• Directed by H.B. Parkinson
• Written by Frank Miller, based on the novel The Love Story of a Mormon by Winifred Graham
• Starring
  • Evelyn Brent
  • Louis Willoughby
  • Ward McAllister
  • Olaf Hytten
  • Olive Sloane

If you think that public attention toward Mormons got a little tawdry because of the Romney campaign (“Have you heard about his underwear?“), brother, you ain’t seen nothing.

It was always about polygamy. The Church officially ended the practice in 1890 after decades of battle with the U.S. Courts and the federal government; it took over a decade for the realization that this was to be the new policy of the Church, not just a ruse to keep government agents off their back, to trickle down through the membership. After 1904, participation in plural marriage pretty much resulted in automatic excommunication.

But Mormonism = polygamy in the eyes of much of the western world. Never mind other doctrines that diverged from mainstream Christendom like continuing revelation, new scripture, the pre-existence of spirits, the separateness of the members of the Trinity… it was the idea that them Mormons got themselves more than one wife that captured the imagination. By all historical accounts, Mormon polygamy wasn’t an especially salacious enterprise, certainly no more so than your average monogamous marriage, and probably quite a bit less; the photos that have been passed down of polygamous families don’t exactly call to mind the male fantasy of the sexual libertine with his harem. But that imaginary conception of Mormon marriage fell on fertile soul in the minds of those who were inclined to think the worst of the Other simply because of his Otherness.

The waters of the Great Salt Lake are an acceptable substitute for Visine.

The image thus took root of the Mormon missionary as “marital predator,” whose mission to preach to the world was really a cover for “converting” and seducing young white women who would then be forced into a life of subjugation for their Mormon husband-masters. Such rumors without foundation held such sway at home or abroad that in 1902, Mormon Apostle Reed Smoot, who had been appointed as one of Utah’s U.S. Senators, was forced to go through several years of Senate hearings to determine if a Mormon could and should be allowed to serve in federal office. One of the points brought up in the hearings was this idea of a Mormon “harvest” of British and other European which was seen as thinly-disguised white slavery, and Senator Smoot was forced to produce Utah immigation records which showed that the number of converts gathering to Utah from overseas was at parity — just as many men as women, and more couples and families than singles of either gender.

Of course, to those devoted to warning the world of a seductive danger, facts hold little headway, which is why, in 1922, Pyramid Pictures could present to the British viewing public the completely unironic cautionary tale Trapped by the Mormons. The film was based on a 1911 novel by Winifred Graham called The Love Story of a Mormon, which was a proud and avowed propaganda piece; there’s no evidence that Graham ever actually met a Mormon in the flesh, but it’s apparent from her novel that she never heard a salacious rumor about them which she didn’t accept as gospel truth. Apart from an inexplicable change in every major character’s name between the novel and the film, Trapped by the Mormons follows The Love Story of a Mormon pretty closely, so we’ll dispense with the book and concentrate on the movie from here out (this being a movie review and all). And lucky for us; while the movie is overblown, hamfisted, and numbingly melodramatic, the book is stultifying read with that particular prose style common to works whose intent is edification first, entertainment second.

DARE YOU WATCH — For the First Time in Any Motion Picture — The MORMON MIND MELD???

If there is any single memorable image in Trapped by the Mormons, we’re exposed to it for the first time in the very first shot: Eyes wide, glaring eyes of Elder Isoldi Keene (Louis Willoughby), Mormon missionary with, we are told, “mesmeric powers” which he uses to get recruits. (Because obviously no one would be convinced of LDS claims without mind control.) And, we are told just as promptly (thank heaven for the bald expository powers of title cards!) that his object at the moment is the young lady Nora Prescott (Evelyn Brent), a single girl and only child who lives with her parents in Manchester while her intended is fulfilling his commission at sea. For days, Isoldi has maneuvered himself to be in Nora’s path to work so that he can become a “nodding acquaintance,” and today’s the day that he breaks the ice and speaks to her about a “message of salvation.” The title cards, unfortunately, don’t contain any such relevant message, but thanks to Isoldi’s mesmeric powers, Nora comes away with the powerful impression of him as “a wonderful vision of all-conquering manhood.” Yes, that’s a quote from the title cards.

Thanks to her meeting with Isoldi and the pamphlets he gives her, the purity of her soul is already compromised; when her paralytic father (Cecil Morton York) asks her where a stray (and noxiously Mormon) pamphlet came from, she tells the first lie of her life (!!) to say that she found it in the street. Her father, an avowed Mormon hater who “know[s] for a fact that they still practise polygamy” (no documentation is ever provided), takes the occasion to rail on this new method of distributing their infernal literature. (Litter — the devil’s handiwork!)

But being entranced yet by Isoldi’s manhood — it’s all-encompassing, you know — Nora introduces the girls she works with to him and brings Mormon pamphlets to their reading group. They’re just as smitten with whatever magnetism this one missionary has for the opposite sex, and swallow his message of divine power easily when he contrives to raise someone from the dead in a doctor’s wagon convenient to the park where they’re meeting. It’s a fake, of course; the “doctor” and the “patient” and her husband are all Mormons, and thus will undertake any subterfuge to trap young British women. If only the Mormons had ever shown a penchant for long mustaches, this would be the perfect place to twirl them.

