#mostly lost

This is how the audience was introduced to the film’s main cast of characters—a gang of petty con artists. Tom (Thomas Meighan) is the leader. Rose (Betty Compson) is the girl. “The Frog” (Lon Chaney) is the faux-disfigured man. “The Dope” (J.M. Dumont) is the pseudo-pimp. Their motivations are even simpler than their schemes. Tom wants to get ahead. Rose has expensive tastes. The Frog does it for the love of the game. The Dope, as the nickname implies, has a pricey drug habit.

Tom presents a newspaper item about a small town upstate called Fairhope. The town has a mysterious elderly deaf-blind and mute resident called “The Patriarch,” who the townsfolk supposedly believe has healing powers. Tom plans to use the old man to run a faith-healing scam. Tom travels to the town as an advance scout, feigning a heart complaint. He plants the notion of The Patriarch having a long-lost grand niece, who will be portrayed by Rose. The Frog and The Dope will take a later train drumming up talk about miracle cures.

On the way up, The Frog captures the attention of a young millionaire, Richard “Asbestos” King, and his disabled sister, who is unable to walk due to “hip disease.” Inspired by The Frog’s ostensible faith, a large crowd detrains in the town. The townsfolk are put off by the spectacle and the only one willing to lead The Frog to The Patriarch is a local disabled child whose father, a scientist, refuses to let him visit the healer. When the motley crew arrives at The Patriarch’s cottage, Tom thinks the scheme is blown with the presence of truly disabled people. But, after The Frog performs his ghoulish simulation of a miracle cure and stands upright, the boy is inspired and drops his crutches running to The Patriarch. He is followed shortly after by the millionaire’s sister, who rises from her wheelchair unassisted. Initially shaken in the presence of legit miracles, the crew recalibrates and gets to work collecting donations. The town is soon overrun with people desperate for cures and willing to pay handsomely for them.

[Full GIF set of the surviving scene here]

Months pass and Tom’s dogged insistence that his gang live their roles at all times—even when they’re alone—had led to real change. The Frog is living straight and narrow looking after The Patriarch and finds an adoptive mother figure in a sweet old neighbor lady. The Dope is working on a local farm and, finding love with the farmer’s daughter, throws his needles into the ocean. Rose is courted by Richard and his earnestness and genuine affection leaves her conflicted—the Rose he knows and loves is a construct. She also still harbors feelings for Tom, even though it seems he only has one love in his life: money. The glimpse Rose gets into a gentler, more wholesome form of love leaves her feeling fairly hopeless that she could find that with Tom.

In the end, Tom discovers the change in his crew when they all agree that they don’t want their cut. Fearing that Rose might leave him, Tom cracks up and intends to kill Richard (and maybe Rose too). However, the millionaire gets to Tom first to tell him he’s leaving town. Richard wants to support the work of The Patriarch from afar as it’s too painful for him to be around Rose after she’s turned down his proposal for marriage. Learning that he hasn’t lost Rose’s love, Tom finally has his own transformative revelation. Tom proposes to Rose while the group plans what to do with all their ill-gotten money—mirroring the close of the opening sequence. As they come to terms, The Patriarch dies peacefully in the background.

from Picture Show, 19 March 1921, Moving Picture World, 13 September 1919, and Masters and Masterpieces, 1927

Tucker had been making films since the beginning of 1910s and his profile had risen significantly on returning to the US after a spending a few years directing prominent films in Britain. His first projects back in the States were vehicles for mega-stars Mae Marsh and Mabel Normand. The Miracle Man, however, would be a George Loane Tucker production, with his name emblazoned above the title. His cast weren’t unknowns, but none could be considered stars. (Shortly after the film was released, Meighan, Compson, and Chaney would all become top-billed performers.)

Tucker produced the film independently with assistance from Mayflower Photoplay Corp. and a distribution deal already in place with Famous Players-Lasky (FP-L).

The timing of this Tucker project was just right for FP-L and their distribution arm, Paramount-Artcraft. FP-L and its head, Adolph Zukor, were facing an array of challenges.

The Feds were mad at them. A possible Federal Trade Commission investigation for violations of the Clayton Act was looming—specifically over their vertical integration efforts and their practice of block-booking.[2]

Top filmmakers were mad at them. Leery over Zukor’s growing control over the entire industry, filmmakers were making moves to preserve their independence—and the formation of United Artists was just around the corner.[3]

Exhibitors were mad at them. Theatre owners across the country were also fed up with block booking.

On top of all that, theatre goers simply weren’t turning up. Attendance had started falling off at the end of the First World War and kept falling off as the flu pandemic proceeded to kill tens of millions of people world wide between 1918 and 1921.

What was Zukor to do? The answer was partly tied up in the release of The Miracle Man.

from Moving Picture World, 13 September 1919 and 9 August 1919

FP-L/Paramount-Artcraft did a full-on media blitz in 1919 announcing that their next season of releases would kick off a new strategy called “Selective Booking.” They claimed that exhibitors would have the opportunity to choose from “fewer and better” films and would be given opportunities to preview the films before choosing to book them. Two stated goals of the strategy were to ensure a higher-quality of product and to encourage longer runs for each film.

What Zukor was doing behind the scenes though was buying up theatre chains via “friendly interests”—including the George M. Cohan-owned theatres, where Miracle Man would be assured long runs in Chicago and New York City. The selective booking scheme was additionally used as a smokescreen to develop a new form of block booking that was built around directors instead of the pre-existing “star” or “program” blocks. (The directors in question would be Cecil B. DeMille, Thomas H. Ince, Hugh Ford, Maurice Tourneur, and George Loane Tucker.)

Tucker’s Miracle Man would have the dubious honor of being the premiere example of this new strategy. Advance screenings were held in the summer of 1919 for critics, industry insiders, and prospective exhibitors. In September, the film entered wide release under the new plan. It was a smashing success. On a production budget of $120,000 (equivalent to $2.3 million in April 2026), it grossed $538,891.49 in less than three months ($9,298,530.78 in April ‘26). In its initial theatrical run, it may have grossed nearly $2 million. (For a more modern reference point, proportional to its budget, it performed as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)!)

