Blue Jeans Stage and Screen

For the past thirty-odd years we have insisted that numerous elements of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stage praxis are frequently visible in motion pictures made between 1896 and 1928 – the so-called silent era. We argue that, rather than a separate development between the Victorian stage and early film, there are numerous points of convergence and overlap between the two media and that filmmakers, many of them beginning their careers in the theatre and finding their way in a newly emerging craft, drew directly on theatrical practice: staging, acting technique, scenic effects, musical support, and the theatrical repertoire itself. Although practices specific to film-making progressively emerge as cinema technology develops, the theatre is not left behind, and film before the 1920s is a liminal area, still resorting to the stage for content and methods, still playing to audiences familiar with theatre, still deferring to the stage for verification. A valuable consequence of this long period of liminality is that many hundreds of archived motion pictures legitimately become a rich research resource for historians of the nineteenth-century theatre. We are able to look at many early films and see the Victorian stage, actually witness performances and practices we had previously – and only – known through textual and pictorial sources. Yes, these performances were sometimes modified in film, but to a minimal extent. Films, to our great fortune, captured and still retain helpful and significant visions of a theatre we had assumed to be deep in the past and, consequently, irrecoverable.

We are aware of the differences between these two media and are not suggesting that we can invariably discern elements of the Victorian stage on early film. This essay deals with one example of convergence between theatre and early film: playwright Joseph Arthur’s 1890 ‘comedy-[melo]drama in four acts’ Blue Jeans and John H. Collins's 1917 film of the same title, with many identical characters and a similar plot. ¹ We find that the filmed Blue Jeans is as effective and potentially as pleasing as a coherent dramatic narrative as when seen in its original incarnation at New York’s Fourteenth Street Theatre and nationally – it was on the road for above three decades. Nonetheless, the problematic nature of this claim becomes evident when we confess that the film version is silent and, even in the intertitles, deprived of Arthur’s dialogue that figures so prominently in the stage drama. ²

We deeply admire Collins’s silent film, but this admission is something of a simplification. It is not our intention to stage an artificial stand-off between the stage play and the movie. Both play and film are complex works to explore and consider, demanding recognition and respect. Both demand description and equal appraisal. Both require placing them in the contexts in which they were created and exhibited. And, above all, both play and film are memorable and highly entertaining, and each offered entertainment appropriate to its era and to the audiences who enjoyed the drama in the medium in which it appeared. In this paper, we will examine the processes and results of Collins’s transformation of a hugely popular stage drama into an equally popular film. Not only did Collins preserve the original drama but, working with his wife Viola Dana and in the spirit of the rising women’s suffrage movement in America, somewhat weighted his film in a proto-feminist vein. To aid investigation we have the evidence of the works themselves and, additionally, pictorial and contemporary critical evidence that also survives. We are further aware that Blue Jeans has furnished scholars with examples of late-Victorian stage sensationalism and models of pictorial naturalism and modernity. ³

Put that reputation down to a single image circulated well beyond the ranges of scholar-historians: reproductions of this Blue Jeans poster (Figure 1), which, over the years, have been printed on t-shirts, cushion covers, fridge magnets, shopping bags, and coffee mugs. Following its reappearance as an image in popular circulation, Americans with no connection to the nation’s theatrical repertoire have become acquainted with this lurid poster, which depicts an unconscious helpless man lying on the moving table of a buzz saw. He is being pushed towards its severing blade by an evident assailant whilst in the background a young female is seen to smash down the door of the office room in which she has been locked, the shards of the splintered door still in the air. It is an image of peril and terror with timely rescue uncertain. OPEN IN VIEWER

Notably successful in drawing audiences, the poster’s source was the earliest surviving full-stage photograph to depict a key moment of performance, the large photograph (Figure 2) by Joseph Byron placed on an easel outside the Fourteenth Street Theatre to attract patrons. ⁴ The photograph clearly identifies the lead actor Robert Hilliard in the role of Perry Bascom lying athwart the saw table, shoved towards the whirring blade by the villain Ben Boone, performed by George Fawcett, whilst Jennie Yeamans as June, newly freed from the sawmill’s office, stands ready to intervene and rescue her unconscious husband. OPEN IN VIEWER

