My edit of a print ad for the Alla Nazimova film Billions, reworked to present some of my cosplays
It feels like eons ago that I started this blog, but I’ve never made a proper introductory post!
Watch More Movies is a celebration of cinema and (hopefully) a way to present the medium with new hooks to encourage you, dear readers, to discover new-old films and filmmakers.
My cosplays are typically $0 endeavors—I try to put the looks together only using materials at hand and styling my own hair. I started creating self-portraits of my closet cosplays about a decade ago and this blog began as a central repository for them. BUT I’ve branched out since, allowing me to research and write about films that I’m unable to cosplay!
Here are some highlights of my work:
Cosplay the Classics
A catch-all category for my cosplay posts, usually accompanied by essays on the performer and film
Lost, but Not Forgotten
Profiles of lost American films of the silent era constructed from the invaluable Media History Digital Library
Best Films before 1924?
Just over a hundred years ago, in 1924, Screenland magazine took stock of the maturing feature-film medium. Canvassing industry figures like magazine and newspaper critics and editors, writers, and the head of a major studio and then including feedback from the magazine’s readers; Screenland reported the “Best Screen Dramas” made to date. In this series, I research the films that made the cut and overall will try to suss out why the industry placed value on these particular titles.
The Vamps
Series of cosplays and essays about different facets of the Vamp archetype
A Century of Glamour Ghouls
Surveying 100 years of horror filmmaking through cosplay (including tutorials)
How’d They Do That?
My series using historical articles about how stunts and special effects were executed in the 1910s/1920s accompanied by gifs or stills whenever possible
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Occasionally I also feature spotlight pieces on specific films or filmmakers. This blog is highly associative—the things I read or research usually lead directly into the next topic that I’ll research and write about. This past year’s main themes have been experimental filmmaking, how the origin story of the American film industry was (re)written in the 1920s and how women filmmakers were written out of said story, and Orientalism in American films of the interwar period. (All these topics are related to one another by the way!)
I also do regular round-ups of what I’m watching, reading, writing, researching, etc.
Here, on the tumblr edition of the blog, I post edits and gif sets of films almost every day! There you might find anything from silent Italian epics to experimental video shorts to anime pilots to cyberpunk musicals.
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About me:
I definitely was not born in the wrong era, but I’ve always been old. My academic/professional background is in information science, cultural history, and film. I speak a smattering of different languages—mostly of the romance and slavic varieties. I was the 1,529th Ironman Heavymetalweight Champion. I’ve been hugged by a walrus and an emu (not at the same time). One day, when the time is right, and I’m of stronger character, I hope to own a cat.
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Disclaimer: I have never, nor will I ever use generative “AI” in any of my work. Please refrain from using gen “AI” in relation to my work in any capacity. Thank you for being a friend!
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If you’ve learned something from this blog, if you’ve been inspired to try out new aesthetics, or to watch different types of movies, or if you’ve just liked my pictures—please consider supporting my work!
My title-card collage of the 1919 George Loane Tucker film The Miracle Man
Back in 1924, Screenland magazine took stock of the maturing medium of feature-filmmaking. The magazine canvassed industry figures like film critics, news and trade paper editors, and writers, and then folded in feedback from the magazine’s readers. The result was Screenland’s report of the “Best Screen Dramas” made to date. [More about that here!]
In tenth place on that list was an epic Tudor-era adventure drama starring Marion Davies, When Knighthood was in Flower. Number nine on the list was something completely different: a small-town drama about the regeneration of a group of small-time crooks—made with no stars. This is George Loane Tucker’s The Miracle Man (1919).
The Film
Unfortunately, The Miracle Man is presumed lost save for three minutes of of clips. So, I’ll spend a bit more time in this write-up describing the film based on contemporary reports.[1]
The story of The Miracle Man began with a serialized novel by Frank L. Packard, which started appearing on the pages of Munsey’s Magazine in February of 1914. The novel was a middling success. The story picks up at the end of 1914 when George M. Cohan debuted a Broadway play based on the novel. The play had a short two-month run on Broadway and likewise achieved only middling success.
