Films Based on Augusta Wilson's 1867 Novel St. Elmo

Recently I made one of my frequent visits to Lantern, the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful resource that makes available full texts of 20th century magazines devoted to film, television and radio. I always find interesting items there, and this time I stumbled across an advertisement for the 1923 silent film, St. Elmo. You can see that ad below. I knew there had been more than one film version of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson's novel, so I decided to investigate; here's what I found. 

First, some background in case you aren't familiar with Wilson. She's one of Mobile's legendary residents; although born in Columbus, Georgia, she spent most of her life in the city. She published nine novels before her death in 1909, and some of them such as St. Elmo and Beulah made her one of the bestselling American novelists of her day. 

Like many female authors of that time, she began writing to supplement her family's income. St. Elmo sold over a million copies and made her the wealthiest female writer in America before Edith Wharton. Only Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur sold better among American novels in the nineteenth century.

There is a town in Mobile County named after the novel. Several of her works, including St. Elmo, can be found via Project Gutenberg. A recent book about Evans is The Life and Works of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, 1835–1909 by Brenda Ayres [Ashgate, 2012]. 

In her entry on Wilson in the Encyclopedia of Alabama, Sarah Frear describes the story of St. Elmo. "In it, Evans depicted a moral struggle between good and evil. The novel's male protagonist, St. Elmo Murray, is at first a cynical and cruel man, but he is gradually converted to Christianity through his love for the virtuous heroine, Edna Earle. Edna willingly gives up her literary career when she marries St. Elmo, and this choice reflects Evans's belief that women were happiest, and most powerful, when they devoted themselves to their families and homes." Perhaps Wilson created a bit of wish fulfillment for herself in this story. 

From what I can determine, five silent film versions of the novel were made: two short ones in 1910, one in 1914, and two more in 1923. The first 1910 version was produced by the Thanhouser Company and released in March. The second one, produced by Vitagraph, came out the next month. You can follow the links below to Wikipedia articles giving more details on both films. The Internet Movie Database also has entries here and here. Both films ran for one reel, or some 10-12 minutes. 

The 1914 version was released in August and "promised 194 gorgeous scenes". Follow the Wikipedia link below for stills from a couple of them and more information on the film. This version was much longer, running six reels. I know a bit about silent film history, but did not recognize any cast members in these three films. I would imagine they are known only to serious silent film buffs and scholars.

However, I am familiar with the leads in the 1923 American version of Wilson's novel. John Gilbert played St. Elmo Thornton in the rising star period of his career. In 1924 Gilbert changed to MGM Studios and soon became as big a box office draw as Rudolph Valentino. Known as "The Great Lover", Gilbert made three films with Greta Garbo. Gilbert's career declined after the arrival of talkies, and he died in 1936 at the age of 38.

His co-star in St. Elmo was Barbara La Marr, known as "The Girl Who Is Too Beautiful." By 1923 she was a major star, but her career did not last much longer. A hard-partying young lady, alcoholic and probably a drug addict, La Marr died in 1926. She was 29 and married to her fifth husband at the time. She and Gilbert reportedly had a steamy affair during production of St. Elmo.

Another familiar name is Warner Baxter, who had a much longer career and died in 1951 at 62. Among many other films silent and sound, he played The Crime Doctor in a series of ten movies popular in the 1940's. 

The last film adaptation of the novel, also released in 1923, was a British production. Like so many silent films, apparently no prints of any of these five versions of Wilson's novel have survived. 

The ad below for the 1923 American film claims "For the past twenty years St. Elmo has been the most called for book in the libraries throughout America." One might think Wilson would be seldom read today, but she still has her fans. Some of them have commented enthusiastically on the GoodReads site. A much longer modern reaction can be found at Vintage Novels. 

 

 

 



Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History

Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History 

 

 

Title page of a United Kingdom edition. The book was published under her maiden name; she did not marry Colonel Lorenzo Wilson until 1868.