However, Tucker was not totally in on this scheme. In January of 1920, he sued FP-L/Paramount and Mayflower Photoplays and sought injunctions concerning the further release of Miracle Man and the completion of his new production Ladies Must Live (1921, presumed lost). Tucker’s contract with the distributor specified that the film should be marketed boldly under his name, but instead the marketing materials disseminated to exhibitors prioritized Paramount-Artcraft’s role. (To bring up another modern reference point, in the years following A24’s founding as a distribution company, their brand benefited tremendously from people talking about the films they distributed as “A24 films,” regardless of whether they had any hand in producing them. This banks on filmgoers not understanding how the industry works and, if the phenomenon had been more extreme, Robert Eggers or Greta Gerwig might have had grounds to challenge A24 over the marketing for The VVitch (2015) or Lady Bird (2017).)

As Wid Gunning put it in Wid’s Daily on 8 January 1920:

“The basic points of the battle between Tucker and Mayflower and Famous Players go direct to the question uppermost in the minds of many independent producers, stars, directors and writers: Has a producer, who is also a distributor, the right to attempt by inference or suggestion to create the general impression that a production especially made by some director or star working as an independent producing unit and only distributed by the distributor is part of the usual program offering of that distributor and, has been produced by the distributor.”

Unfortunately, this question didn’t receive a proper answer as the suit was settled in June of the same year. Tucker finished Ladies Must Live, but through this whole legal rigmarole he had been fighting the undisclosed illness that would take his life before the film was released. While The Miracle Man broke box-office records all over the country, benefited its distributor in a myriad of ways, led to re-issues of the novel and regional re-stagings of the play, and created three new stars, the film’s director/writer/producer was seemingly the only person who wasn’t able to capitalize on its success.

Behind-the-scenes still of Tucker directing from Photoplay Magazine, January 1920

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[1] I also read the source novel, the short-story adaptation of the film, and watched the 1932 remake to gather as much info as I could. [2] Block booking was a release strategy employed where the most in-demand films would only be available to exhibitors in a package deal with other productions that were perceived as less marketable.  [3] I talk more about that in my article on Nazimova’s independent production Salome (1922) 

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What Did Exhibitors Think?

Put bluntly, in the case of The Miracle Man, the “Selective Booking” scheme succeeded at placating exhibitors. The feedback that theatre owners reported to the trades was overwhelmingly positive. Paramount-Artcraft made a big deal of this release so there was a lot of feedback to sift through. I couldn’t collect every report, but I recorded a representative sample of 70 (from Exhibitors Herald and Variety, between September 1919 and March 1921).

Using the same rubric that I’ve used previously, I broke down feedback into positive, mixed, or negative based on how the exhibitors rated the value, draw, and reception of The Miracle Man. I define “value” as perceived worth in comparison to the film’s rental fee—“special” productions like Miracle Man usually come with higher rental fees. “Draw” is simply the number of patrons brought in and if the film brought in new patrons. “Reception” captures the exhibitor reporting on the quality of the film—either their own assessment or their patrons’. Depending on the community a given theatre served, the exhibitor might also note the types of patrons the film appealed to most by social or economic class, gender, age, and/or level of education or sophistication. Regardless of what each exhibitor’s community was like, the ideal was “pleasing to all classes.” Positive feedback could be good reception, value, and/or drawing power. Mixed feedback usually implies one or more factors were good but one poor. Negative feedback indicates poor reception, value and/or draw.

Maybe due to the novelty of the selective booking system, rental cost was not as common a talking point in relation to Miracle Man as it usually is for specials. Only 5 exhibitors brought it up at all—3 claiming it was worth the extra cost, and two claiming it wasn’t. The novelty of selective booking encouraging longer runs created a new hot topic in exhibitor feedback: whether interest in the film held up to more screenings. Some big-city theatres played Miracle Man for weeks and some towns ran it for 3-4 days or played it continuously for 2. 24 exhibitors reported that the film held up to a longer run without a drop-off in business, though 2 did report a drop-off. 11 thought the film drew well, 6 did not, and 3 thought its draw failed to meet expectations. Exhibitors were also encouraged to charge higher ticket prices to match the film’s special status. 10 reported that the price bump was no deterrent, while 3 thought it kept their patrons away. Notably, 14 reported good business, but 4 suggested they only broke even, and 10 said they lost money.

As for the quality of the film, a lot of theatre owners felt inclined to put on their film-reviewer hats. 42 praised the film’s artistic merits. Fewer exhibitors reported on what their patrons felt about the film’s quality—16 reported it pleased all, 5 reported a mixed response. This leads me to a unique trend I noticed in researching Miracle Man feedback: 11 theatre owners expressed great admiration for the film then immediately stated that they didn’t make money on it. Here are a few snippets:

The Miracle Man, with a special cast. — Words cannot express the wonderful picture. But business was poor. It poured rain both days. Just broke even. — J. Adcock, Grand theatre, Princeton, Ind. — Elite patronage. (Exhibitors Herald, 3 Apr 1920)

The Miracle Man, with a special cast. — One of the best pictures that we have ever run, but did not draw. Some did not like it. Lost money two days. — Will F. Taddiken, Elite theatre, Morganville, Kans. — Neighborhood patronage. (Exhibitors Herald, 10 April 1920)

The Miracle Man, with a special cast. — Just broken even on this one, but it was the best picture I ever had. — Rae Peacock, Mystic theatre. Stafford. Kans. (Exhibitors Herald, 1 May 1920)

The Miracle Man, a George Loane Tucker production. — A wonderful picture. Did not draw as well as expected. — W. L. Uglow, Crystal theatre, Burlington, Wis. — General patronage. (Exhibitors Herald, 14 August 1920)

