Traffic in Souls (1913);
Where Are My Children? (1916)

Directed by George Loane Tucker

The issue of underage prostitution exploded in American public consciousness in 1910 with the publication of Reginald Wright Kaufmann’s sensationalist novel, "The House of Bondage," which went through ten printings in as many months. Prostitution then became a national obsession with the release of the “Rockefeller Commission Report on White Slavery,” a supposed source for Traffic in Souls, co-written and directed by George Loane Tucker. In this seminal melodrama, a young woman accepts a date with a “nice” young man, and ends up sold to a “white slavery” ring, secretly run by a well-known philanthropist. Desperate to find her, the victim’s sister takes a job with the philanthropist and, with the help of her boyfriend, a police detective, exposes his nefarious scheme. Whatever actual truth Tucker’s depiction of this criminal world may hold, the fact that it is a member of the ruling class that controls public vice— and the working class his victims—testifies to the class bias of early cinema audiences, a trend in this new popular entertainment, also evidenced in D.W. Griffith’s early gangster film Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), that was almost as alarming to some social reformers as prostitution itself.

Striking the right balance between civic education and salacious exploitation, however, Traffic in Souls earned a whopping $450,000 on a $5,700 investment. At one point, the film was being shown at 20 New York theatres simultaneously. Both film critics and Progressives praised its fast pace and social message. Produced by the Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP), Carl Laemmle’s production company, Traffic in Souls was the first feature length film distributed by Universal after its founding, and one of the first long form films produced in the United States. Ironically, the film’s success did little to convince Laemmle that features were the way of the future, so for several more years Universal continued making shorts, while others made the transition. Given that policy, Traffic was cast and shot in secret without the knowledge of IMP officials, then cut down to six reels by Jack Cohn and Walter McNamara, Tucker having left the country for England before the film’s post-production was completed. Finally, since the film was shot in real New York locations, it affords the modern viewer a unique window on to the past.

—Jan-Christopher Horak

Independent Moving Picture Co. Screenwriter: Walter MacNamara, G.L. Tucker. Cast: Jane Gail, Ethel Grandin, William Turner, Matt Moore, William Welsh.

35mm, silent, b/w, 88 min.