 

 

 



A still from the Thanhouser Company's one reel silent film released in March 1910

Source: Wikipedia

 



A New York newspaper ad for Vitagraph's April 1910 adaptation, also a short single reel film.

Source: Wikipedia




Poster for the Balboa Amusement Producing Company's 1914 release
Source: Wikipedia 

Ad for St. Elmo from Motion Picture News 12 September 1914

 

Source: Lantern 

Advertisement for the 1923 Fox Film Corporation release

Source: Motion Picture News July-August 1923 via Lantern

Alabama on U.S. Postage Stamps (1): Some African-Americans

Alabama people and themes have been featured on numerous U.S. postage stamps over the years, and I want to explore some of them in a few posts. Other nations have also honored Alabamians in this way.

My father Amos J. Wright, Jr., was a stamp collector in the 1960's and gave my brother Richard and I an appreciation of the hobby. I still collect them, although they simply end up in a shoe box. We still have my dad's stamp albums, as well as several boxes of stamps that never made it into albums. He pretty much dropped the hobby when his interest turned to Alabama archaeology. 

The stamps below feature African-Americans connected with our state in some way. I've added comments on some of them.

The U.S. Postal Service recently featured "Stamps Reflect History of Tuskegee University" on its blog.

This stamp featuring Booker T. Washington was issued on April 7, 1940, and was the first U.S. stamp to honor an African-American.

Another stamp was issued in 1956 to honor the centennial of Washington's birth. 


African-American author Ralph Ellison is best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man. Ellison, who attended Tuskegee Institute, died in 1994. He arrived at Tuskegee on a music scholarship but left to study the visual arts in New York City. He eventually detoured into writing. This stamp was issued on February 14, 2014.





This George Washington Carver stamp was issued on February 3, 1998. I recently described "That Time Mom Saw George Washington Carver in Camp Hill" on this blog.





Florence, Alabama native William "W.C." Handy had a long career as songwriter and arranger and is known as the Father of the Blues. He died in 1958 and this stamp was issued in 1969.




Although Tanner never visited Alabama as far as I know, I wanted to include him because his sister Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson has an important connection to the state. Henry Ossawa Tanner was the first African-American artist to achieve fame internationally. He moved to Paris in 1891 and remained there until his death in 1937. As I wrote in another post, his sister was "The First Certified, Practicing Female Physician in Alabama." She practiced at Tuskegee Institute for several years after finishing medical school in Philadelphia in the spring of 1891. Their father was Benjamin T. Tanner, a prominent minister in Pittsburgh. This stamp was issued in 1973

Jesse Owens is one of many legendary athletes born in Alabama.  This stamp was issued on September 10, 1998.




The United Arab Emirates featured Owens on a stamp in 1973.

The Alabama Bicentennial is Coming!

In April 1798 Congress created the Mississippi Territory which included land that is now Alabama. In 1817 the Alabama Territory was created and on December 14, 1819, that territory became the 22nd state. The territorial and early statehood time is a fascinating period in Alabama history. 

The state of Alabama will be celebrating it's bicentennial with numerous events in 2017 through 2019. The Alabama Bicentennial Commemoration has been established in the state tourism department to coordinate and promote those events. What will your community be doing to celebrate?

Below are a few maps of the state from that early period.







Mississippi Territory in 1804




This 1817 map shows the state of Mississippi and the Alabama Territory.




Here is the Alabama Territory in 1818. 




And here is the state of Alabama in 1822. 




All maps are taken from UA's wonderful Historical Maps of Alabama digital collection. 

Birmingham Photo of the Day (30): 3rd Avenue at Night in 1908

Once again I want to feature in this series a photograph from the 1908 publication Views of Birmingham. As the BhamWiki site notes, the book was a 64-page promotional effort published by a banking firm. You can read the introduction below the photograph. "Birmingham is destined to be the greatest of Southern cities," it declares. 

The photograph shows 3rd Avenue at night. Since I recently watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the first time in a while, this shot makes me think of the Mother Ship landing on the street car tracks.