The Miracle Man, with a special cast. —A picture that will make you proud of your profession. Although it did not draw as much business as some of them you will benefit in more ways than one by showing it. Everyone praised it highly. T. C. Shipley, Essaness theatre, Rushville, Nebr. — Small town patronage. (Exhibitors Herald, 21 August 1920)

The Miracle Man, with a special cast. — A great picture. All that they said it was. Good, but I lost money on it. — W. H. Gilfillan, Lotus theatre, Red Lake Falls, Minn. — Neighborhood patronage. (Exhibitors Herald, 5 March 1921)

Then, perhaps in rebuttal:

The Miracle Man, with a special cast. — The greatest picture since The Birth of a Nation. If you don’t make money on this one take the key out of the door, set fire to your playhouse and then commit suicide. — Polk E. Moore, Portland Theatre Co., Portland, Tenn. (Exhibitors Herald, 29 January 1921)

That said, the balance of exhibitors reported great profits. 9 mention house records being broken, 9 reported capacity, S.R.O., or turnaway crowds, and 4 announced extending or repeating their runs of the film due to continued demand. In Spokane, WA the film even played simultaneously at 2 theatres, both seeing good business.

While the selective booking scheme might have been more of a smokescreen for FPL/Paramount powerplays than a legitimate revision of distribution, it did succeed in temporarily skewing the narrative with theatre owners. I’ve done a decent amount of these breakdowns now and having so few exhibitors complain about the rental fee is noteworthy. Block booking was so deeply unpopular that it seems that even the suggestion of a viable alternative on the horizon was enough to put exhibitors in a positive frame of mind.

What Did Reviewers Think?

The Miracle Man was well-liked by many critics and the film was even touted as a potential sea change in American filmmaking.[4] The most popular points center on the strength of filmic storytelling in Miracle Man. That is to say that Tucker took a simple, self-contained story and told it well, without relying on elements of spectacle nor banking on current events. Tom Hamlin, who reviewed the film for Motion Picture News, added that the film’s simplicity meant the potential to please any viewer:

“There is cleverness, wit, pathos, sentiment and satire which is bound to sway any audience anywhere. […] This is a modern, throbbing human interest photoplay of city and country, peopled by saints and crooks, with no killings to mar, where trickery and deceit is finally conquered and a great moral is planted. Quite daring in spots but entirely wholesome.”

Julian Johnson, writing for Photoplay Magazine, likewise hit on the crowd-pleasing, human-interest angle:

“As a study in genuine human beings, as an exhibition of the instinctive triumph of the better nature when that better nature has a chance, as a perfect fabric of life as it is lived […] and as an adroitly constructed drama, rising from climax to climax and never missing a telling point, I do not recall that the silversheet has ever offered anything any better than this, and few pieces as good.”

Most every critic was in agreement that the film’s highest emotional and climactic beat was the healing scene, which occurs only a third of the way through the film. This led to an unconventional pacing and plot structure that some critics found awkward. However, one critic writing for Moving Picture World commended Tucker’s success at shifting the film’s driving motive to the love story to shore up the finale. We can’t know who was right unless more of the film is recovered, but I will say that the short clip that survives from the end of the film with Meighan’s character emotionally breaking down over the pile of ill-gotten riches is powerful even in isolation.

my gif of Meighan in The Miracle Man

Variety’s critic was not as complimentary of Tucker’s pacing and thought the conclusion of the film was weak. But he brings up an interesting point about the miracle element of the story (true also of the book):

“To the critical mind, this effect is palpably a contrived one. The reason for its success is that it states in convincing terms what we would all like to believe, namely, that sins are forgiven, that the afflicted are comforted. We cannot believe it, and yet are so anxious to believe that we will pay well to be fooled.”

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[4] Interestingly, the reviewer in Picture-Play Magazine, which is a fan outlet not a trade, brings up the success of Selective Booking in the case of Miracle Man. 

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What Do I Think?

I can’t presume to speak directly on a lost film. That said, based on my research, I can place this film in the context of broader trends of the era and tentatively draw conclusions as to why an industry organ like Screenland would rate The Miracle Man as one of the most important works in the young history of feature filmmaking. And, I’m going to start by piggy-backing on that Variety reviewer’s comment.

As mentioned in the first section, The Miracle Man was made in the wake of the Great War and smack in the middle of the flu pandemic of 1918-1921. The world was not in a great place. In November 1922, the author of the original story, Frank L. Packard wrote an editorial on the importance of The Miracle Man film. Packard saw the world at the time as “hectic” and “sick.” The film medium was becoming hugely influential as a form of mass communication—one that could cross borders of class, culture, and language. Packard believed that filmmakers had the potential to bring the world back to “sanity.” Corny as that may seem, it’s precisely the itch that The Miracle Man scratched. The Variety reviewer described it a bit more cynically in that the film—and the miracles depicted in it—appealed to a populous “so anxious” that they would “pay well to be fooled.”

In my opinion, Packard and George Loane Tucker were sincere in crafting their stories.[5] Tucker was part of a social-justice minded cadre in the 1910s film industry, strongly reflected in an earlier film of his, Traffic in Souls (1913, extant). Traffic is a drama film about a young, hard-working woman who uncovers a sex trafficking ring after her sister is abducted. The film depicts true-to-life scenarios for how trafficking was carried out and includes a subplot of the ring targeting fresh-off-the-boat immigrant women. Traffic also daringly makes the head of an organization to stop trafficking a double dealer who is also the head of the trafficking operation.[6] The film also features plenty of heightened qualities and dramatic devices to make it firmly a melodramatic thriller rather than a ripped-from-the-headlines didactic dramatization.

Skilled filmmakers like Tucker and Lois Weber held Progressive (in the era-specific sense of the term) social values and believed that narrative filmmaking had the power to educate. American life was changing fast at the turn of the last century, and the growth of industries of mass communication, like filmmaking and later radio, had to respond.

