The postwar decade of the 1950s saw a marked increase in interest in the Collins affair. Hollywood found Floyd first. As if to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the event, a full-length movie appeared in 1950 called Ace in the Hole (later retitled The Big Carnival). Produced by Billy Wilder, it was set in the Southwest and had as its stars Kirk Douglas and Jan Sterling. In the screenplay, Sterling was the wife of the proprietor of a combination gas station and curio shop who was trapped by a cave-in in an old Indian cliff dwelling while hunting salable artifacts. Douglas, a has-been big-city reporter, prolonged the rescue and built up the suspense for his own purposes. Sterling, who hated her husband, encouraged this subterfuge, and in the end the victim died. The film not only emphasized the reporter’s ambition and the wife’s infidelity, but also pointed up the greed of political and business interests in the area. It particularly sensationalized the carnival atmosphere attending the abortive rescue attempt, even showing a ferris wheel in operation at the site. Roughly paralleling the Collins tragedy, this movie quite naturally recalled it to mind and added immeasurably to a growing distortion of the real Sand Cave situation.
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Whatever Homer might have accomplished in straightening out the record would probably have gone for naught anyway, since in the next year, 1959, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Penn Warren published a revamped version of the Collins tragedy in a work called The Cave. That Warren should have used this incident in one of his writings is not strange; he was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905, and was twenty years old when the Collins affair occurred. The Cave was an overdrawn novel that preached the idea that anyone who “lives with a guilty secret lives in a dark cave.” The person in the book who had the darkest secret was Isaac Sumpter, son of a Baptist preacher, who pretended to talk to and feed Jasper Herrick, a Korean War veteran, who was trapped in a Tennessee cave. Besides Isaac, who was Jasper’s partner, the plot revolved around Jasper’s invalid father (Jack), a younger brother (Monty), and a girl (Jo-Lea) who was loved by both Jasper and Monty. Each of these harbored deep-seated reasons for not wanting Jasper rescued.
Containing lavish quantities of religious bigotry, personal fear, greed, and sex, the novel moved inexorably toward the inevitable climax. While exploring a cave worthy of commercial development, Jasper was caught on the edge of a deep pit by a rock falling on his foot. Rescuers thereafter hurried in and out, the main one being Isaac Sumpter. Ultimately, the press descended on the site and huge crowds milled about as Isaac reported fictitious news from below. Johntown, Tennessee, was the Cave City of the book where conniving businessmen were busily making an economic killing. There was also a professor of geology from the state university and a mine superintendent present. In the end, only one person ever actually reached the trapped man and that was Isaac’s father, preacher MacCarland Sumpter, who at the conclusion of the novel realized that all of them, including his son, were liars. Jasper, of course, had long since died.
The Cave was not intended as history. Yet its similarity to the Collins affair easily caused its fictional aspects to rub off onto the real thing. The net impact was to reinforce in reader’s minds a belief that Floyd Collins, too, had been done in by opportunists, money-grubbers, his friends, and especially his partners. The morbid nature of the crowd, the unending carnival atmosphere, the inexplicable slowness of the rescue, the commercial exploitation, the impure motives—these remained when all other details were forgotten.
On the entertainment front, the appearance of Trapped! provided a literary and historic gold mine for playwrights and magazine writers. Time and the Rock, a play by Warren Hammack and Beverly Byers Pevitts, opened and ran from July 24 through September 12, 1981, at the Horse Cave Theater in Horse Cave, Kentucky. The stage play dramatized the conflicts and interactions of the Collins family based on some of the scenes portrayed in Trapped! Hammack interviewed members of the Collins family and reviewed newspaper clippings. The play ran one season and was never restaged.
A highly fictionalized drama, The Death of Floyd Collins, by Tim Hatcher, opened in 1989 as an outdoor entertainment in the Green River Amphitheater in Brownsville, Kentucky. It has continued to run for ten years. Performed on Friday and Saturday nights during July and August, this two-act melodrama features community residents in all the parts. Names of characters other than Floyd were changed and, to spice up the action, Floyd is portrayed as having shot the sheriff. “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry,” claims Ricky Skaggs, who plays the part of Ben (based on Lee Collins). Skaggs states he got the idea for producing the play after reading Trapped!
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