Victorian Melodrama What Happened Next?

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 27, 1 January 1994, Page 55

Peter Harcourt

Victorian Melodrama What Happened Next?

This text, intended for publication, has been adapted from that of the original lecture, which was essentially visual in that it relied for much of its effect on images. Lacking many of these images, the text has been revised so that the pictorial element can be expressed to some extent in words.

Before demonstrating how the themes, techniques, and style of Victorian melodrama carried over into the era of silent films (1896-1926), I should perhaps give some brief background to the origins and development of melodrama itself.

In the late 19405, I was fortunate enough to see an actor called Tod Slaughter in two famous old melodramas: Maria Marten; or, The Murder in the Red Barn and Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. His was a touring company and so, in the accepted tradition, the performances were fairly rough-and-ready; that is to say, the scenery was basic and, because of the small number of actors, parts were doubled or even tripled. The whole effect was quaintly oldfashioned. But, given that by then the twentieth century was nearly half over and the heyday of Victorian melodrama was long gone, what I saw could be described as reasonably authentic. Tod Slaughter was considered to be a survivor from the old barnstorming school an actor of the grand gesture, the

throbbing voice, and the overwrought emotion. It was a style very much of its time, and, although Slaughter was by no means a leading exponent, what he did was a reasonable facsimile of the real thing. Nowadays it is not easy to try to reproduce the style without resorting to caricature, for which reason there is a tendency to moderate its worst excesses into something acceptable by today’s standards. It might be said that Victorians found in melodrama what modem audiences find in television soap opera: escape into a world of fantasy where everything seems lifelike but is played on a scale much larger than life; where supposedly ordinary people are really exaggerated stereotypes, forever threatened by imminent disaster; where last-minute rescues, reprieves, or narrow escapes are commonplace; where virtue is constantly in danger from wicked villains or smooth seducers; where actions speak louder than words, and frequently have unexpected consequences; and where the character with integrity may be scorned but will ultimately prove his or her worth. While soap opera is hardly likely to be regarded as a morality play, Victorian melodrama has been seen as representing the age-old struggle between good and evil, with a heroine in purest white and a villain in deepest black symbols of the extremes in human nature. Remember that in Hollywood cowboy films it was conventional to present the hero on a white horse and the villain on a black one.

Melodrama became part of the English theatre scene in the late eighteenth century, concurrent with the rise in popularity of the Gothic school of fiction and the influence of David Garrick’s theatre reforms on stage presentation. Garrick’s principal contribution was to separate the audience from the action by withdrawing the performance behind a proscenium arch, thus immediately creating a frame within which a designer felt obliged to make a setting or picture. That led to the development of a technique of stage design which almost literally required the background to be as realistic as art, ingenuity, and false perspective could make it. The greater the illusion of reality, the greater the designer’s achievement. This is important to bear in mind because it had a significant influence on the way melodrama came to be presented; and that, eventually, led to a situation in which the emphasis on ‘realism’ created a public expectation that could only be satisfied by the invention of a device to reproduce actuality: the motion picture camera.

With the popularity of the Gothic novel, the mass audience became infatuated with tales of mystery, horror, spectacle, and romance. Crime in particular was a subject of endless fascination hence the huge success of both Maria Marten in 1830 and Sweeney Todd in 1847. They were typical of a vast number of highly-coloured plays about thieves, cut-throats, highwaymen, and pirates. Their declamatory style and dramatisation of low life (which struck a chord with many of the Victorian underprivileged) appealed tremendously to theatregoers who asked for nothing more than a night of excitement, thrills, laughter, and sentimentality. It was quite a different matter for members of the emerging middle class. Not for them the violent and the vulgar. Their tastes ran more to the picturesque and chastely

emotional, and this produced a type of melodrama more refined, more genteel (if you like), less concerned with the criminal element in society, and less reliant on crude action. As it moved up in the social scale, the middle-class melodrama became even more rarefied. It has been reported that Queen Victoria herself, in the year 1851, was visibly affected by the plight of the heroine of the melodrama Pauline, from a story by Alexandre Dumas. The young woman was seen to be falling unsuspectingly into the clutches of a murderer with charming manners and merciless instincts. Melodrama’s relentless exploitation of the ‘fate worse than death’ theme was to become such a cliche that music hall, revue, and popular song all made it the butt of parody or caricature.