Easters Past in Alabama

I plan to do several posts related to holidays and their celebration in Alabama or parts of it. The first was a look at "A Vintage Valentine's Day in Birmingham." Next up is Easter; some historical goodies from the Digital Collections at the Alabama Department of Archives and History are below with information and/or comments. We've been sending Easter cards for a long time!

This postcard is dated April 6, 1912. 

This card dates prior to 1920.

This Easter egg hunt from the 1930s is taking place on the playground of the Cowikee Community House in Eufaula. The complex served the families in the Cowikee Cotton Mills village.




Company party for the families of employees at Gamble's, Inc., in Montgomery, March 25, 1967




Another of several photos on the ADAH site taken at that March 1967 Gamble's party. Adults could have fun, too!





This window display was at the Silver's store on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery; the photograph was taken on April 3, 1949.




Easter decorations inside the Church of the Ascension on Clanton Avenue in Montgomery, April 22, 1962



On April 8, 1917, Helen Keller wrote a letter to a Mrs. Burton in Montgomery. Apparently the lady had sent some Easter lilies, and Keller was responding to thank her. The flowers were "a message of hope that cheered me" when she was "grieving over the fearful world-tragedy." Two days earlier the United States had declared war on Germany and was thus about to enter the European war already in progress. 

Birmingham Photos of the Day (29): Three Churches in 1908

I'm continuing to draw photographs from the wonderful 1908 publication Views of Birmingham. 

The top photo is the "Baptist Church", perhaps the one built of Bedford Stone and dedicated on Easter Sunday in 1905. If so, it is the First Baptist Church of Birmingham now located on Lakeshore Drive in Homewood. The property was sold to AmSouth Bank in the 1980s. The Encyclopedia of Alabama has an entry on Southern Baptists in Alabama.

The Methodist building still stands and is now the First United Methodist Church of Birmingham. More information on the building is available on the BhamWiki site and on Methodism in Alabama at the Encyclopedia of Alabama. 

The Episcopal church also still stands and is now known as St. Mary's-on-the-Highlands Episcopal Church. The congregation was organized in 1887. An EOA entry on the history of the Episcopal Church in the state is available here.   

Film Actresses from Alabama before 1960 (1): Lois Wilson

Source: BhamWiki.com

One of the earliest actresses from Alabama to find success in Hollywood, Lois Wilson is probably unknown to most state residents today. Although born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 28, 1894, her family soon moved to Birmingham where she grew up. 

We can find some interesting information about the family in the 1910 U.S. Census. Her father is A.K. Wilson, a Canadian native. Her mother Constance was born in Pennsylvania. Also listed are three other daughters, all younger than Lois, and grandfather William Wilson. The family lived in the city's 15th Ward. 

She graduated from Alabama Normal College in Livingston, which is now the University of West Alabama. Apparently Wilson just missed the era of famed educator and reformer Julia Tutwiler, who directed the school from 1881 until 1910.

By 1915 Wilson was teaching school. We can assume her ambitions ran beyond that; she entered a Miss Birmingham contest sponsored by the Birmingham News and Universal Pictures. By winning she received a trip to Hollywood for an audition. After a brief period in Chicago, she won her first film role--a small part in a short, The Palace of Dust. She made four other films in 1915 alone. By the time she more or less retired from the movies in 1941, Wilson had acted in more than 100 silent and sound motion pictures.

Wilson appeared with various established or up-and-coming film stars of the silent and early sound eras: Pola Negri in Bella Donna [1923], Rudolph Valentino and Bebe Daniels in Monsieur Beaucaire [1924], Louise Brooks in The Show Off [1926], Bette Davis in Seed, Davis' second film [1931] and Tom Mix in Rider of Death Valley [1932].