As Janet Staiger put it in Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema:

“These changes result from the massive transformations from a rural, agrarian, national society to the urban, industrial, global world of the new century. As other historians have aptly described the era of 1880 through World War I, these years produced instabilities of a massive dimension. Immigration, feminism, free love, adultery, class warfare, and a multicultural urban life were widely perceived as threats to the (apparent) stability of the agrarian and small-town Anglo-Saxon republican atmosphere of the United States of the nineteenth century. That image is now recognized as romantic nostalgia for a utopian society that never actually existed, as a fantasy that sustained many American myths. Yet it was an image promoted by many during this period.”

These stories were meant to reconstitute a population growing disaffected by war, illness, and economic decline and also enculturate new immigrant populations via the mechanism of melodrama—grounded with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideals that these folks viewed as the bedrock of American culture. Basically, white middle and upper-middle class, native-born Protestant Americans took it upon themselves to address social ills head on with their own Christian/Capitalist ideology.[7]

Returning to The Miracle Man, there are common tropes in this social-problem subgenre of melodrama that the film definitely utilized. One is the tendency to frame ethnic-coded and Black-American urban spaces as low and crime-ridden in stark contrast to WASP-coded spaces depicted as wholesome and homey. Some films are more subtle about it than others. The Miracle Man, both novel and film, presents New York’s Chinatown (in the 1930s remake it’s San Francisco’s) as a den of sin and a small, all-white upstate town called Fairhope (located in Maine in the book) as the wholesome space of salvation and regeneration. Lois Weber, who was a true master of the subgenre, used the trope more subtly in one of her later films, The Sensation Seekers (1927, extant), where a jazz club with Black staff and performers is used to signify low living in contrast to the all-white town environment to signify wholesome (though not totally idealized) living. George Beban’s The Italian (1915, extant) (which has the distinction of making the immigrant the protagonist and of having a more broad-minded view of class politics than the other films) places the crowded tenements of lower Manhattan as the site of tragedy in opposition to the clean, spacious suburbs as the site of regeneration.

Another typical storytelling strategy of the subgenre is the meshing of these social-environment elements with the individualistic use of a character’s psychology as a motive force for the story.[8] Beban’s The Italian is a good illustration of this—Beppo’s inner journey is what makes the film. Weber’s Shoes (1916, extant) and Where Are My Children? (1916, extant) also work along these lines. With The Miracle Man, I suspect that the reason Tucker may have been forgiven by critics for awkward pacing is precisely this factor. Even if the miracle scene is a centerpiece to the film, what drove the film from set up, to revelation, to regeneration might be the ultra-skeptic Tom’s psychology. I’m basing this mostly off of descriptions and reviews, but also from the extant clips. In the miracle scene, Tom registers shock at the miracle, but, given what follows in the story, must quickly reorient himself. This makes it clear that this experience was not as transformative for Tom as it was for his compatriots. In the clip of Tom weeping over his riches, which occurs near the end of the film when he believes that he has lost Rose to the millionaire, there is an emotional catharsis. This is one final big emotional beat before he can finally catch up to his gang mates and marry the girl—apparently an unsatisfactory denouement, but a denouement nonetheless.[9]

Meighan’s Tom arriving at the gang’s headquarters at the start of the film >> Tom’s initial reaction to the miracle >> Tom weeping over the gang’s “take” thinking he’s lost Rose’s love

Now, as I stated earlier, I believe Tucker was sincere in his approach, but the approach had profit-related benefits as well. Stories about crime and criminals were and are perennially popular. But along with growing concern over troublesome content in films came interest in censorship and regulation. Even before a formal office was formed under Will Hayes, the U.S. industry favored self-regulation. The simplest route for handling crime stories (or any potentially distasteful content) was to narrativize. In The Miracle Man’s case, it’s not a crime story, it’s a regeneration melodrama.[10] Imagine how difficult it would be just a few years later to include a subplot in a film about opiate addiction. In the 1932 adaptation, that character is just some guy! (Albeit charmingly played by Ned Sparks) Basically, the one-two punch of emphasizing the positive influence of WASP-American values and couching touchy topics in melodrama allowed audiences to indulge in compelling criminal characters without running afoul of morality-mad interest groups.[11] The melodrama is one of the more important ingredients in the formula as it tempers didacticism. Tucker excelled at this with Traffic and (based on reports) set a new standard with The Miracle Man.

Always Hollywood is obsessed with formula. When a filmmaker hits upon just the right equation of elements to tell a certain type of story or to package a certain type of star, that equation will get repeated as often and for as long as it turns a profit. With When Knighthood Was in Flower, Cosmopolitan discovered both an ideal formula for its star’s vehicles, and also for pairing the conferred respectability of spendy-spectacle costume drama with the entertainment values needed to please a modern audience. That formula continues to pay dividends in filmmaking (and TV).[12] George Loane Tucker hit on another now-classic formula with The Miracle Man: criminal regeneration stories placed in the setting of the fictional utopia of WASP Americana. The idealized image of small-town America may have changed in a century, but the formula hasn’t changed all that much.

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[5] Though what happens to a piece of art and how its received is out of its creator’s hands once released it into the world!  [6] Especially daring as this character may have been derived in part from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  [7] For more on immigrants and early cinema see: Elizabeth Ewen’s “City Lights: Immigrant Women and the Rise of the Movies”  [8] D.W. Griffith is usually the filmmaker’s name most associated with this trend—tho his films appear multiple times on the Best Before list so I’ll save talking about him for later.  [9] And it’s certainly unsatisfactory in the book!  [10] Weber was also a master at this in films like Shoes (prostitution), Where Are My Children? (abortion and birth control), and Hypocrites (various social issues and the inclusion of full-frontal nudity).  [11] For another fine example of this (with less religious overtones) see: Maurice Turner’s Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915, extant).  [12] Off the top of my head: Bridgerton (2020-), Marie Antoinette (2006), A Knight’s Tale (2001), etc. etc. 