Another cliche of the genre was the scene in which the heroine suffers some such ordeal as being tied to the railway tracks in the path of an oncoming train. In Augustin Daly’s play Under the Gaslight, first performed in 1867 at the New York Theatre, the usual roles were neatly reversed: a man was rescued in the nick of time by a resourceful heroine. She (Laura) has been locked in a signalman’s hut while her friend, Joe Snorkey, waits to flag down a train. The villain knocks Joe down and ropes him securely to the rails as the locomotive can be heard thundering towards them. In

desperation, Laura breaks out and manages to free Joe just as the train roars past with a flash of light and a hiss of steam. Gratefully Joe thanks her by saying, ‘And these are the women who ain’t to have a vote!’. If you’re sceptical that this sort of thing could be represented realistically on stage, just remember that theatre audiences were largely unsophisticated. They had no idea how the illusion was created, and marvelled that such things could be done at all; and, most importantly, theatres were lit by gaslight, producing a soft, low-key ambience, which disguised the mechanics of the effect but stimulated the imagination. In time, however, the artifice became too obvious and too familiar. A need arose for true reality to replace the pretend variety. A curious paradox of nineteenth-century melodrama was the contradictory role of women. Although the helpless heroine, innocent victim of the villain’s most dastardly intrigues, was a classic stereotype, many of the greatest melodramas were from the pen of strong-minded female authors: Mrs Henry Wood, for instance, whose East Lynne is almost the archetypal Victorian melodrama; Mary Elizabeth Braddon, whose book Lady Audley ’s Secret was dramatised by several playwrights (including Julius Vogel in Dunedin in the 1860 s); most of all, perhaps, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose book Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted and performed countless times. As late as the end of the 19205, at least twelve companies were still touring it throughout the United States.

It should be remembered that full-scale realistic melodrama could only be staged in large population centres that is, in cities of a size which justified the construction of fully-equipped theatres, those possessing all the facilities and mechanical aids necessary to create the complete illusion demanded by a playscript, and to do this so effectively that an audience would willingly suspend its disbelief. Outside those main centres, in the provinces (and, by extension, in the even more remote provincial towns of the Empire), touring companies had to do their best with whatever was available. They still achieved small miracles of illusion and deception, persuading an eagerly compliant audience that what they were seeing was true to life. From our point of view, the methods used were primitive and clumsy in the extreme, but until the advent of the cinema Victorian audiences found them quite acceptable. Painted backcloths, flimsy wings and borders, artificial waves, obvious models, canvas cut-outs to us they sound almost laughable, but in their day they worked. As the nineteenth century progressed, increasingly strenuous efforts were made to overcome the acknowledged limitations of melodrama’s stock-in-trade. Unknowingly, those who made these efforts were preparing the way (and the audience’s receptiveness) for the coming of the cinema.

By eliminating some of the more obvious conventions of theatrical staging and introducing improved (electrical) lighting, producers achieved a high level of pictorial splendour. At the same time, dialogue was reduced to a minimum; the story was told almost entirely through the characters’ actions. Inevitably, of course, what

resulted was a kind of mimed moving picture a forerunner of the pioneer silent films.

In creating their stage pictures, producers anticipated the cinema in several ways. For instance, they developed techniques for dissolving from one stage picture to another by means of a slow dim to black-out and a return to full light on a new scene the equivalent of film’s ‘fade-out, fade-in’. Using gauzes and transparent scenery to effect a ‘transformation’, they could change settings under the very gaze of a wondering audience. Films would manage the same technique more successfully. Adding considerably to the effectiveness of these innovations was the use of music (Gk melos = music). An orchestral accompaniment established mood, underlined moments of high drama, and lent deeper meaning to romantic interludes. When silent films came along, hundreds of pianists and musicians were employed to provide exactly the same sort of emotional colour to black-and-white pictures.

