Pauline will fly and causes it to crash
OLD SAILOR'S STORY Blinky Bill the sailor tells a story of mutiny and treasure
TREASURE ISLAND Expedition to an island to recover lost treasure; bomb on board ship
RECEPTION/ABDUCTION BY CHINESE Pearl charms Signor Baskinelli, seized by Chinamen, imprisoned in a Joss House
BALLOON/CLIFF Owen and Hicks conspire to set Pauline aloft in a balloon, rescue from cliff's edge
HOUSE FIRE/WESTERN ACTION Pauline trapped in abandoned house set afire, Harry rescues her, she travels West and is kidnapped
INDIANS Pauline is believed to be a goddess and tested by an Indian tribe
DEVIL'S ISLAND Pauline acts in a movie for director Louis Gasnier
SMUGGLERS Lighthouse, rocket gun
Behind the scenes
Pearl White was hesitant to accept the title role, but signed up for $250/week (equal to $8,036 today) and a large amount of publicity.
William Randolph Hearst was involved in plot development. He was also present at the premiere at Loew's Broadway Theatre, on March 23, 1914. According to "The Truth About Pearl White" by Wallace E. Davis, the general release was approximately April 1, 1914.
E. A. McManus, head of the Hearst-Vitagraph service organization, was the person who proved how successful a serial could be. He co-operated with the largest film equipment and production company in the world at that time, a France-based company named Pathé, to produce this serial, which was Pathé's first entry into the medium. George B. Seitz tried to follow the cliffhanging pattern of The Adventures of Kathlyn but each chapter was mostly self-contained.
After retiring from law enforcement, William J. Flynn, former director of the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI), became a scenario writer for the motion picture industry through his acquaintance with the actor King Baggot, who was considered the greatest film star in the country at that time in 1912. Producers Theodore and Leopold Wharton commissioned him to write story lines for their films, including Pauline. The Whartons also eventually adapted Flynn's experiences into a 20-part spy thriller titled The Eagle's Eye (1918), starring Baggot.
Surviving chapters of the French condensation of Pauline are noteworthy for the unintentionally funny re-translations of their title cards and dialogue captions in the English version, filled with misspellings, poor punctuation and grammar, and odd expressions. The film was recut and adapted for home-movie use, and all of the printed captions were translated into French. Later, when the American home-movie industry beckoned, the original English titles had been scrapped, so the French technicians tried to translate the titles back into English. These errors have also been blamed on Louis J. Gasnier, director and supervisor of the production. Gasnier, as explained by Crane Wilbur, made linguistic mistakes that confused the French-speaking crew. The new title cards also renamed the villain's character: Raymond Owen as "Koerner," in reference to German "villainy" during World War I.
Sequels and remakes
This successful serial was quickly followed by The Exploits of Elaine, also starring White. Many imitations and parodies followed, heralding the first golden age of the American film serial.
The title The Perils of Pauline was reused by Universal Studios for a 1933 sound serial with a different plot, by Paramount Pictures as the Betty Hutton vehicle The Perils of Pauline (1947), and by Universal again in 1967 as an updated comedy.
An abortive mixed-media musical was planned to be based on the film, called Who's That Girl?, meant to be premiered by The Boys from Syracuse producer Richard York on Broadway in 1970, with a book written by Lewis Banchi and Milburn Smith, and with the planned participation of the songwriting duo Ray Evans and Jay Livingston.
Legacy
The Perils of Pauline is the prime example of what scholar Ben Singer has called the "serial-queen melodrama". There has been a recent reassessment of Singer's model in light of broader film forms.
The film's style was later subject to nostalgic caricature in many forms (e.g. Dudley Do-Right), but the original heroine was neither as helpless as the caricatures, nor did the original series include the much-parodied "tied to railroad tracks" or "tied to buzzsaw" scenarios which appeared in later films in this vein. Even the title phrase "Perils of" was often adopted by later serials, for example, in Universal's Perils of the Secret Service, Perils of the Wild, and Perils of the Yukon. and Republic Pictures' Perils of Nyoka.
The 1969–70 cartoon series The Perils of Penelope Pitstop was patterned after this serial, and included the plot point of the villain trying to eliminate the heroine so he can keep her inheritance.
The Thunderbirds episode "The Perils of Penelope" was inspired by The Perils of Pauline.