I viewed an acetate print of 'Den Hvide Slavehandels Sidste Offer' ("The White-Slave Trade's Final Victim") at the Cinema Muto festival in Sacile, Italy, in October 2006. This film is yet another early 20th-century movie exploiting a theme that was hugely popular at the time, namely 'white slavery': white slavers were organised rings of criminals who abducted young women and forced them into prostitution, sometimes in a foreign nation where they had no friends and couldn't speak the local language. Undoubtedly, this crime genuinely existed -- and still does, in the early 21st century -- but I have difficulty believing that it was ever as glamorous or exotic as it was depicted to be in novels and films of the period. In Denmark, the passion for white-slavery novels and films appears to have originated with a 1905 novel by Elisabeth Schrøyer. Judging from this film's title, it seems to want to be the last word on the subject.
At least this movie does vary the potboiler formula slightly. The heroine, Edith von Felsen (played by an actress billed here as Clara Wieth), is a motherless girl from a middle-class background. Edith has boarded a ship to a distant city where she will live as her maiden aunt's companion. A Creole woman befriends her on the journey; Edith doesn't suspect that this woman is a talent scout for a white-slavery ring. Also aboard ship, Edith befriends a handsome and brawny engineer with the unfortunate name Faith. (Are his brothers named Hope and Charity?) The Creole arranges for Edith to be abducted when she disembarks, while her aunt receives a forged letter to explain Edith's absence. But handsome Faith is determined to find her. Will the lovers be united before Edith's abductors force her to lose her Danish cherry pastry?
SPOILERS COMING. One of the interesting and amusing aspects of this movie is the fact that the police are (more than once) depicted as incompetent and useless. It's obvious that Faith will triumph, but he does so with no help from the Danish bluecoats. Amid the hugger-mugger, there are actually TWO rival gangs of white slavers operating; just as Faith is about to rescue Edith from the first lot, the second lot snatch her for themselves. Fortunately, a servant is willing to betray the criminals. (I guess criminals just can't find loyal servants.) Another impressive aspect of 'Den Hvide Slavehandels Sidste Offer' is that the heroine is a wilful and self-minded young woman who actually makes some real efforts to win her own freedom ... as opposed to the heroines of several other white-slavery sagas of this period, who tended to be fainting damsels entirely dependent on courageous boyfriends to rescue them from a fate worse than death.
Apart from some fascinating exterior sequences in this film, we also get an impressive triptych sequence: a three-way split-screen, featuring a 'phone conversation between two villains (at opposite sides of the screen) while Clara Wieth emotes in the centre of the image. This sequence is slightly less impressive when one realises that the basic set-up was copied from yet an earlier white-slaver epic: 'Den Hvide slavinde', a 1910 Fotorama production which now appears to be lost except for a few tantalising fragments.
It's a shame that most white-slavery films (including this one) are so overwrought that they make a genuinely serious issue -- sexual enslavement -- seem risible. However, this movie achieves most of what it set out to accomplish, and I'll rate 'Den Hvide Slavehandels Sidste Offer' 9 out of 10.
At least this movie does vary the potboiler formula slightly. The heroine, Edith von Felsen (played by an actress billed here as Clara Wieth), is a motherless girl from a middle-class background. Edith has boarded a ship to a distant city where she will live as her maiden aunt's companion. A Creole woman befriends her on the journey; Edith doesn't suspect that this woman is a talent scout for a white-slavery ring. Also aboard ship, Edith befriends a handsome and brawny engineer with the unfortunate name Faith. (Are his brothers named Hope and Charity?) The Creole arranges for Edith to be abducted when she disembarks, while her aunt receives a forged letter to explain Edith's absence. But handsome Faith is determined to find her. Will the lovers be united before Edith's abductors force her to lose her Danish cherry pastry?
SPOILERS COMING. One of the interesting and amusing aspects of this movie is the fact that the police are (more than once) depicted as incompetent and useless. It's obvious that Faith will triumph, but he does so with no help from the Danish bluecoats. Amid the hugger-mugger, there are actually TWO rival gangs of white slavers operating; just as Faith is about to rescue Edith from the first lot, the second lot snatch her for themselves. Fortunately, a servant is willing to betray the criminals. (I guess criminals just can't find loyal servants.) Another impressive aspect of 'Den Hvide Slavehandels Sidste Offer' is that the heroine is a wilful and self-minded young woman who actually makes some real efforts to win her own freedom ... as opposed to the heroines of several other white-slavery sagas of this period, who tended to be fainting damsels entirely dependent on courageous boyfriends to rescue them from a fate worse than death.
Apart from some fascinating exterior sequences in this film, we also get an impressive triptych sequence: a three-way split-screen, featuring a 'phone conversation between two villains (at opposite sides of the screen) while Clara Wieth emotes in the centre of the image. This sequence is slightly less impressive when one realises that the basic set-up was copied from yet an earlier white-slaver epic: 'Den Hvide slavinde', a 1910 Fotorama production which now appears to be lost except for a few tantalising fragments.
It's a shame that most white-slavery films (including this one) are so overwrought that they make a genuinely serious issue -- sexual enslavement -- seem risible. However, this movie achieves most of what it set out to accomplish, and I'll rate 'Den Hvide Slavehandels Sidste Offer' 9 out of 10.