Although W. J. Thompson’s play A Race for Life was produced in 1883, its script could have been a blueprint for any early screen melodrama. Having described the set (a two-storied house, both levels to be practical, with a fenced garden and a bam), the author then sets out in detail the nature of the action to take place in it. The villain, Gaspard, holds a mortgage on the house, which is the home of the Widow Farrand and her son Jacques, whose sweetheart, Louise, is desired by Gaspard. The Widow, having received S6OOO to pay off the mortgage, sits down upstairs to count it. Downstairs, Louise is busy in the kitchen. From the garden Gaspard sees the Widow, climbs up the side of the house, enters through a window and, after a brief struggle, stabs her to death. He then escapes as Louise runs upstairs and discovers the murder. End of Act I.

Action was taking place in three separate areas on stage, and the audience’s attention was directed to each as new developments occurred. There was little or no dialogue to interrupt the flow of movement. Tension was sustained by sheer dramatic force and by the shifting of emphasis within the setting. It was cinematic technique pure and simple, more than a decade before the arrival of the motion picture camera. In the late nineteenth century, Henry Irving dominated the theatrical profession. His productions were legendary, not so much for their displays of acting (although these were regarded as a benchmark) but for their spectacular settings, their lavish decoration, the quality of their costumes, and their faithful representation of accepted historical fact. He had the scenery for Coriolanus painted by Sir Lawrence AlmaTadema because that distinguished academician was a noted authority on the artistic archaeology of ancient Rome. He brought to life on the stage a series of breathtaking pictures, minutely detailed, extravagantly choreographed, and carefully designed to entertain the eye. Because he used every known trick to deceive the viewer into believing that what he or she saw was real, even Henry Irving, Victorian theatre personified, was leading people to want a means of showing the world as it really is: in other words, a movie camera.

Among writers of melodrama, there were hacks whose job it was to make stage versions of anything and everything that might thrill an audience, and there were craftspeople who genuinely tried to write plays of quality. Among the latter was Dion Boucicault, an Irishman who first achieved fame in London in 1841, then went to America and established himself as a playwright with an extraordinary talent for creating theatrical sensations such as the cave scene in The Colleen Bawn (1860), which featured an attempted drowning and a heart-stopping rescue; and, in The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana (1859), the destruction by fire and explosion of a Mississippi riverboat. Boucicault is said to have written at least 200 plays, most of which depended for their appeal on complex and skilfully-devised special effects. In Formosa; or, The Railroad to Ruin (1869), one scene showed the River Thames at Barnes Bridge during an Oxford-Cambridge boat race. The bridge dominated the background, with people apparently moving about (actually jointed stick figures), while on the river itself boats crossed the stage, cheered on by spectators on the bank in the foreground. The crowd of ‘extras’ was real enough; everything else was faked

but faked so cleverly and manipulated so expertly that it looked like a genuine moving picture of the event. Audiences knew it was not, of course, but allowed themselves to be fooled into believing it was. Boucicault once said ‘ Sensation is what the public wants and you cannot give them too much of it’. 1 He was constantly devising new ways of providing that sensation. In Pauvrette; or, Under the Snow (1858) he showed an avalanche high in the French Alps which cuts off the escape of the play’s characters. In The Rapparee; or, The Treaty of Limerick (1870), it was a fire an effect that seems to have held a particular fascination for Victorians. Other Boucicault plays (some set in his native Ireland) contained an escape from prison with a climb up an ivy-covered cliff and a fight between the hero and the villain at the top (Arrah-na-Pogue; or, The Wicklow Wedding, 1864); a heroine attempting suicide by jumping from Blackfriars Bridge (After Dark, a Tale of London Life, 1868); and a scene at Hungerford Bridge, with the River Thames flowing beneath a railway viaduct and a steamboat pier in the foreground ( Lost at Sea: A London Story, 1869).