Homer Farnham Emens’s set design – fully operating mill apparatus with levers, wide leather belts travelling across rotating iron pulley wheels, and glistening revolving saw blades that appeared to slice through pieces of timber before moving onto the victim – offers the sawmill interior in all its mundane yet terrifying detail. The apparent realism of this scene invited a New York critic to speculate that audiences half-hoped, half-feared to see real blood shed:

To show that the saw is as real as the buzz, it is made to cut thick boards into lengths, and cold shivers pass over the audience as it settles itself down to enjoy what it thinks, I will not say hopes, may be a real tragedy. ⁵

Similar evidence enables Blue Jeans to be associated with ‘disaster rubbernecking’, a term coined by Emily Godbey ⁶ to describe both theatre audiences’ and a larger public’s pleasure at witnessing calamities and human carnage.

Blue Jeans is, beyond dispute, one of the more memorable stage sensation melodramas, an important piece in the development of the American theatre, but the drama is not without its faults. It is, at times, remarkably clumsy and discursive, frequently reducing its narrative flow to a trickle by introducing marginal episodes and non-diegetic characters who entertain with rube cross-talk humour and arcane political banter associated with the protectionist free-trade debates of the 1880s, or who add a variety of musical numbers and dances. But this pattern of alternating serious plot incidents with overtly comic scenes accords with Charles Dickens’s ‘streaky bacon’ description of melodrama:

It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. ⁷

In creating such juxtapositions of a serious plot with comic and musical interludes, Arthur sacrificed the possibility of a tightly focused and coherent plot to play, instead, to the gallery. Not that the gallery complained, rather the opposite. The 1890 New York audiences, and those the drama thereafter played to on the road, took pleasure in such digressive scenes and would have paid scant attention to our latter-day quibbles or critical judgements. But the play, to its detriment, is also overpowered by its third-act climactic ‘Great Sawmill Scene’ and leaves a dangling fourth act in which the loose ends of a failed blackmail plot, a long-absent husband, and the rehabilitation of an errant daughter are all tied up around a Christmas tree: acceptably sentimental, but drawn out and contrived.

That tolerance for, and downright enjoyment of matter extraneous to the narrative of course reminds us to look at the American context in which the play first appeared: a product of a theatrical economy that thrived on ‘combination’ or ‘amalgamated’ companies. ‘Combinations’ had arisen in response to the national financial crash of 1873 in which numerous local legitimate theatres and variety houses failed and went dark. These theatres were expressive of class interests, the upper and middle classes accustomed to theatres which offered dramatised narratives, the lower classes attending vaudeville and variety houses. Cities and villages alike were left without venues offering entertainments, but that dearth of diversions ended as combination companies filled the vacuum.

‘Combinations’, travelling by rail, brought theatrical ‘packages’ that contained both narrative drama and variety acts and brought different audiences together under one roof. Arthur’s Blue Jeans was just such a ‘combination’, a drama first performed before metropolitan audiences in Manhattan and Chicago but devised for eventual touring along America’s rail networks. Blue Jeans was shaped by its author to give audiences a pleasing mixture of pathos, suspense, and bold action interspersed with generous intervals of light entertainment. The play embraced a double company of performers: those who acted the principal roles of the dramatic narrative and a second miscellaneous troupe of performers who offered variety turns and undertook secondary roles – comic country people. Both in the play’s major city residences and on the road, Blue Jeans was padded out with yokel comic turns, partisan political banter, country dances, vaudeville ‘buck-and-wings’, and musical numbers from an eleven-member mixed singing group, a vocal quartet (who doubled on ocarinas), and a raucous village band. Most of the antics of this double company were excised by Collins, enabling him to compress Joseph Arthur’s sprawling four-act play into 70-minutes running time and allow a tighter focus on June and her reconciliation with her grandparents.

A brief outline of the play’s two convoluted and intertwined plots will identify what Collins and his scenarists have accepted, adapted, or rejected. Although, to a considerable degree, both plots are equal, they were differently read by critics and audiences. The more traditional – male character-led plot – favoured by most critics enacts the vicissitudes of Perry Bascom, which begin with his arrival in the rural Indiana hamlet of Rising Sun. ⁸ From the outset, Perry is hounded by a predatory adventuress Sue Eudaly (pronounced by the locals as ‘sue-you-daily’) who, despite being still married to a conveniently absent husband, claims marriage and harasses Perry, blackmailing him with spurious evidence. Perry runs for political office, but Sue’s claim turns voters against him. Perry is opposed by the local bully Ben Boone, who will become an employee of the sawmill and, jealous for the affections of Sue, attempts to murder him. However, soon after his arrival, Perry encounters June, a beguiling, amusing tatterdemalion of a waif. ⁹ They fall in love and marry, but the claim of a prior marriage to Sue hangs over them both.