She worked with Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici in 1916. Wilson played heroine Molly Wingate in one of the most popular westerns of the silent era, The Covered Wagon [1923]. In that same year she appeared in Hollywood, one of the earliest films using cameos by a parade of stars--in this case ones such as Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Noah Beery, Mary Astor, William S. Hart and Alan Hale. She played Shirley Temple's mother in Bright Eyes [1934].

In 1922 Wilson was in the first group of WAMPAS Baby Stars of actresses expected to be major stars. That campaign was a promotional effort by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers and ran annually until 1934.

In 1926 she played Daisy Buchanan in the first film version of The Great Gatsby released just a year after the novel was published. Like so many silent films, this one has not survived but a one-minute trailer does exist. Thus we have an Alabama actress playing a character based on Alabama native Zelda Fitzgerald. 

Wilson made other films with Alabama connections. In 1921 she played the title character in Miss Lulu Bett; her male co-star in the film was Milton Sills. You can read a long review of the film by Fritzi Kramer here. A few years later Sills would star in Men of Steel, a picture filmed mostly in Birmingham. In 1922 she appeared in Manslaughter with Thomas Meighan. Two years later Meighan would be in the Birmingham area to film Coming Thru. 

After 1941 Wilson made only one more movie, The Girl from Jones Beach in 1949. The comedy starred Ronald Reagan and Virginia Mayo; Wilson played the mother of Mayo's character. She did not completely retire from acting, however. She had a couple of roles in Broadway productions and did network television work on the soap operas The Guiding Light and The Secret Storm.  

Wilson was a good friend of silent film star Gloria Swanson and made an appearance on the 1957 episode of the television series This Is Your Life when it profiled Swanson. In 1950 Swanson had played former silent star Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd., one of the great films about Hollywood. 

Wilson died at 93 on March 3, 1988, in Riverside Hospital in Reno, Nevada. She is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. She never married. Whether she ever returned to Alabama after leaving in 1915 is currently unknown. 

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Picture-Play Magazine December 1918
In the section titled "Favorite Picture Players" she follows Mary Pickford and Alice Joyce

Wilson made the cover of Picture-Play in April 1923.

Motion Picture Studio Directory for 1919
Wilson's entry is in the right hand column, 3rd down

Old Alabama Stuff (4): Teacher Certification in 1922

This pamphlet of 16 pages was published in 1922 as Bulletin No. 32 of the State of Alabama Department of Education. The item describes the various types of certification and methods of receiving them for Alabama's public school teachers. 

Certificates could be received by graduating from an approved post-high school training program for teachers or by examination. Certificates valid in other states could be approved by the State Superintendent of Education. Special and emergency provisional certificates were also available.  

Details are also given for rules governing examiners, preparation of teachers in colleges and universities and "preparation of teachers in colored institutions." 

That Time Mom Saw George Washington Carver in Camp Hill

George Washington Carver in March 1942
Photograph by Arthur Rothstein

When my mother was six and seven years old, she and the family were living in the small town of Camp Hill in Tallapoosa County.  Her father John Miller Shores was minister at the Methodist church. Mom was the youngest of four children; the older siblings were Heth, John and Marjorie. My grandmother Tempe completed the family.

Mom tells the story of the time they went to hear a talk by George Washington Carver while they lived in Camp Hill. Since she was born in 1929, that would have been in 1935 or 1936. The event took place in the town's largest auditorium at the Southern Industrial School, which is now Lyman Ward Military Academy. Mom remembers him as an older black man with snow-white hair. Carver was about 70 at the time. The trip from Tuskegee would have been a drive north of less than 40 miles.

The auditorium was crowded. Mom was lifted into one of the deep windowsills to watch beside other children. She remembers being afraid she might fall from her perch. She doesn't recall any of Carver's speech, just the size of the crowd. Both whites and blacks were in attendance. She suspects the blacks were segregated in some way, but doesn't remember specifics. Perhaps the auditorium had a balcony.

The Lyman Ward web site notes that one of the school's two gyms was constructed in the 1930's. You can see a panoramic video of the interior of Tallapoosa Hall here. I've shown this video to mom and the high windows are the way she remembers them in the auditorium. 