Because of their obvious visual and dramatic appeal, several of Boucicault’s plays were filmed between 1911 and 1913, when the feature film was evolving from the pioneering short subjects, which were mostly comedy, action, and travel. The

playwright, who died in 1890, would have appreciated the freedom lent by the motion picture camera. His output suggests a man frustrated by the shackles of Victorian stage apparatus. Perhaps because they were the centres of vice, crime, money, and the high life, the cities of London and New York figured prominently in many melodramas. One, The Poor of New York (1857), originally a French play called Les Pauvres de Paris, was retitled The Poor of London for its English production, implying that all big cities are essentially the same. Its highlight was a spectacular blaze caused by the villain, the grasping banker Bloodgood, setting fire to a warehouse to get rid of some incriminating documents.

Although such hair-raising scenes were popular with audiences, they were decidedly risky. The smoke and flames were created with a mixture of explosive black powder, alcohol, and lampwick. Special fire accelerants were used, and clouds of steam seemed all too much like thick smoke. At the same time, red filters were used in front-of-house lighting and ‘flash torches’ were played on the set from the wings

and the grid above the stage. Theatres were notorious fire hazards, and the use of anything combustible was extremely dangerous, a fact which may have added to the audience 's frisson of dread and excitement. In Lady Audley’s Secret (1863), the drama was less flamboyant but equally gripping. Audiences watched with horrified fascination as Lady Audley, a woman of high social standing, tried to conceal her past (her ‘secret’) by murdering her first, still legal, husband, who had suddenly returned to confront her. While her actions may have seemed far-fetched, both the milieu and her other behaviour were close to the experience of many in the audience.

During this same period (1865-69), the Bancrofts, at the Prince of Wales Theatre, were changing the course of English drama. In plays by Tom Robertson, they introduced the concepts of domestic drama, natural dialogue, recognisable interiors, and credible plots. Caste (1867) is probably the best-known of Robertson’s plays; others include School (1869) and Ours (1866). In the latter play, there was a scene set in a hut in the Crimea during the war of 1853-56. Three Englishwomen are

visiting the front, among them Blanche Hay, who had previously been engaged to the Russian Prince Petrovski. Suddenly the door opens and Prince Petrovski enters. He is a prisoner of war. This was a truly melodramatic situation, in surroundings that heightened the romance because they seemed so bleak and inhospitable. On the other hand, Not Guilty (1869) featured a battlefield during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. This was even more exotic, and even more difficult to stage, given the problems posed by the depiction of gunfire, explosions, hand-to-hand fighting, and mass movement. In fact, no amount of backstage banging and dried-pea rattling could do justice to the authentic sounds of war. The battle in Not Guilty, like all such attempts at realism, must have been singularly unconvincing. Not until D. W. Griffith made the film Birth of a Nation in 1915 would there be anything like a true re-creation of warfare.

Charles Dickens was a great lover of the theatre, and his novels cried out to be dramatised. There were numerous stage adaptations, most of which highlighted the rich humour and the spectacle. Even so, the shipwreck at Great Yarmouth in David Copperfield might have seemed well beyond the scope of the theatre yet the play Little Em’ly (1869) made a brave try. Nevertheless, it had to rely on all the

conventional tricks of the trade shaken stage cloths, cut-out models jerkily moved up and down, waves made by violently agitating strips of canvas. For an audience to see what it knew it was supposed to be seeing required a quantum leap in imagination. Denied the use of real water (although some large theatres did have built-in tanks), producers were forced to use some fairly makeshift alternatives. Olive Logan’s play Surf; or, Stricken Blind (1867) attempted to portray the joys of sea-bathing and the breaking of waves on the shore. This could be done by covering the stage with blue cloth dashed with white paint, then having a small army of stagehands energetically flap the cloth to simulate the ocean’s movement. Alternatively, canvas cut-outs shaped to a wave formation could be stretched across the stage. Then, again with the stage crew’s help,

each billow may be made to show separate, with the alternate rows of billows rearing their white crests between the tips of the row on each side. These tips are rocked backwards and forwards... while the ocean’s roar comes from a wooden box lined with tin and containing a small box of bird shot. 2

