User Reviews

Not the story of sunburned, angry marine life, but a public information film from Edison on behalf of The National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis and The Red Cross. It's about as exciting as you'd expect, and what drama there is in its tale of a small-town woman stricken with the disease is undone by the over-emoting of all concerned.

This film is part of a collection entitled "American Film Archives: Vol. 3: Disc 1". The DVDs deal specifically with American short films that deal with various social issues. These are the sort of films that usually would be forgotten or lost had it not been for some film preservationists work. Now this set certainly isn't for everyone, as the content is a bit dry. However, for history teachers (like myself) and cinemaniacs (again, that would be me), it's an invaluable set.

HOPE, A RED CROSS SEAL STORY is a short film made by the Edison Company in 1912. At 14 minutes, it's actually pretty long for this time period--full-length films as we know them today were very rare.

The story begins with an employee with the Red Cross trying to solicit donations in a rural town. However, the town banker refuses, as in a letter he states that it's a disease of city folk. However, his own daughter soon comes down with the dreaded disease--thus ruining her chance to marry and forcing her to go to the dreaded sanitarium.

This sort of mortality tale would definitely be seen as overly melodramatic and old fashioned today (particularly when the fiancé laments her poor fate), but the film isn't bad for the era. It manages to tell the story without quite the usual high level of melodrama and is reasonably realistic, as tuberculosis was an incredibly deadly disease at the time. Watchable and worth seeing.

Hope, a Red Cross Seal Story (1912)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

At this time this Edison short was made, Tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in America and this film serves as a warning as well as giving hope that the disease doesn't have to mean death. An elderly man refuses to donate money to a Tuberculosis fund but soon his daughter (Gertrude McCoy) comes down with the disease. This film certainly comes off too dramatic today but at the time of release this was certainly serious stuff. McCoy is very good in her role as is Charles Ogle in his small role. The direction is also quite nice and handles the story well. The film tries to give hope to those with the disease and this also comes off quite well but even with all that said, the film just doesn't come off as powerful as I'm sure it once did.

Reportedly, the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis (now known as the American Lung Association) and Red Cross teamed up once a year with Edison's film company, from as early as 1910, to make one of these one-reel melodramas serving as an advertisement for their cause and strategically released around the Christmas charity season. This, "Hope - A Red Cross Seal Story," is the earliest of them that I've seen (the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) website says the initial effort from 1910 is lost). Another, "The Lone Game" (1915) has been available on the "Edison: The Invention of the Movies" home-video set, and the Blackhawk Films copy of "The Temple of Moloch" (1914) has been on YouTube. Besides being an early instance of charitable cinematic collaboration, these films are also some of the few early examples I've thus far been able to find in my search for filmic depictions of disease outbreaks. Moreover, while in 2020 the world is going through a different pandemic, it's good, I suppose, to be reminded that tuberculosis was once the leading cause of death and for a long time, and while in some parts of the world is may now be mistaken as a largely solved disease, it's still the most deadly communicable disease most years worldwide and probably the most prevalent if, indeed, as reported, a quarter of all people actually carry it.

The melodrama here is exceedingly contrived, involving as it does the woman's flair for the theatrical in sneaking away from her father and lover to a sanitarium. Going along with the picture's letter and pamphlet motif, however, she does leave them notes. Her contracting of TB, or "consumption" as it was more commonly called then (in movies, at least), also serves as something of a comeuppance, it would seem, for her lover's dismissive attitude of a Red Cross seal campaign request he receives, to which he replies that consumption doesn't exist in his country town.

Nevertheless, such antipathy as displayed by this character is strikingly familiar to this day. It seems as though every illness needs to be blamed on some other by somebody. In the case of TB, it was known as an urban pestilence, which was true to the extent that people living close together is squalid conditions was a breading ground for the bacterium and that the factories filling the air with pollution made people more susceptible to and symptomatic from the disease. But, they did and they still do die in rural areas, too. Indeed, the NFPF entry compares such prejudice to that against gay men during the AIDS epidemic. I'm sure others could find similar parallels in the most recent pandemic of 2020. Speaking of which, in this film we also have a family doctor who diagnoses the woman with TB from a thermometer. She thought her coughing was from a cold and, yet, a fever proves otherwise somehow? Whether 1912 or 2020, one's temperature isn't a diagnosis.

We also get a tacked-on happy ending involving a cure in this one (surprising for a film titled "Hope," I know), the second such TB melodrama I've seen after Alice Guy's "Falling Leaves" (1912). In reality, it wouldn't be for a few more decades before more effective, antibiotic treatments were discovered.

This is the annual Red Cross Seal picture that the Edison Company produces in co-operation with the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis. As philanthropists we feel that we ought to further the picture as much as we can, but as critics we cannot report that the audience liked it; too many showed that they didn't. It is not good entertainment, as was the first Seal picture, two years ago. The trouble is that from first to last it has too obviously been forced into the pattern of the committee's purpose; it was too plainly made to teach. The lesson is valuable, and is worth putting before every audience. - The Moving Picture World, November 30, 1912