Mom does remember something very specific about the event. The family brought home a booklet which she read and kept for some years. The item described Carver's many achievements; she doesn't remember if the pamphlet was sold or given away at the event. 

Carver's appearance is interesting in light of events in Camp Hill just a few years earlier. In July 1931 a meeting of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union in a church was attacked by a band of white men. A shootout resulted in at least one death and 30 arrests. Four other individuals were later lynched, but the 30 were eventually released. The all-black Union, affiliated with the Communist Party USA, operated in the state from 1931 until 1936.

On a brighter note, Chicago White Sox outfielder Bill Higdon was born in Camp Hill in 1924. He died in 1986.

Rev. John Miller Shores 

My grandmother Tempe, Aunt Heth standing on the left, Uncle John on the right. The two squirts are Aunt Marjorie and mom--she's the one with the pensive look. 

Birmingham Photo of the Day (28): The Morris Hotel in 1908

In the previous post in this series I made some comments on the city's Hillman Hotel and included a photo from the Views of Birmingham published in 1908 that included so many photographs of local landmarks at that time. Below is another hotel photo from the book, this time featuring the Morris Hotel at the corner of 1st Avenue North and 19th Street. 

The Morris was constructed in 1891 as an office building and a 125-room hotel. The building lasted until 1957 when it was demolished for a three-story parking deck. You can read much more about the Morris at its BhamWiki entry. A few more photos can be seen at the Birmingham Public Library's Digital Collections. 

Image of the newspaper article taken from the Birmingham Public Library's Digital Collections

Pondering Alabama Maps (5): An 1867 Railroad Map

 

The wordy title of this map is "Map showing the line of the Alabama & Tennessee River Rail Road and its proposed extensions; exhibiting also the contiguous mineral deposits and zone of production". The dark blue line indicates the existing railroad; the dark green lines are proposed extensions.

The company had incorporated in March 1848 under an act of the Alabama legislature. By 1862 about 135 miles of the line ran from Selma to Blue Mountain and toward Dalton, Georgia. By February 1867, after acts of both the Alabama and Georgia legislatures, the line was merged with one in Georgia to become the Selma, Rome and Dalton Railroad. By 1894 the road had become part of the Southern Railroad Company.

Digital versions of this map in various sizes/formats can be found at the Library of Congress web site.

A very good history is Wayne Cline's book Alabama Railroads. 

WAPI-TV Ads from the 1950's & 1960's

For some time I have been mining the Lantern Media History digital collection for material related to Alabama. The site offers full text of numerous trade and popular magazines related to film, television and radio. The publication dates range from the early twentieth century into the 1960's.

The advertisements below all come from the site; I have linked to the specific Lantern pages for each one so you can look at the full magazine issue. I've posted numerous images from the site on my @AJWright31 Twitter feed and will be using many in future posts on this blog. 

 These five advertisements are taken from various media trade journals between 1955 and 1964. All five feature WAPI-TV, Channel 13, the longtime NBC affiliate in Birmingham. Today the station is known as WVTM or NBC13. Alabama's first television station went on the air in July 1949 with different call letters, WAFM, and network affiliations. New owners changed the call letters to WABT and finally WAPI in 1958. The WAPI in the first ad refers to one of Alabama's oldest radio stations. 


The second ad lists the fall 1962 network programming on the station. Boy, do I remember many of those shows with fondness. We must have watched a lot of NBC in those days; the only show I don't remember at all is Saints and Sinners. 

The third ad comes from a period when the station carried both NBC and CBS programming. Note the tiny listings for weekly programs featuring "Bear" Bryant and "Shug" Jordan. No doubt a much larger font would have been used if that ad ran today!

The final two ads are simply touting the brand. I wonder who that outstanding young woman with the beehive hairdo was.

Broadcasting 1956

Broadcasting 1962

Sponsor 1964 

Broadcasting 1962

Sponsor 1962 Also appeared in Broadcasting