One reviewer of Surf gave short shrift to this attempt to ‘represent by the usual stage appliances the peculiar beauty of dashing water. The surf scene, which was handsomely painted, was thus robbed of its illusion by the clumsy putting of a piece of sail cloth across the stage loaded with white cotton to represent surf.’ 3 All these plays attempted the impossible: with limited resources and inadequate means, they tried to give a world of make-believe the appearance of the real world. As playwrights sought to outdo each other in sensationalism, so producers strove to invent, adapt, or construct ways to meet each fresh demand. All their efforts were to be in vain. Only a change of direction or new technology would free producers and designers from the constraints that held them back. Release came in December 1896 with the first public screening by the Lumiere brothers of what was then called the cinematograph.

In July of that same year, at the Opera House in Wellington, New Zealand audiences saw a local attempt at the melodrama of romance, spectacle, and disaster, natural as well as accidental. Written by actor-manager George Leitch, The Land of the Moa was the stirring tale of a buccaneering adventurer trying to outwit both colonists and an avenging Maori tribe. It reached a climax with the eruption of Tarawera. In his introduction to the published text, Adrian Kiemander quoted a review in the New Zealand Times :

The most notable scenes are on the rocks at Tauranga, where a ship is wrecked bows on, and catches fire while a desperate fight is raging on the rocks.... The Pink Terraces [are] a perfect marvel of beauty.... The terraces are first seen in the play through a dark mist. Gradually this clears away and the beautiful terraces, glimmering pink and broken up into steaming pools as blue as filtered ultramarine, are dimly seen. The dark mist vanishes and hovering fleecy clouds are noticed. These in turn melt away and the morning sunlight breaks upon the scene. Its impressive beauty evokes enthusiastic cheers every night. The eruption outvies all the rest in its weird magnificence. The whole stage is given to this effect, the performers in the drama having escaped through a rain of fire and ashes in a previous scene. The crater is riven, belching forth flames and scoria; other craters break out; the earth is split with bursting fires; the lake in front of Tarawera is red with reflecting flames; the air is filled with falling fire and ashes; steam bursts out of the earth. 4

That’s graphic enough to make it sound as though the re-creation was reasonably authentic. Even a hardened newspaper critic was taken in by it. Nevertheless, a study of the text reveals just how crude the display must have been, using sleight-of-hand and trompe-l’oeil to maximum effect. The actual stage direction describing how the effect of the eruption was to be achieved, reproduced in full below, only serves to

emphasise the inadequacy of any attempt to reproduce theatrically a natural phenomenon of such overwhelming proportions: Tarawera Mountain and Lake. Mountains and burning bush off R. and L. on side cloths; clumps of burning trees R. and L. Tarawera itself is on back cloth, masked with a set mountain to break, sink and rise. Two portions of other mountains set R. and L. to its base. Set lake piece on frame set from base of mountain to ground row of burning sedges. Two deep black cloud borders mask portion of mountain of Tarawera flashing fires seen between set mountain and back cloth. Intermittent explosions, red flashes seen occasionally from set mountain and burning bush R. and L. Mystic green flames on top of small cones. Green mediums (half power) on scene which is very dark. As scene opens, thunder, lightning and shrieking wind. When well developed, a terrific explosion heard, the top of Tarawera is blown out. A rain of fire and red hot stones are hurled from the crater, which is jagged and open, the black cloud borders lift same time showing the summit of Tarawera vomiting fire. Streams of red lava run down the mountain. Smaller craters break out down stage R. and L. Flames and steam rise from crater and blow hole down L. H. 5

For all its shortcomings, the staging obviously made an impression. The Evening Post critic was as much deceived as his colleague on the Times : Steam rises in volumes, and the roaring and thunder of the geysers appear to shake the theatre, but everything culminates in the final sensation, in which a volcanic cone representing Tarawera looms up out of the blackness of the stage, becomes violently eruptive, and finally pours flame and lava amidst crash and steam and smoke and thunders, which proved realistic enough to make many in the audience jump in their seats as each successive explosion came. 6

It proved ‘realistic enough’ to alarm some in the audience. Their alarm cannot have been as great as that of audiences at some of the first screenings of the Lumieres’ cinematograph. Among their short actuality films was one of a train approaching a station, coming straight towards the camera. It is recorded that people were so unnerved that they ran from the path (as they saw it) of the train. Despite its best efforts, the stage had never succeeded in provoking that kind of reaction. Seven years later, when Edwin S. Porter’s film The Great Train Robbery was shown, audiences were similarly thrilled and shaken by the final image: a cowboy pointing his gun directly at the camera and firing it.

