Traffic in Souls
A FILM BY: George Loane Tucker
STARRING: Jane Gail, Ethel Grandin, William H. Turner
Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Programmed and co-presented by the Chicago Film Society
The earliest feature films to grace American screens were spectacles imported from the stage or from Europe. It's no wonder that TRAFFIC IN SOULS, an all-American, effortlessly cinematic blend of thrills, melodrama, and social critique, would stand out like a flare in a tinderbox. Promoted as a "full-blooded sermon" that allegedly dramatized the results of a highly-publicized 1910 grand jury investigation into sex trafficking chaired by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., TRAFFIC IN SOULS is a Progressive Era tract outfitted with enough pulp espionage to make it a runty American cousin of the hyperbolic crime cinema of Louis Feuillade and Fritz Lang. With a frenetic tempo that rivals D.W. Griffith, TRAFFIC IN SOULS may be past its centenary, but it's never stopped to catch its breath.
Print courtesy of the Library of Congress
Technical Information
Production Year: 1913
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Run Time: 75 mins
Format: 35mm