Vintage original 4.75 x 6 in. US double-weight matte photograph from the historic teens silent film serial, THE PERILS OF PAULINE, released in 1914 by the Eclectic Film Company and directed by Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie.
 
The Perils of Pauline is the most famous of American silent film serials and catapulted Pearl white to super-stardom. The image features an interior shot of Pearl (Pearl White) looking with some trepidation at her guardian, Raymond Owen (Paul Panzer), as Harry Marvin (Crane Wilbur), holds his hand between them while protecting Pearl. This photograph was signed at the time in black ink by Paul Panzer thusly: To Alma Mohr - with sincere good wishes - Paul W. Panzer. It has been trimmed in fine+ condition.
 
Provenance: The John Robyns Collection; a prior owner indicated they received this photograph in 1941.
 
*"The Perils of Pauline is a 1914 American melodrama silent film serial produced by William Randolph Hearst and released by the Eclectic film company, shown in bi-weekly installments, featuring Pearl White as the title character, an ambitious young heiress with an independent nature (in the time before women could vote in the United States) and a desire for adventure. 
Despite popular associations, Pauline was never tied to a railroad track in the series, an image that was added to popular mythology by scenes in stage melodramas of the 1800's, in serials featuring the resourceful "railroad girl" Helen Holmes in her long-running series The Hazards of Helen and other railroad-themed cliffhangers, such as The Girl and the Game. The images of Holmes' railroad adventures were blended in the public mind with Pearl White's cliffhanging adventures, probably because White became the bigger celebrity and was so better-remembered.
 
Much of the film was shot in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where many early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based at the beginning of the 20th century. Scenes were also filmed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Staten Island, New York. The term "cliffhanger" may have originated with the series, owing to a number of episodes filmed on or around the New Jersey Palisades—though it is also likely to refer to situations in stories of this type where the hero or heroine is hanging from a cliff, seemingly with no way out, until the next episode or last-minute resolution.
 
Pearl White performed most of her own stunts for the serial, but also was stunt doubled by a man. Filmed in the Adirondacks in New York, the stunt double rode a horse off a cliff into the lake below. Considerable risk was involved. In one incident, a balloon carrying White escaped and carried her across the Hudson River into a storm, before landing miles away. In another incident her back was permanently injured in a fall.
 
The serial had 20 episodes, the first being three reels (30 minutes), and the rest two reels (20 minutes) each. The final peril has Pauline sitting in a target boat as the Navy opens fire. The idea was also used in To the Shores of Tripoli (1942). After the original run, it was reshown in theaters a number of times, sometimes in re-edited versions, through the 1920's. Today, The Perils of Pauline is known to exist only in a condensed, reformatted 9-chapter version (approximately 214 minutes), released in Europe in 1916 by Pathé Freres.
 
In 2008, The Perils of Pauline was selected by the Library of Congress for the United States National Film Registry, as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
*(source: Wikipedia)
 
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