Jumping ahead five eventful years, film director/writer/producer George Loane Tucker saw the cinematic potential in it. Tucker’s crack at the story resulted in a renowned critical success and box-office smash. How did he pull that off? Well, let’s start by talking about this story that multiple writers found so troublesome to tell.
The continuity for The Miracle Man was hashed out by Tucker with his wife, actress Elisabeth Risdon, and journalist Wid Gunning before any of the roles had been cast.
Here’s a little summary of what that team came up with:
The action commences in New York’s Chinatown. A disfigured man wretchedly drags himself through filthy streets. The sympathies of a group of slumming tourists are provoked and they offer him alms. A scene plays out between a poor young woman and her abusive boyfriend/pimp, which also elicits sympathy and monetary aid from the crowds of tourists. The woman returns to her apartment and the act is dropped. The disfigured man crawls into the room and, behind closed doors, loosens up his joints and stands upright. The implied pimp is yet another compatriot. The crew starts counting their take. Unexpectedly, one of the tourists arrives at the door; the one who had helped guide the charity of his fellow travelers. Surprise! He’s none other than the brains of the gang.
[Full GIF set of the surviving scene here]
READ on BELOW the JUMP!
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
Variety: 9, 26 September 1919; 10, 24, 31 October 1919; 7, 14, 21 November 1919
My title-card collage of the 1919 George Loane Tucker film The Miracle Man
Back in 1924, Screenland magazine took stock of the maturing medium of feature-filmmaking. The magazine canvassed industry figures like film critics, news and trade paper editors, and writers, and then folded in feedback from the magazine’s readers. The result was Screenland’s report of the “Best Screen Dramas” made to date. [More about that here!]
In tenth place on that list was an epic Tudor-era adventure drama starring Marion Davies, When Knighthood was in Flower. Number nine on the list was something completely different: a small-town drama about the regeneration of a group of small-time crooks—made with no stars. This is George Loane Tucker’s The Miracle Man (1919).
The Film
Unfortunately, The Miracle Man is presumed lost save for three minutes of of clips. So, I’ll spend a bit more time in this write-up describing the film based on contemporary reports.[1]
The story of The Miracle Man began with a serialized novel by Frank L. Packard, which started appearing on the pages of Munsey’s Magazine in February of 1914. The novel was a middling success. The story picks up at the end of 1914 when George M. Cohan debuted a Broadway play based on the novel. The play had a short two-month run on Broadway and likewise achieved only middling success.
Jumping ahead five eventful years, film director/writer/producer George Loane Tucker saw the cinematic potential in it. Tucker’s crack at the story resulted in a renowned critical success and box-office smash. How did he pull that off? Well, let’s start by talking about this story that multiple writers found so troublesome to tell.
The continuity for The Miracle Man was hashed out by Tucker with his wife, actress Elisabeth Risdon, and journalist Wid Gunning before any of the roles had been cast.
Here’s a little summary of what that team came up with:
The action commences in New York’s Chinatown. A disfigured man wretchedly drags himself through filthy streets. The sympathies of a group of slumming tourists are provoked and they offer him alms. A scene plays out between a poor young woman and her abusive boyfriend/pimp, which also elicits sympathy and monetary aid from the crowds of tourists. The woman returns to her apartment and the act is dropped. The disfigured man crawls into the room and, behind closed doors, loosens up his joints and stands upright. The implied pimp is yet another compatriot. The crew starts counting their take. Unexpectedly, one of the tourists arrives at the door; the one who had helped guide the charity of his fellow travelers. Surprise! He’s none other than the brains of the gang.
[Full GIF set of the surviving scene here]
READ on BELOW the JUMP!
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
Variety: 9, 26 September 1919; 10, 24, 31 October 1919; 7, 14, 21 November 1919
