THE IMPERISHABLE PAULINE
Meyer, Ernest L.
The Imperishable Pauline By ERNEST L. MEYER IN a recent movie gossip column is recorded the interesting fact that a firm of Hollywood producers plans to make, in streamlined form, that saga of...
...In her pursuit of purity Pauline was aided by the fact that in those days a villain was recognizable from the moment he entered the stage and unveiled a pepso-dental leer...
...Moreover, the villain no longer forth-rightly bludgeons the heroine with a rubber plant or throws her off the Brooklyn Bridge, but he probes her innards with Freudian lancets...
...And with a delight that seemed never to lag we would watch the same program 3 times over, each time screaming at the dramatic climax when Ford Sterling put limburger in the band player's tuba, or Pearl White, bludgeoned and bound but still beautiful, lay within gnashing range of a buzz-saw...
...Each nickel show, before the ornate era of console organs, was equipped with a girl pianist, generally nearsighted and afflicted with a cold...
...And the villain always remained in character, what there was of it...
...Her repertoire consisted of a dozen "pieces" which she had a genius for playing at the most inappropriate time...
...THE illustrations were made to fit any love song, consisting simply of 2 lovers vaguely intertwined under a full and rather bilious moon...
...It was in that age that Pearl White reached stardom by regularly, once a month or so, plunging off a precipice to preserve her good name...
...Pearl White, who played the part of Pauline through long and harrowing years, was exposed to many temptations but never succumbed...
...She would leap off a crag rather than capitulate...
...She also played the scores for the illustrated song feature on the program...
...In these days of the decadent drama she would have encountered far greater peril...
...She would unfailingly tinkle "Hearts and Flowers" when the express train fell off the mountain, and hammer "The Burning of Rome" when the hero fell into the arms of the palpitating Pauline...
...Her favorite piece was "Narcissus," and with remarkable talent she could make "Narcissus" fit any scene on the screen from the slaughter of a pony express messenger to a tinted travelogue showing a Schenectady tourist scratching flea-bites while climbing a pyramid...
...Most of the girl's sheet music had a blue and white cover with a big Bromo Seltzer ad on it and was given away as a premium at the corner drug store...
...A re-issue today of "The Perils of Pauline" would rekindle in many of us the memory of the neighborhood "nickel shows" of 35 years ago...
...In the modern sychological plays the villain is rarely distinguishable from the hero or the second butler...
...It was possible in those halcyon days to spend a whole afternoon in the theater for a single nickel, and it was the custom of many mothers to pack off their children to the cinema as a sort of cheap nursery, though the things we learned would never have been approved by Parson Weems...
...At the greatest crises on the screen this girl pianist had a habit of blowing her nose or taking the gum from her mouth and sticking it under the bass octave on the keyboard...
...So that after 2 tremendous reels one could go home confident that whatever perils confronted Pauline in Episode 28 she would continue to lead a thoroughly sanitary life...
...This, remember, was in the innocent age of pompadours, flannel penwipers, a plate of sea-foam for the Sunday night sweetheart, when "The Prisoner of Zenda" was a best seller and the chief home industry was pyrography and making monstrous ash-trays out of glass bowls and cigar bands...
...Occasionally, to be sure, she was interrupted in this laudable leap by a break in the film and a sign flashed on the screen reading "Just a Moment, Please...
...The columnist, Hedda Hopper, adds that a dash of satire may be added to the scripts, which would be too bad, for in those brave days we took our Pauline straight, without the fizz of sophistication and soda...
...The moment he displayed his bicuspids and Sweet Caporal cigarette underneath his mustache, Pauline would know that his soul was mumbling dark deeds...
...SO Pauline, though pursued and bedeviled as no other woman in history, remained pure...
...The Imperishable Pauline By ERNEST L. MEYER IN a recent movie gossip column is recorded the interesting fact that a firm of Hollywood producers plans to make, in streamlined form, that saga of intrepid womanhood known a generation ago as "The Perils of Pauline...
...But always we knew that if we sat tight and waited patiently the film would be mended and so would dear, durable, unbreakable, and triumphantly pure Pauline...
...An hour or so later there would always be a hiatus in her playing when she struggled desperately to wrench from its roosting place her priceless wad of peppermint cutlet...
...For Pauline was straight, straight as a beacon in a naughty world, though buffeted by all the evil winds that blow...
...The movie houses were long, narrow, unventilated, and smelled strongly of disinfectants which ushers would squirt generously during intermissions, probably to get rid of long-sitting squatters who had had a quarrel with their wives and didn't want to go home...
...The songs were saccharine, and the lantern-slide illustrations, like the voices of the audience, were cracked...
...His attack is always oblique instead of direct, and you see the poor girl's cerebrum slowly being sliced to ribbons before she gets wise to the monster...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 28