Porter’s film, one of the earliest narrative movies, a pioneer ‘western’ and a textbook case in its use of essentially/i/m/c techniques, was shot largely out of doors. Here lay perhaps the screen’s greatest advantage over the stage. Backgrounds were not painted, rocks and trees were not fabricated, water was not a canvas substitute. In its infancy, the cinema tended to concentrate on outdoor subjects, because electric light could not then develop sufficient power to illuminate an indoor set. There were exceptions, of course, and sometimes there were films like the 1906 western A Race for Millions shot in the open but with painted backdrops and mock exteriors. It looked every bit as artificial as a theatrical production.

Although film expanded the horizons of theatrical presentation, the relationship between stage and screen was close from the very beginning. The filming of popular stage plays gave access to a ready-made audience. In 1895, an adaptation of Anthony Hope’s romantic novel The Prisoner of Zenda had been a huge hit on Broadway. Touring versions persisted well into the twentieth century. One starred James K. Hackett, who, in 1912, appeared in the first film version (a second was made in 1922). Playing a dual role (the king and his impersonator) in the theatre meant that the two characters could never be seen together. In a film, on the other hand, bringing them face to face could be managed very easily with trick photography. Camera magic often heightened credibility rather than stretching it, as was likely to be the case with special effects in the theatre.

The use of camera trickery can be related to the sort of theatrical faking employed by Boucicault in the aforementioned boat race scene in his play Formosa for instance, the small hand-operated figures used to deceive the audience into thinking that there were people moving about on Barnes Bridge. The screen was not above using a similar technique, notably in the 1925 film version of the celebrated nineteenth-century drama Ben Hur. Adapted from Lew Wallace’s best-selling novel, this play, the story of a young Jew’s rise from galley-slave to a high position in Roman society during the time of Christ, was first staged in 1899. It was episodic in form, each scene being a pictorial setpiece which carried forward the tale of Ben Hur’s adventures. For its climax it offered the tremendous spectacle of a chariot race in the Circus Maximus, using real horses harnessed to real chariots, running on a treadmill against a background panorama rolled horizontally. Even in its own day, critics recognised the severe limitations of this contrivance. The New York Times went so far as to suggest that it would be better done with the newly invented cinematograph: ‘The pictures on a screen... would be closer to realism... than these horses galloping nowhere....’ 7 In fact, several (truncated) versions were filmed during the early silent film era, but none achieved the epic status of MGM’s 1925 film, which is still highly rated as a semiBiblical spectacular.

Writing soon after Ben Hur ’s original release in December 1925, the film historian Iris Barry commented ‘At the chariot races we look at only one section of the

amphitheatre but still we see a crowd of fifty thousand souls receding to the sky’. 8 Even in its palmiest days, Hollywood could not have assembled a crowd of ‘extras’ quite as large as that. The sequence relied on a simple optical illusion. Only the lower half of the stands in the Circus Maximus were built; the upper half, showing the bulk of the crowd, was painted in miniature on glass. The painted section was then suspended in front of the camera and carefully aligned so that it matched with the real section. When the two were photographed together, it was impossible to see the join. A model was used for some shots; it had stick figures specially mounted so that they could be made to rise as though prompted by eagerness or excitement.