The leading character in the parallel plot, June and the actor depicting her, were much admired, both praised by the New York Times critic as,

a sweet-tempered, self-reliant girl, who has good, honest blood in her veins, as it turns out. There is poetry in this character, and humor, too. June is not given to sentimentality, and the sunny side of her disposition is not wholly clouded even by bitter misfortune. She has natural refinement and refreshing wit. She has also certain human failings; she is a bit suspicious and very jealous early in her married life. No-one would have expected Mr. Arthur capable of drawing a character so thoroughly human and sympathetic as June; and it was equally surprising that Miss Jennie Yeamans, who has been associated for so long a time with unmitigated tomfoolery, should act the part in the pathetic as well as the comic scenes, with so natural a touch and so little exaggeration. ¹⁰

June’s origins and parentage are obscure. Events will prove that the play’s heroine turns out to be the granddaughter of Cindy and Jacob Tutwiler, a local elderly couple. Enraged and in despair over their daughter’s elopement with a wastrel eighteen years earlier and erasing the unnamed daughter from the family circle, Jacob has ‘turned her picture towards the wall’ (Figure 3) and is unaware of June’s existence or the dire poverty and humiliating circumstances in which their grandchild was born. ¹¹ OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

‘The Picture Turned Toward the Wall’ poster linking Blue Jeans to Charles Graham’s song inspired by the drama and subsequently incorporated into it. Source: Authors’ collection.

The June plot is important to both play and film. The ballad ‘The picture that is turned toward the wall’ emphasises her initial estrangement and the stigma of her mother’s elopement, which casts a shadow over her. Her identity still unknown, she becomes a member of her grandparents’ household. There she discovers her mother’s portrait turned to the wall, and her grandfather still fiercely hostile to her mother’s memory, unable to forgive the shame their daughter’s elopement brought upon the family name. June, once an infant reared in the county’s poorhouse and ejected when she reached puberty, misunderstood and disbelieved, is introduced as one more problem for Perry to solve. Soon married to him and the mistress of her home, June is unfairly tasked with learning middle-class decorum and critiqued for retaining friendships from her earlier peripatetic life. She, however, aids Perry’s brief political aspirations, bringing onstage to a spectacular ‘political barbeque’ a prize bull she has reared and which is roasted and served up to the guests. And, of course, June is the agent of Perry’s rescue.

In both stage and film dramas it is Perry’s arrival in the hamlet of Rising Sun in the rural south-east corner of bucolic Indiana bordering the Ohio River, the so-called Blue Jeans District, which gives the drama its title, principal plot line, and cast of characters. This depiction of rural Midwestern villagers emerges in one of the earliest American dramas to celebrate homespun life beyond the metropolitan centres and, in so doing, not rendering the hinterlands as threatening landscapes and embattled settlements contested by ‘colourful’-but-hostile natives. The novelty and significance of Blue Jeans was immediately perceived by the New York Times critic:

It was received with a great demonstration of delight that was perfectly sincere. It will last a long while: everybody will see it as everybody has seen ‘The Old Homestead,’ and it will enrich its author, Mr. Joseph Arthur. It is not a pretentious play, and its author is not a very ambitious playwright; it is sometimes vulgar and sometimes silly; but its merits far exceed its faults. It gives new faces and new places to the drama. It is the first play treating Hoosier life, and it contains personages and scenes evidently studied from nature … Mr. Arthur’s triumph will encourage aspiring American dramatists, and they need encouragement. … The American drama, the drama that deals with the life, the peculiar humor born of their environment, the hopes and aspirations of the people of this broad Continent – the richest field ever offered to dramatist or humorist – must have a beginning … ¹²