Or, as the title card reads, “Isoldi had caught his bird….. like thousands of other dupes….. lured from home and into the Mormon net.” I swear, I could put together an amusing essay with nothing but card text.

Nora has fallen for the faith completely, or at least for the missionary; she has her father deliver to her fiance Jim (George Wynn) her cancellation of their engagement, and naturally the two of them suspect Mormonism is to blame. (After all, she once brought home a pamphlet! What could be clearer evidence than that?) She agrees with Isoldi’s plan to “snatch you from an unworthy home” and spirit her away to be his wife.

I guess this is one thing this movie got right: We Mormon guys are hella good kissers.

The plan for doing so without arousing more suspicion than necessary is for Isoldi’s sister Sadie (Olive Sloane) to pose as a authoress who needs a secretary for a tour of the Continent. That gets Nora out of the Prescott house with a minimum of fuss, and into the Mormon “safehouse” in London called (wait for it) “Gethsemani.” A life of wedded bliss awaits Nora!

Jim, though, isn’t taking any of this lying down. Early on, he’s gotten in touch with a retired policeman turned private detective to watch those danged Mormons. Between the two of them, they tail Nora to Gethsemani, and take digs across the street to watch for trouble.

And yes, trouble comes, right about when Nora finds out why Sadie is acting increasingly annoyed. She’s not Isoldi’s sister — she’s his wife, who’s being displaced in his affections by Nora! (Let’s not even try to examine the wisdom of taking your first wife along on a wife-finding mission to England, okay?) And then, when Isoldi and the other sinister elders discover that Sadie has betrayed them and is trying to help Nora escape, they pronounce a sentence of death upon her! (And maybe, the other elders mused without Isoldi’s input, Nora ought to die, too! Just to be evil!)

Even by the standards of the day, Trapped by the Mormons is a cheap and silly movie. The levels of melodrama presented should have the audience looking for a railroad track on which the villain can leave the trussed-up heroine. Given the enlightened audience this site attract, I don’t need to belabor the point that the accusation of “They’re after our womenfolk!” is one of the hoariest cliches of engendering prejudice and othering the dissimilar. And the Mormon menace as portrayed here hardly even qualifies as one-dimensional, with their avowed missionary purpose of spreading their faith being nothing more than an elaborate ruse for trapping young English girls.

Nora gets her right Brit dander up. (No, that’s not dandruff. Just speckles on the film print.)

It’s also a movie which, like the book on which it was based, substitutes fervor and a will to believe the worst of the enemy for any kind of research. Isoldi’s speech is peppered at random with words like “celestial” which were gleaned, no doubt, from some pamphlet found on the road. (Litter! It’s more than discourteous, it’s insidious!) But he fails the smell test early on when he describes “where the wild Salt Lake lies at the foot of the great crystal temple…” (It’s about fifteen miles from the shore of the Great Salt Lake to the Salt Lake Temple, which is made of granite.) And it gets worse. Mormon baptisms have never been secret (though naturally those who would disrupt the proceedings are not encouraged to attend), so there’s no excuse for the portrayal of the “secret” baptismal font in the basement of Gethsemani, with Isoldi and the other elders dressed in something that looks like cassocks and performing a sprinkling rite that would look more at home among Catholics than Latter-day Saints.

More than being just human evil, though, the Mormons’ portrayal crosses the line into supernatural archetypes, with Isoldi being rendered almost as the vampire in Victorian lore. (No, this comparison isn’t original with me.) The mesmeric stare, the intimations of “all-conquering”sexual appeal, the way in which he brings the fake “dead woman” out of the hypnotic trance that simulates death, the manner in which he looms over poor drugged Nora on her mattress…. All that’s missing is an aversion to sunlight. Never is this identification between Mormons and vampires so strong as in the final struggle between Isoldi and Nora while police are breaking into Gethsemani; it’s not exactly clear why Isoldi is grappling with Nora so ferociously, but you’d swear he was trying to bite her on the neck.

Today, the movie is characterized as “the Reefer Madness of religious films,” and its camp value is so highly prized that a 2005 silent remake to play up the ridiculous overreaches of the original. Even upon its release, the movie was lambasted by the London Daily Mail as “an insult to public intelligence.” However, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public, and Trapped by the Mormons, along with a spate of other anti-Mormon melodramas around the same time (including A Mormon Maid (1917) and Married to a Mormon (1922)), contributed to difficulties for and a general distrust of for-real Mormon missionaries in Britain (who were definitely NOT on the make), as a general “where there’s smoke there’s fire” public reaction.

That’s an awfully aggressive door approach, Elder.

But bygones are bygones, I guess; the Grapevine Video DVD release features a new score by Blaine Gale, performed on the Wurlitzer organ at Peery’s Egyptian Theater in Ogden, Utah; it also includes a full-length commentary by Brigham Young University film historian James D’Arc, who calls it “a hilarious artifact.” All I know is that mesmeric powers over young women are desperately lacking in Mormon men these days, as evidenced by the fact that it’s all we can do to hold onto one wife at most.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0