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“A Good Thought Can’t Die”

We might not be able to watch The Miracle Man ourselves to judge its formal qualities or Tucker’s effectiveness at using certain devices, but I think we can still identify some of the film’s potential echoes. Throughout the 1920s, The Miracle Man was regularly name-dropped as the standard to compare regeneration-type stories to. In the 1930s, Paramount still banked on the cache of the film, producing a sound version in 1932 (which seems to stick very close to the 1919 version) and including clips in two promotional films for the studio: The House That Shadows Built (1931) and Movie Memories (1935). (Those promotional films are how the few minutes that survive have survived.) IMO a Tucker-esque influence can also be seen (either directly or indirectly) on Frank Capra’s vision of Americana. Capra even made his own vaguely mystical, crime/faith-healing film in The Miracle Woman (1931).

While critics at the time were certain that The Miracle Man would be a film for the ages and would stand the test of time, time was unkind and the film was lost. It’s survival status has mostly reduced The Miracle Man to trivia: the film that launched the careers of Lon Chaney, Betty Compson, and Thomas Meighan. Whether it would still be regarded as classic or timeless in this century is an unknown, but the reverberations of its success were felt for decades. The final line from the film, which contemporary viewers and critics agreed was a groaner, feels strangely appropriate given the legacy of The Miracle Man: “A good thought can’t die… And that’s what he was, a good thought.”

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Related/similar films you can watch:

(presented chronologically)

Traffic in Souls (1913, George Loane Tucker), Hypocrites (1915, Lois Weber), Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915, Maurice Tourneur), The Italian (1915, George Beban), Where Are My Children? (1916, Weber), Shoes (1916, Weber), The Sensation Seekers (1927, Weber), The Miracle Woman (1931, Frank Capra), The Miracle Man (1932, Norman Z. McLeod)

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Selected Contemporary Sources:

Literary:

The Miracle Man by Frank L. Packard “The Miracle Man” by Jerome Shorey in Photoplay, November 1919

About the Release:

“’MIRACLE MAN’ ON BROADWAY” in Variety, 1 August 1919 “Happenings on the Pacific Coast” in Exhibitors Herald, 20 September 1919 “Rivoli Theatre” in Motion Picture News, 20 September 1919 “‘MIRACLE MAN’ GOING” in Variety, 2 October 1919 Wid’s Daily, 12 October 1919 Wid’s Daily, 16 December 1919

About the Film:

“The Master of the Show” by Adela Rogers St. Johns (profile of Tucker) in Photoplay Magazine, January 1920 “A Miracle Man of Make-Up” by Herbert Howe (profile of Lon Chaney) in Picture-Play Magazine, March 1920 “The Miracle Girl” by Hazel Simpson Naylor (profile of Betty Compson) in Motion Picture Magazine, March 1921 “The Story—The Precious Corner Stone” by Frank L. Packard in The Photodramatist, November 1922 Editorial on paying writers in Wid’s Weekly, 29 November 1924 “THE MIRACLE MAN” in the Photoplay Plot Encyclopedia

Reviews:

“THE MIRACLE MAN” in Exhibitors Herald, 23 August 1919 “THE MIRACLE MAN” in Variety, 27 August 1919 “THE MIRACLE MAN” in Motion Picture News, 6 September 1919 “Yes, It Is An Art!” Editorial in Motion Picture News, 13 September 1919 “THE POWER OF ‘THE MIRACLE MAN'” by Edward Weitzel in Moving Picture World, 13 September 1919 “The Miracle Man” in Moving Picture World, 13 September 1919 “The Shadow Stage” by Julian Johnson in Photoplay Magazine, October 1919 “The Screen in Review” in Picture-Play Magazine, November 1919

On the Tucker/Paramount Lawsuit:

“Claims Breach and Demands Rights” in Wid’s Daily, 8 January 1920 “George Loane Tucker Asks Court for Injunction On ‘Miracle Man'” in Moving Picture World, 17 January 1920 “Tucker Contract Sent To Mayflower After Reaching Amicable Settlement” in Exhibitors Herald, 19 June 1920

On Selective Booking:

“Plan in Brief” in Exhibitors Herald, 28 June 1919

Exhibitor Feedback:

Exhibitors Herald‘s “’What the Picture Did For Me’: VERDICTS ON FILMS IN LANGUAGE OF EXHIBITOR” dated: 13, 20, 27 December 1919; 10, 17, 24 January 1920; 7, 14, 21, 28 February 1920; 6, 20, 27 March 1920; 3, 10, 24 April 1920; 1, 15, 29 May 1920; 5, 26 June 1920; 14, 21 August 1920; 25 December 1920; 22, 29 January 1921; 12 February 1921; 5 March 1921

Beggar on Horseback and Finding an American Expressionist Cinema

If this isn’t your first visit to the blog, you’re likely familiar with a phenomenon I’ve talked about often: the mergermania of the US film industry in the first half of the 1920s. If not, in short: by the mid-1920s, most of the industry—including production, distribution, and exhibition—had been merged into fewer and fewer, larger companies. Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, who produced and distributed Beggar on Horseback, was the largest company at the time. What this meant creatively for the American cinema landscape was significantly less room for experimentation in mainstream feature filmmaking (see my articles on A Lover’s Oath or Salome for more on that).

So, a parallel phenomenon emerged: a growing artistic inferiority complex in the US industry. Hollywood studios were producing large quantities of technically strong and polished films, but they garnered little respect for artistry. This was an unfavorable comparison to the output of European film industries (esp. Germany, France, and Sweden). The response production companies took was to poach talent from Europe—for example directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Victor Seastrom, Benjamin Christensen, Mauritz Stiller, F.W. Murnau, and even a failed bid at Sergei Eisenstein and actors like Greta Garbo, Emil Jannings, and Pola Negri.