This critic’s reference to The Old Homestead reminds that from 1875, first in a vaudeville sketch and a decade later as a four-act melodrama, the comedian and comic actor Denman Thompson had performed the New Hampshire farmer Joshua Whitcomb searching lower Manhattan for his errant son, encountering a succession of New York street characters who are bemused by his rural manners, before eventually returning the still-innocent-but-damaged young man to the recuperative security of his New England farm. Thompson’s comedy-drama was not the first to place a New England farmer amidst an assortment of amusing and occasionally predatory city types. Charles Davis built a lifetime career and acquired great wealth with his four-act Alvin Joslin, which, at the very least, nodded to Thomson’s vaudeville sketch as it depicted a New England farmer on a visit to New York. Arthur’s Blue Jeans is unique not only because the action is set in a part of America hitherto unfamiliar to theatre audiences, but also because his rural characters depart from the by-now familiar ‘down East’ character stage roles. Arthur brings to his Midwest stage – partly through the agency of the play’s combination company – country politicians of varied stripes, country women, farm hands and mill hands, town loiterers, a shoemaker, a local sister and brother who have run away to go on the vaudeville stage, a village quartet and a ragtag village brass band, ‘the Rising Sun Roarers’, who play energetically but barely manage to stay in tune.

There are two further strands of popular American drama that Arthur has carried into his play. The first of these is what might be termed the ‘hoyden’ or ‘feral child’ drama best exemplified by the character of ‘Cherub’ created by Mattie Vickers and the several variants of M’liss, adapted from short stories, written between 1873 and 1878, by Francis Bret Harte and performed nationally by Katie Mayhew, Annie Pixley, and Jennie Calef. ¹³ M’liss (a contraction of Melissa) is a pubescent girl reared in a California mining camp, illiterate, unguided by adults and consequently, uncontrollable, who gradually, under the guidance of a sympathetic school teacher, is educated and matures and who encounters and overcomes numerous obstacles to her growth and innocence, some disheartening or threatening, some comic. Arthur’s June is created in the same mould, an uneducated, initially illiterate ragamuffin hoyden who, cast out of a down-river poor house, is prepared to accept any task merely to survive. ¹⁴ Her initial bizarre appearance is described in a note appended to the licensing script held in the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection:

June’s dress, Act 1.

Consists of things donated by friends living in neighborhood of poorhouse: A very old fashioned bonnet; a dress made for a woman twice her size and cut off at bottom to shorten it. Waist very much too long. An old silk fur-lined circular, too large. One boot and one prunella gaiter, too large. ¹⁵

Arthur’s second theatrical borrowing is the very sensation scene that has immortalised this play. As the New York Times critic complained,

This situation was used years ago by Augustin Daly in his ‘Under the Gaslight’ days, in a piece called ‘The Red Scarf.’ ¹⁶ It is, to tell the truth, one of the defects of Mr. Arthur’s play. It is not needed. ¹⁷

Blue Jeans is further indebted to Daly as June’s rescue of Perry, using a chair to bash her way out of the locked sawmill office, strongly recapitulates the scene in the third act of Daly’s Under the Gaslight in which Laura Courtland, locked in a railway toolshed, witnesses Snorkey, a one-armed Civil War veteran, tied to railway tracks by the play’s villain and, seizing an axe, hacks her way free of the shed and, with seconds to spare before an express train rushes across the stage, severs the ropes that bind the victim. ¹⁸

We have no account of the measures that director John Collins undertook as he prepared to adapt Blue Jeans for the screen, but there are hints. So concerned was he to link his film to the original and successful stage drama that the film’s main titles appear superimposed over a large poster for the play that depicts the drama’s principal scenes (Figure 4). Moreover, the underlying stage melodrama vigorously re-emerges on screen – albeit with some changes. Quite possibly at the instigation of screenwriters June Mathis and Charles Taylor, the play’s rube comic roles, broad comic dialogue, and political allusions have been stripped away, the musical interludes largely expunged, and the narrative reshaped and smoothed out in order to create a taut drama of love, ambition, family woe, and, significantly, to foreground female heroism. Crucially, in an act destabilising ‘traditional’ melodrama, Collins, Mathis, and Taylor have diminished the former dominance of the male lead, reshaping the narrative to focus on the bravery, self-abnegation, and resourcefulness of the heroine. The role of June provided a major vehicle for Collins’s talented wife, the actress Viola Dana (already at the age of twenty a silent ‘star’). Collins turns June into a suffering-but-courageous feminist heroine whose deeds and devotion more than justify the love, respect, and vindication she seeks. OPEN IN VIEWER