Ben Hur was not alone at the turn of the century as a drama of early Christianity or Old Testament conflict. Among its contemporaries were The Sign of the Cross (1895), Quo Vadis? (1899), and Judith ofßethulia (1904). All were subsequently filmed, and the results proved how much better suited they were to screen treatment than to the stage. Quo Vadis?, an Italian production on a vast scale, inspired D. W. Griffith to make Judith ofßethulia (1913) on a scale even more vast and magnificent;

and from that he went on to make The Birth of a Nation (1915), based on Thomas Dixon’s play The Clansman. A contemporary review was less than flattering: ‘ Doubtless there are features in The Clansman spectacular and other which may appeal rather forcibly to the lovers of crude melodrama.’ 9 Although Griffith’s film retained the crude melodrama, it made amends by its vivid account of Civil War battles and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The success of the film demonstrated conclusively the superiority of filmed spectacle over anything the stage could offer. Griffith ’ s early experience had been in theatre, and his fondness (or weakness) for melodrama showed in much of his work. Perhaps the most celebrated example was in Way Down East (1920), the story of a ‘fallen woman’, deceived by a man, rejected by her family, who ends up adrift on an ice floe in a river rushing towards a waterfall. From this perilous situation she is rescued by the hero, who hops nimbly across the broken ice to save her in the nick of time. The sequence, enthralling enough in itself, was made even more so by the fact that Griffith shot it under the actual conditions portrayed risking the life of his star, Lilian Gish, and insisting on absolute verisimilitude. It contrasted sharply with the tawdry effects the stage had traditionally used to present Eliza’s escape across the ice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Once again, a theatrical cliche was transformed by the use of techniques the stage could never hope to match.

Probably the most obvious extension of melodramatic situations into film production was their wholesale adoption as the stock-in-trade of the serial. These ‘cliffhangers’, with their weekly episodes artfully contrived to bring an audience back time and time again, depended on continually putting the heroine in grave peril and keeping the audience guessing over how she could possibly escape. Tied to railway tracks in the path of an oncoming locomotive, secured to a bench moving relentlessly towards a whirring circular saw, bound and gagged in a sealed room into which water or gas was slowly seeping all the standard ploys of Victorian melodrama were given a new lease of life. Their popularity testified to their effectiveness, although the stage melodrama was all but dead before the twentieth century was into its second decade. In 1909, it was reported that ‘popular [stage] melodramas, since moving pictures became the rage, have decreased fifty per cent in number'. 1 " In the same year, another observer noted that ‘eighty per cent of present day theatrical audiences are canned drama audiences’." Four years later, seeking locations for a proposed film of the popular drama The Squaw Man , the young Cecil B. DeMille happened on a little town in California called Hollywood, and so helped to give a place and a generic name to the whole burgeoning film industry.

DeMille would go on to build a reputation for spectacle, melodrama, and Biblical epics ( The Cheat 1915, The Ten Commandments 1923, The King of Kings 1927, The Sign of the Cross 1932, Samson and Delilah 1949). He had learned his craft in a good school, as an actor in the company of David Belasco, the producer and entrepreneur

who pioneered a style of almost excessive theatrical realism. DeMille’s own odd combination of extravagance and attention to detail was greatly influenced by his association with Belasco. From 1878 onward, Belasco developed a form of elaborate pageantry using complex mechanisms, which led him eventually to create stage pictures so true to life that they were admired for their verisimilitude almost more than for their dramatic content. His work formed a bridge between the theatre and the cinema. In 1901, his Dubarry was described as ‘stage pictures of life at Paris and Versailles towards the end of the reign of Louis XV, with a scene or two from the Revolution as an epilogue’. 12 He died in 1931, having lived long enough to know that in 1925 Gloria Swanson starred in a film version of the play Madame Sans Gene , set during the Revolution, which was shot entirely on location in and around Versailles and Fontainebleau. Try as he might, no stage designer could compete with that. For the film Robin Hood (1921), Douglas Fairbanks built huge sets and performed feats of derring-do that thrilled the cinemagoers of the time. Theatregoers were entering the era of the cocktail comedy, the intimate drama, and the Jazz Age musical. Large-scale melodrama had all but vanished from the stage.

