The Perils of Pauline

...starring Pearl White as the title damsel in distress. Pauline inherits a fortune when her kindly guardian dies, but as she's not quite old enough to take charge of it, it is left in the stewardship of Koerner (Paul Panzer), her guardian's personal secretary. Koerner desperately wants the money all to himself, so he begins formulating more and more elaborate plans to have Pauline killed so that he can have it all. Pauline's fiance Harry (Crane Wilbur) keeps a close watch over Pauline, often rescuing her in the nick of time.

This was the 9-chapter version, as the original 20-chapter version is believed lost. Nine chapters were enough, though, as the scenarios included cowboys & Indians (chapter 2), pirate treasure (chapter 3), auto racing (chapter 4), gypsies pretending to be firemen (chapter 5), airplanes (chapter 6), spies and a submarine (chapter 7), more gypsies, this time with snakes (chapter 8), and more boats (chapter 9). Needless to say, this is fairly ludicrous, but it's fun in a cartoonish way. The quality of the print I watched was hit-or-miss, but it is over 100 years old. This is one of the 101 Action Movies to See Before You Die. It was quickly followed by The Hazards of Helen, also starring White.

We can not truthfully say that this Pauline series is holding up very well. It started off finely, but is poor this week. This number carries the action on without getting it, in any true sense, along any. Rough incidents, in which the players are or seem to be in great peril, are not real action; they are film users and need to be a hit better done than in this two-reel offering to be thrilling. The photography is poor. - The Moving Picture World, June 13, 1914

The Perils of Pauline is the most famous of the silent movie serials, which were a phenomenon on the teens and early 20s. Pearl White was the superstar of this genre (Ruth Roland and Marion Davies also starred in famous serials) and is the star of The Perils of Pauline.

Loosely plotted with little connecting tissue between episodes, the serials usually featured heroines in all kinds of dangers but always saved in the nick of time. 30s serials mostly featured men in adventurous outings. The "cliff hanger" ending was developed in serials as a way of drawing audiences back to watch the next episode.

The Perils of Pauline was originally a 20-episode serial but only the 9-episode European release survives. It opens with the death of Pauline's uncle and takeover by his "trusted" secretary as Pauline's guardian until she marries. Pauline's boy friend (Crane Wilbur) is a loyal but dumb sort of guy. The guardian (Paul Panzer) is constantly trying to knock off Pauline so he can inherit all the family fortune.

So in each episode Pauline gets into trouble as the guardian and his henchman (Francis Carlyle) try to kill her. The plotting is crude and the escapes are unrealistic but it's all in good fun. And audiences loved seeing Pearl White doing all kinds of dangerous stunts.

In this series she is bound and gagged several times, kidnapped several times by cowboys, pirates, gypsies, wild Indians, etc. and left for dead in a number of caves, burning houses, sinking ships, and subterranean cellars, and of course tied to railroad tracks!

Pauline is imperiled in speeding cars, runaway balloons, runaway horses, and left dangling on cliffs, and fighting off hordes of rats. My favorite is the Indian immortality test in which they shove her down a steep mountain slope to give her a running start and then shove a massive round boulder down the slope after her-a stunt basically repeated in the opening of the first Indiana Jones movie.

Pearl White is pretty and does well as the archetypical heroine. She's also very good in the action scenes whether dangling from a rope or cliff's edge or being carried off by desperados. Crane Wilbur and Paul Panzer overact but it's fun. Milton Berle made his first film appearance in this serial (and also in Tillie's Punctured Romance) in 1914!

An entertaining biography of Pearl White was filmed in 1947 as The Perils of Pauline, starring Betty Hutton.

If you have to see only one silent serial, then this is the one you have to see. Not because it is clearly the best one -- although it's a lot of fun, there are others, such as Feuillade's LES VAMPIRES with as good or even better claims -- but simply because it is a ripsnorting bunch of fun, and, more importantly, the wellspring from which all other movie serials, that cinematic art more fully lost to its makers than the movie musical -- the spring from which all serials sprang. It has all the usual stuff of serials -- scary cliffhanging chapter ends, the intrepid hero and heroine, the awful, hissable villain, tearful deathbed scenes and a host of storied names: Pearl White, Crane Wilbur, Louis Gassnier, George Seitz..... who has not heard of The Perils of Pauline? And I will repeat in case you missed it: it's a lot of fun. In the original version it might not play well in one evening, but the only surviving version is the 9-chapter version that Pathe released in Europe in 1916, now available on DVD from Grapevine. The print they located is a bit battered, but complete and in a lovely colored print. Go to their website and order one. Watch it with some friends. You won't regret it.

The one silent movie serial most people have heard of is "The Perils of Pauline." The 20-episode serial premiered on March 23, 1914, followed with a new 30-minute film released every two weeks. In the serial's plot, Pauline, played by actress Pearl White, stands to inherit a fortune from her late dad when she gets married. She has a sweetheart who desperately wants to marry her, but Pauline wants adventure in her life and puts him off for a year. However, her father's male secretary is next in line for a fortune if Pauline dies before she marries.

France's Pathe Studios had just opened a United States production house in Ft. Lee, N. J., under the name The Eclectic Company. After the original serial was played out in America, all the movies were shipped to Pathe's Paris headquarters. The title cards were translated from English to French for European audiences seeing it for the first time in 1916. Years later, when the serial was reintroduced to American viewers, the title cards were amateurishly retranslated, containing ungrammatical errors, misspellings and horrendous punctuation.

There's a misconception that Pauline was tied to railroad tracks and saw mill blades ready to cut her in half. None of those events happened in the original series. Because the serial was shot around the New Jersey Palisades, where Pauline was dangled over its cliffs, the term "cliffhanger" originated. Some life-threatening dangers were resolved before the end of some episodes, but others ended with Pauline fighting for her life, only to resolved in the beginning of the next movie.

Numerous remakes were produced following the end of the original, including Universal Pictures's sound serial with a different plot, Betty Hutton memorable title role in 1947's "The Perils of Pauline" and a 1967 comedy of the same name.

Pearl White, who did most of her stunts in "Pauline," injured her spine during one shoot, causing much pain the rest of her life. She was the ultimate "serial melodrama queen," starring in several later serials. A wise investor, she retired from acting in 1924 as a multi-millionaire. She died in 1937 at the age of 39 from liver failure. Ms. White had to take pain pills and alcohol for years to relieve the pain suffered from her back injury, resulting in damaging her liver. She's buried in Paris' famous Cimetière de Passy.