That didn’t mean that these corporate behemoths suddenly started investing in artistic experimentation however. The European imports were expected to fit themselves into the factory-like environment of US filmmaking (Lubitsch being one of the few successful transfers). That said, the ever-consuming machine of Hollywood didn’t just take film artists and force them into molds, they also tested out avant-garde techniques in limited capacities to see what could be worked into formulas of mass production. Kristin Thompson used Beggar as an indication and illustration of the US industry doing just this in her essay “The Limits of Experimentation in Hollywood” and I hope to build out that idea further here. Despite only having about six and one half minutes of accessible footage, we can still learn a lot about what the supposed failure of Beggar meant in practice and in the quest for the Art of American cinema.[4]

Homegrown filmmakers like James Cruze had their own ideas of how to elevate the artistic qualities of cinema. A primary trend was adapting source material that would confer respectability, like novels, plays, or operas/operettas. (A Lover’s Oath, based on The Rubaiyat, and Salome, based on the Oscar Wilde play are also illustrations of this.) This strategy was controversial, since these were stories and scenarios not originally conceived for cinematic telling and therefore were seen as holding back truly cinematic artistry in lieu of re-purposing dramatic devices established in other media.[5] Basically, the effect would be the opposite of what the filmmaker in pursuit of Art was aiming at. Additionally, there’s no denying that, in the hyper-capitalist world of the US film industry, the major drive to adapt preexisting works over producing original stories was the commercial benefit of an established audience with name recognition for the authors or titles.

Enter another data point in this swirling creative discourse: the major artistic movement of the era in cinema, German Expressionism. In 1925, Robert Weine, director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, extant), weighed in on the limitations of American film art in conversation with Barnet Braverman and identified the Hollywood’s preference for adaptation as one of its primary problems. Caligari did not achieve popular success in the US (largely due to timing in relation to the end of WWI) but, along with later German Expressionist films, it was highly influential among industry pros and the growing community of amateur and semi-pro filmmakers in America. Regardless of the commercial success in the US (or lack thereof) of German Expressionist films, a discourse developed around how features of the style—such as rejection of realism/naturalism or reliance on psychological and emotional motivations for the flow of a film—could be re-worked or translated into American filmmaking modes.

from A pictorial history of the movies, 1943 and Picture-Play Magazine, August 1925

At this point, I’ve probably made you question Cruze’s decision making even further, but now I’m going to try and explain why I think choosing this production, a silent adaptation of a stage play renowned for its dialogue, may have been bold instead of bone-headed.

Photo of the Winthrop Ames stage production of Beggar on Horseback

The authors of the play version of Beggar on Horseback claimed German inspiration and the Broadway production by Winthrop Ames took visual and stylistic cues from German Expressionism for its staging and set design. When Cruze caught the play, as presented in Chicago in the autumn of 1924, the cinematic potential must have been clear. Just as Cruze had successfully synthesized a sure-fire new formula for westerns, maybe he had found the key to another new formula: American Expressionism via comedy. Despite Cruze’s rep being built on a western, the bulk of his work was in comedy. And, in fact, he had already dabbled in incorporating fantastical elements into comedy films like Hollywood and the Will Roger’s vehicle One Glorious Day (1922, presumed lost).

Something that can be gleaned from both the extant footage of Beggar, and from contemporary descriptions, is that the flow of scenes within the dream/nightmare sequence is motivated by dream-logic. The dream sequence begins with Horton’s McRae falling asleep in his arm chair. When he awakes into the dream, he rises and with a few cuts and lighting tricks his apartment becomes a massive cathedral. The wedding party flashing bouquets of dollar signs in McRae’s face turns into coins being thrown at him by the same party as the scene moves from the cathedral to the train station. Once at the Cady home, characters seem to appear and disappear based on McRae’s shifting focus.

Contemporary descriptions also elaborate on particularly whirling transitions from McRae serving his life sentence as a tin-pan-alley composer to the presentation of a musical number that McRae had composed with his writing partner/girlfriend featuring a dancing prince and princess[6] to a pastoral fantasy sequence where he’s reunited with said partner.

Other expressionist-influenced touches can be found in the production design of the dream sequence. The cathedral dedicated to the almighty dollar features some gorgeous compositing between sound-stage constructions and matte paintings, as does the train station scene.

The train sequence in particular suggests how comedy might be an ideal inroad for American audiences to accept more poetic or reality-bending images in film. The grotesque and symbolic elements hew toward absurdism and satire, an attitude Americans still favor when it comes to artistic experimentation.[7]

Flop or not, Beggar was clearly a change of pace for the major studios. It wasn’t just critics and filmmakers that craved an escape from formulaic Hollywood product—it was a common refrain in fan magazines and even from exhibitors. Paramount was ready to get in front of those exhibitors to market Beggar as a new strain of artistic filmmaking touting in their release schedule published in Exhibitors Herald, 16 May 1925:

“Those who have been crying for something new, something that gets away from the regular motion picture formula, have nothing more to cry about. James Cruze has made ‘Beggar on Horseback,’ and he has made a great box office picture.”

And exhibitors in some cities went the extra mile to sell the film to the public as a novelty. In its opening run at the Criterion in New York, there was a massive light-up billboard and the film was presented with a new one-act play by George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker. In various cities, exhibitors covered their facades with unique advertisements, ran newspaper campaigns, and did tie-ins with, appropriately, music stores.

from Motion Picture News, 11 July 1925, Exhibitors Herald, 3 October 1925, Motion Picture News, 3 October 1925, Moving Picture World, 31 October 1925, Motion Picture News, 19 September 1925, Motion Picture News, 8 August 1925

Now here’s the question, with all this build up, was Beggar truly a flop?

If Wishes Were Horses…

First off, I’ll state outright that the common narrative, which began as early as 1925, that Beggar on Horseback was a failure, is an oversimplification. We obviously can’t judge the quality of the film ourselves because more than half of the film hasn’t survived. What we can do is look at contemporary evaluations and see how or if it remained in the discursive zeitgeist in the years following its release.