For his 1923 film The Ten Commandments , Cecil B. DeMille built a complete replica of an ancient Egyptian city in the California desert. This was typical of his prodigal approach to film-making, but it underlined yet again Hollywood’s complete supremacy in establishing locale. As a matter of interest, the city was subsequently buried and lost. It makes a strange commentary on our time that an archaeological expedition has recently been trying to rediscover it and restore it to its former glory. In 1893, David Belasco had presented a melodrama called The Girl I Left Behind Me, depicting an encounter between marauding Indians and settlers trapped inside a stockade. Just as the attackers were about to break through the last line of defence, the United States cavalry arrived on the scene to save the day. This was to become a standard theme of the movies, reaching a peak in 1923 with The Covered Wagon. Unlike the Belasco play, which struggled to seem real, the film benefited from its use of the rivers, prairies, and mountains of the American west. A sequence in which the wagon train is attacked by Indians gains enormously from the tension of a long shot showing the wagons drawn up in a circle in a canyon, while on the cliffs above the Indians look down and await their moment.

In this article, two parallel themes have been pursued: one, the transition from stage to screen of the content of Victorian melodrama; and two, the manner in which the screen was able to enlarge and improve on the actual staging of melodramatic material. Quite early in the piece, Hollywood, in the person of D. W. Griffith, created what remains almost the definitive example of both those themes: the film Intolerance (1915).

In terms of what might be called ‘gigantism’ in set design, nothing has yet surpassed Griffith’s re-creation of the city of Babylon so huge that, seen from above, actors were dwarfed by massive columns, pillars, ramparts, and ‘graven images’. Griffith, who had come from the theatre, exploited the potential of film to the furthest extreme. Intolerance pointed the way for those who followed. For all its colossal sets and hordes of extras, however, Intolerance essentially set out to tell four separate stories in a mosaic of contrasts and rising tension. One of those tales, ‘The Mother and The Law’, was about a young man unjustly condemned for murder and about to be executed. As preparations for the hanging go forward, a pardon from the governor is on its way, but it is beset by delays and obstacles of every kind. It becomes a desperate race against time.

The situation was not new; much the same sort of thing had frequently been done on stage. What Griffith brought to it was unbearable suspense as he manipulated the time-frame lengthening the deliberate build-up at the prison, shortening the glimpses of the car as it sped furiously down the highway. By such means, an audience was involved as never before. Film had scarcely emerged from its raffish beginnings as vaudeville entertainment when it produced an authentic masterpiece. It mixed those elements of immensity and expectancy which the Victorians had tried for so long to fuse satisfactorily, and which the cinema could fuse so simply. It was, you might say, an invention whose time had come.

Bibliography Principal sources for this article were: Appelbaum, Stanley, ed., Scenes from the Nineteenth Century Stage (New York, 1977) Bordman, Gerald, Oxford Companion to the American Theatre (New York, 1984) Hartnoll, Phyllis, ed., Oxford Companion to the Theatre , second edition (London, 1957) Leitch, George, The Land of the Moa, edited and introduced by Adrian Kiemander (Wellington, 1990) Nicholl, Allardyce, World Drama (London, 1949) Vardac, A. Nicholas, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Origins of Early Film, reprinted edition (New York, 1987)

Turnbull Library Record 27 (1994), 55-73

References 1. Quoted in Gerald Bordman, ‘Boucicault’, in his Oxford Companion to the American Theatre (New York, 1984), p. 97. 2. Scenes from the Nineteenth Century Stage , edited by Stanley Appelbaum (New York, 1977), p. 10. 3. Appelbaum, p. 10. 4. New Zealand Times , 30 July 1895, quoted in George Leitch, The Land of the Moa, edited and introduced by Adrian Kiemander (Wellington, 1990), p. 32. 5. Leitch, p. 154. 6. Evening Post , 30 July 1895, quoted in Leitch, p. 34. 7. Quoted in A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Origins of Early Film, reprinted edition (New York, 1987), p. 80. 8. Quoted in Vardac, p. 231. 9. Quoted in Vardac, p. 85. 10. Quoted in Vardac, p. 187. 11. Quoted in Vardac, p. 87. 12. Quoted in Vardac, p. 115.