Of course, both the 1890 stage version and the 1917 film make much of ‘the great sawmill scene’, and the manner in which it was realised permits noting similarities and significant differences between the two media. The dimensions of the Fourteenth Street Theatre’s stage, where the play was launched and where Joseph Byron’s photograph depicts a telling moment in this scene, offer an essential clue to understanding how each medium works. Described in Julius Cahn’s Official Theatrical Guide as within a proscenium opening of 30 ft 9 in. across × 40 ft high and a stage depth from footlights to back wall of 37 ft, Homer Emens’s set had ample space in which to place the sawmill’s office, ¹⁹ three parallel rows of industrial-size shining metal buzz saws, and a corresponding array of pulleys and whirring leather belts to drive the saws. ²⁰ Reviews note that before Perry steps into the set, Ben Boone has used the downstage saw to slice a thick piece of timber, and the audience has heard the shrill whining rasp of the blade against the wood. ²¹ Moments earlier in a scene played against a drop cloth depicting the outside of the mill ²² (and allowing time for the theatre’s stagehands to set the complicated scene described above), we are witness to a confrontation that continues into the mill’s interior between Perry and Sue, the latter urging Perry to leave June and Perry refusing. June’s arrival in the mill intensifies the dispute with Sue. Ben and Sue bundle June into the office and bolt the door. Ben and Perry fight, Ben striking Perry with a logger’s peavey knocking him unconscious, enabling Ben to drag Perry onto the table of the saw and begin pushing him – as he had previously forced the piece of timber, towards the whirring blade. Against the whine of the saw the audience hears June striking the door with a chair and crying to be released. The door shatters. June jumps down, pulling Perry from the saw table and falling protectively across his unconscious body. Ben and Sue attempt to flee. At precisely that moment Perry and June’s friends and millhands rush in, arresting Ben’s departure. June rises and loudly demands that Ben be lynched then and there. Curtain.

Collins to some extent adheres to this sequence but uses the mobility of his camera to accentuate the danger – stepping between exterior and interior shots as Perry heads to the mill; June, at home sensing that Perry is imperilled and frantically hurrying to join him; close-up views of the toothed saw-blade and moving machinery; and, some moments later, the sweaty begrimed face of Ben and the terror-stricken face of June – whilst delaying June’s entry into the mill. Perry again snubs Sue, and Sue urges Ben to assault Perry. Ben again knocks Perry unconscious and drags him onto the saw table, pulling a large lever to lock the saw’s propelling machinery into gear. Cutting from interior to exterior, Sue rushes from the mill to fetch a horse on which she and Ben will make their escape. A journey which a film camera can follow allows us to track June as she reaches the mill, enters, sees Perry, reacts in horror and is shoved into the office by Ben, who barricades the door. The camera repeatedly cuts between Perry, drawing closer to the blade, and June, desperate to escape and finding an awkward 4 × 4 batten to shatter the office’s glass panes and clamber out. This ability to cut swiftly between these two simultaneous actions is an effective device that builds dramatic tension and anxiety. Meanwhile, Sue and Ben have together mounted their horse and have leaped over a parked carriage, the horse barely clearing this obstruction. June, unable to operate the controlling lever, rushes to the saw table and shoves Perry onto the floor as the saw slices through the plank on which he had been lying. No one comes to her aid. Perry is safe, but she is alone: a heroine, an active agent of justice, but again alone. All that is required is a final shot that has June, Perry, their baby, and the grandparents united.

And so we return to early film as a valuable research tool for readers of this journal. Two Victorian inventions, the motion picture camera and nitrate silver cellulose film, still preserving dramatic images made more than a century ago, have provided us with revealing glimpses of the Victorian stage and its performance style. The acting in silent film, albeit adapted to the camera, is still within nineteenth-century gestural codes, partly because early film is ‘silent’, and therefore meaning must be conveyed through expressive gesture still wedded to musical accompaniment, partly because the actors themselves were stage trained and experienced in gestural performance, and partly because audiences were still accustomed to gestural performance on the live stage and, equally so, in film. That is why we repeatedly urge our theatre historian colleagues to recognise the value of early film. It is not a perfect time machine, but, used with caution and knowledge of Victorian stage praxis, “silent” motion pictures become a formidable research tool. Films will bring elements of the Victorian stage before your eyes.