Beggar on Horseback was well regarded by critics and industry professionals upon its release. Edwin Schallert of The Los Angeles Times cited Beggar in his top ten films of the year alongside heavy hitters He Who Gets Slapped, Thief of Bagdad, The Last Laugh, The Sea Hawk, The Iron Horse, and The Lost World. (This list suggests a trend of fantastical or speculative productions in Hollywood at the time tho, doesn’t it?) The Film Daily ran a poll of critics in November and December of ‘25 and Beggar came in 13th place with The Gold Rush, The Unholy Three, Don Q, The Merry Widow, and The Last Laugh making the top 5. (In the detailed breakdown of the critics’ responses, it seems that Beggar was favored broadly by Mid-Western critics, not just those in NY/LA.) Motion Picture News ran a similar poll of critics at the same time and their list placed Beggar as the 4th best film of the year. The National Board of Review also cited Beggar on its yearly best-of list. American Cinematographer magazine placed Beggar on its “Roll of Honor” alongside The Lost World and Don Q.[8]

Moving on to average folks, The San Francisco Call and Post polled their readers in the autumn of ‘25 to name the best films of the year and Beggar received honorable mention with Greed and The Phantom of the Opera. (Funnily enough, those same readers voted James Cruze’s next film The Pony Express into second place!)

The trade reviews were positive on the technical and artistic quality of Beggar, but nearly all of them questioned if it had commercial viability. The nature of the warnings these reviewers gave to exhibitors focused primarily on worries that the film would go over people’s heads or concerns that it would require careful, thoughtful marketing. A few also noted that the music that accompanied the film was of the utmost importance—understandable given Beggar’s subject matter![9] Another common criticism, which became a practical issue for some exhibitors, was that the dream sequence making up the bulk of the production was too long.

Beggar was built around the dream sequence, which meant that the film had to be watched from the beginning to follow the story. In 2026, that seems totally reasonable, but in 1925, there were still many, many theatres that had continuous programs. With that structure of programming, a bill composed of features, shorts, cartoons, newsreels, etc. would played on loop. So, when you bought your ticket, you might not enter when the program began or when the feature began, but you’d likely watch at least until it looped back to when you came in. Beggar was deemed unsuitable for that style of exhibition. It’s story structure required being treated as a special release. Paramount tried to guide marketing and exhibition strategies and it did seem to pay off in some markets.

from Masters and Masterpieces of the Screen, 1927, Exhibitors Herald, 4 July 1925, Educational Screen, October 1925, Photoplay Magazine, July 1925, Exhibitors Herald, 17 October 1925

Upon release, Beggar didn’t totally flop in most major cities. A recurring trend was strong business at the start of the film’s run and then a notable petering off of ticket sales as the run continued. This happened at the Criterion in NYC, where they cut Beggar’s scheduled eight-week run short by about a week and a half. Beggar brought in solid returns in its first week at the Criterion and steady, but below-expectation returns in the following weeks. This happened likewise in Los Angeles, but the owner of the Million Dollar Theatre there blamed the limited interest on the fact that the play (with Horton in the lead) had only closed a month before they started playing the film. Baltimore and Philadelphia reported similar stories. However, reports out of San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, and the Twin Cities suggest decent business and a good reception.

Another practical consideration to note is that Beggar premiered in a very hot June and then entered wide release in August. While nowadays its common for theatrical release films to show a lull in business in January/February and do bigger box-office in the summer, it was the reverse a century ago. This was simply because theatres were only starting to install air-conditioning systems at the time, so it would be a few years before the movie theatre became the AC oasis we know it as today. That is, Beggar was one of many films that might have presented a lower box-office draw based on weather alone.

You probably have a decent notion as to why calling Beggar a flop is an oversimplification now, but getting feedback from smaller cities and towns alters the picture considerably.

from Exhibitors Herald, 16 May 1925

I broke down forty two exhibitor feedback reports from across North America into positive, mixed, or negative based on how the exhibitors rated the value, draw, and reception of Beggar. Positive feedback could be good reception, value, and/or drawing power. Mixed feedback implies one or more factors were good but one poor. Negative feedback indicates poor reception, value and/or draw (and warnings to other exhibitors). Notably, even though rental cost is usually a common complaint from exhibitors, almost no feedback for Beggar mentioned this.[10]

So far, this is the most negative set of responses I’ve come across! But, oddly, the only common complaint was that Beggar just didn’t prove to be a draw. Only a few mention it going over patron’s heads. One tried to place Beggar in a continuous program, immediately realized his error, and pulled the film after only one day of exhibition.

Typically, I disregard exhibitor feedback when theatre owners put on their film-reviewer hats and give more than practical exhibition assessments but one piece in particular was too good for me not to share. As published in Moving Picture World, 26 September 1925, W.C. Whiting of the Whiting Opera House (260 seats) in Whiting, Iowa wrote:

“[Beggar on Horseback] Is a graphic portrayal of the fantastic vagaries of a mind, diseased by overwork and worry, while in a dream, the result of sleep produced by an opiate. This picture when approached from this angle, is a masterpiece. Photography and acting excellent, and the effects show real genius and fertility of imagination. The advertising that was sent us would indicate a picture that was light and foolish which is a mistake. It was so deep that some could not follow it. It was a money loser here. Good only for those who grasp the director’s idea. My admission was 10 and 25 cents.”

If someone wrote this about one of my films, I would have clipped and framed it immediately.

… Then Beggars Might Ride

Beggar on Horseback did not end up being the “great box-office picture” that Paramount touted it to be. However, it did do decent business in a number of major and medium-sized cities. It was lauded by newspaper and trade critics for its technical and artistic merit. Beggar also stayed in the discourse into the sound era for its creative ambition as well as for its failure. It became an oft-cited illustration of artistic films and bad business in the US. It’s narrative we’re still struggling with here in the states, one hundred years later, and it’s as dubious a narrative now as it was then.

The frame within which we measure the success of a work of art that has any commercial component is always shifted to suit the demands of capital. Popular works across different forms of media will be labeled as flops even when they receive positive critical feedback, develop dedicated fandoms (a more modern phenomenon), and turn a modest profit. The reality is that Beggar might have been a bad movie, we can’t know unless it’s recovered, but there is evidence to suggest that we need to take the “flop” narrative with a grain of salt. I don’t have the numbers for its total box-office and budget, but Beggar’s budget was likely more modest that one might expect. The whole film was shot in five weeks—entirely on sound stages, there were no big-name-star salaries, pre-production was just under one month as was post-production. The film may have looked expensive but the facts behind it suggest a reasonable budget.

Additionally, we might be unaware of the creative impact it had on later films without more accessible footage. Films like the German Expressionist imports as well as box-office flops like Nazimova’s Salome had second lives through amateur film clubs and the Little Cinema movement. Given the continued discussion about Beggar into the 1930s, I might guess that the film might have had some circulation beyond its initial release and it definitely had some impact on the movement to increase artistry in US filmmaking.

All that said, James Cruze recognized that Beggar not being an unqualified success made the future outlook for his career murky. Being the workhorse he was, by the time Beggar was released, Cruze was already filming The Pony Express, his return to western storytelling. Max Parker, Beggar’s art director, was offered a contract with Cecil B. De Mille’s company soon after the film’s release and became extremely prolific throughout the pre-code and classic eras of Hollywood. Famous Players-Lasky also didn’t sour on Beggar’s stars: Esther Ralston was immediately put to work in starring roles in major productions and by the next year Edward Everett Horton was signed to a contract for a series of comedy shorts, which presaged him becoming an established screen performer.

All in all, Beggar might not have been that much of a flop, but even if it was, it was an interesting flop!

Edward Everett Horton from the Standard Casting Directory, April 1925, Esther Ralston from Screenland Magazine, August 1925, Gertrude Short from Screenland Magazine, August 1925

But What Can You Watch?

Unfortunately, the obvious recommendation choices as an alternative to Beggar on Horseback also happen to be lost films: James Cruze’s Hollywood and One Glorious Day or Cruze’s other collaborations with the same team Merton of the Movies, To The Ladies, or The Ruggles of Red Gap.

Perhaps, in view of that disappointing fact, I’ll make some creative recommendations. For a sample of 1920s Hollywood/Professional filmmaking that defies formula:

Camille (1921) paired with 2 shorts: The Love of Zero (1928) and The Telltale Heart (1928)

The Salvation Hunters (1925) with The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (1928)

Or for a taste of the 1920s in the US fully outside the Hollywood system:

Eleven P.M. (1928) and Webber and Watson’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

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☕Appreciate my work? Buy me a coffee! ☕

——— ——— ———

The Details:

Direction: James Cruze 

Original Play: George S. Kaufman & Marc Connelly

Adaptation: Walter Woods & Anthony Coldeway

Camera: Karl Brown

Art Direction: Max Parker (Motion Picture News, 4 July 1925)

Studio: Famous Players-Lasky (Production) Paramount (Distribution)

Performers: Esther Ralston, Gertrude Short, Edward Everett Horton, Ethel Wales, Theodore Kosloff, Erwin Connelly, James Mason, Betty Compson, Frederic Sullivan, Barbara Boudwin, Lillian Lawrence, Cyril Chadwick? ((Photoplay, July 1925))

Premiere: 5 June 1925 at The Criterion Theatre, New York, NY and 3 June 1925 at The Million Dollar Theatre in Los Angeles, CA

Status: mostly lost, three reels are extant at The Library of Congress and may be fragmentary

Length: 7[11] or 8[12] reels, variously reported as 6,874 feet[13] or 7,197 feet[14] or 6,800 feet[15] or 7,168 feet[16]

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Footnotes:

Merton of the Movies (1922, presumed lost), To the Ladies (1922, presumed lost), and Welcome Home (1925, extant) 

Thirty Days (1922, presumed lost), Merton, The Ruggles of Red Gap (1923, presumed lost), The City that Never Sleeps (1924, presumed lost), and The Goose Hangs High (1924, presumed lost) to name a few. 

To the Ladies and Ruggles 

Thompson’s article also includes a modern analogue that might be enlightening context for readers here: David Lynch going from Eraserhead to Wild at Heart or John Waters going from Pink Flamingos to Hairspray. 

Contemporary French filmmaker Germaine Dulac wrote pretty extensively about the problems of this approach. 

If anyone has come across stills from this sequence, please hit me up! I haven’t yet been able to positively ID images of Betty Compson or Theodore Kosloff from this sequence. 

I’d be remiss not to shout out the likes of Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks, Larry Semon, and numerous silent comedy shorts that break the fabric of reality for a laugh. They aren’t necessarily Expressionism, but if other forms of eschewing realism for the strange and poetic can work in comedy, why not expressionism too? For a quick and short example of what I mean see Egged On (1926) 

Additionally, you can find some newspaper opinion summaries from The Film Daily here, here, and here! 

Two side notes here: 1. There was an official soundtrack release for exhibitors in picturoll format so if a theatre had a player organ, their music issue was settled. 2. The Eastman Theatre in Rochester, NY was highly regarded for their musical accompaniment but something didn’t quite click with their presentation of Beggar and the exhibitor himself struggled to reason out why aside from a failure to program it correctly. 

Feedback was collected from Exhibitors Herald, Motion Picture News, Moving Picture World, and Variety between July and December 1925. 

Exhibitors Herald, 17 October 1925 

Exhibitors Herald, 10 October 1925; Exhibitors Herald, 19 December 1925, Exhibitors Herald, 19 September 1925 

Moving Picture World, 20 June 1925; Moving Picture World, 5 September 1925; Moving Picture World, 10 October 1925; Moving Picture World, 7 November 1925; Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 14 November 1925; Moving Picture World, 12 December 1925 

The Film Daily, 14 June 1925; Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 27 June 1925 

Motion Picture News, 4 July 1925; Exhibitors Herald, 11 July 1925, Motion Picture News, 5 September 1925 

Motion Picture News, 3 October 1925; Motion Picture News, 10 October 1925; Motion Picture News, 14 November 1925; Motion Picture News, 12 December 1925