George Kibbe Turner, author of The Street of the Forgotten Men

On May 10th, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will screen its new restoration of The Street of Forgotten Men - Louise Brooks' little seen first film. More information about that special event can be found HERE. 

This month, and ahead of that very special event, I thought to run a few excerpts from my forthcoming book, The Street of Forgotten Men, from Story to Screen and Beyond, which will be published later this year, hopefully. 

This excerpt focuses on author George Kibbe Turner, whose 1925 story "The Street of the Forgotten Men" was adapted as the 1925 film. Turner is an interesting figure in his own right, as a muckraking journalist, as a novelist and short story writer, and as Hollywood figure.

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George Kibbe Turner (1869-1952) was a well-regarded writer who first made his name as a muckraking journalist, and then as the author of a number of short stories and novels. Notably, between 1920 and 1932, nine of Turner’s stories were made into thirteen films. At the time, Turner’s renown was such that studios often evoked his name in their promotions and advertisements. (See Turner's IMDb page for more about his efforts in Hollywood.)

Turner began writing for magazines in his early twenties, while working as a journalist for the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts. By 1899, he had placed a small number of pieces in McClure's, a popular magazine which would soon publish his first novel, The Taskmaster (1902); at the time, The Nation described Turner’s debut as “thoughtful, eager, even impassioned.” 

In 1906, Turner was hired by McClure’s as a staff writer. His first major assignment was to report on the new form of municipal government set up in Galveston, Texas following the devastating hurricane of 1900. Turner's widely read article, “Galveston: A Business Corporation,” proved highly influential and helped secure his reputation. 

During his more than ten years with McClure’s, Turner made his name as one of the leading muckrakers, or muckraking journalists. His reform-minded contemporaries included Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Frank Norris, Jacob Riis and most famously Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle. Early on, Sinclair was a champion of Turner’s work. In 1922, Sinclair wrote “Ten or fifteen years ago this man used to write for McClure’s, and I think, for the American Magazine. At this time these magazines were honestly edited by independent and high minded men, and George Kibbe Turner was a ‘coming writer.’ I shall never forget some of his short stories, which were as good as anything published in the magazine in those days. There was a series of Wall Street stories, full of bitter, burning contempt for our money masters and their pride and pomp. There was another series called ‘Butterflies,’ dealing with the showgirls and artists’ models, and other poor feminine waifs of the great Metropolis of Mammon. They were full of human feeling and sympathetic insight into the plight of frail human creatures struggling to keep decent in a world which starved them into indecency. I wrote Turner several letters of friendly sympathy, and tried hard to find a book publisher for those stories.”

Turner’s journalism – which spotlighted the entanglement of local government and vice – included an exposé of drink, gambling, and prostitution titled “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities” (April 1907), as well as “The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the White Slave Trade under Tammany Hall” (November 1909). Each were widely read, each provoked controversy, and each stirred calls for action while effecting local politics.

With the decline in muckraking journalism, Turner returned to fiction. The stories and novels that followed – melodramatic and at times as provocative as his journalism, appeared in popular publications like the Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, Red Book, and Woman’s Home Companion. Others were serialized in newspapers across the country. [A few of Turner's stories were also anthologized, and at least one or two were published in book form in Europe.]

Turner’s best-known novels include The Last Christian (1914), The Biography of a Million Dollars (1918), and Red Friday (1919) – the latter an early red-scare novel which warns of the dangers of Bolshevism when a Lenin-like character appears in America. There was also Hagar's Hoard (1920) – which follows the life of a Confederate miser amidst an outbreak of yellow fever, and White Shoulders (1921), a society drama in which a mother tries to marry off her daughter  to the highest bidder. The latter was made into a film, as were a number of other of Turner more sensational stories. Among them was Held in Trust (1920), a Metro release which starred May Allison.

First National adapted Turner’s 1922 story “Those Who Dance” – about a federal agent and a gang of bootleggers, into a film of the same name in 1924. It starred Blanche Sweet, Bessie Love, and Warner Baxter. In 1930, Warner Bros. remade the story as a talkie starring Monte Blue, Lila Lee, William Boyd and Betty Compson. That same year, Warner Bros. filmed “Those Who Dance” as Der Tanz geht weiter, a German-language version of the story shot in Hollywood with a German-speaking cast which included William Dieterle as director and star. A Spanish-language version, Los que danzan, was also made starring Antonio Moreno and Maria Alba, as was a French-language version, Contre-enquête, with Suzy Vernon and others.

Perhaps the best known film adapted from a Turner story may be The Girl in the Glass Cage (1929), which stars Loretta Young as a pretty young cashier at a movie theater who is stalked by a neighborhood thug. A few years later, Richard Dix starred in RKO’s Roar of the Dragon (1932), which was based on Turner’s “A Passage to Hong Kong.” 

“The Street of the Forgotten Men” (with the determining article, the, before the word forgotten), is representative of Turner's fiction. The short story appeared in the February 14, 1925 issue of Liberty magazine, and was described as a “Romance of the Underworld – The Strange Story of a Bowery Cinderella and a Beggar Who Lost Himself for Love.” It was illustrated by Dudley G. Summers, one of the name illustrators of the time.

 “The Street of the Forgotten Men” sketches incidents in the life of Easy Money Charlie, a “fake bandager” who feigns the loss of an arm in order to solicit sympathy and coins from passers-by on the street. Charlie is part of a gang of professional beggars, and their gathering place is Diamond Mike’s old Dead House, a saloon whose back room is known as the “Cripple Factory.”

Charlie (played by Percy Marmont in the film, depicted above) is a decent sort at heart, and he is convinced to raise a child, a girl, of another down-and out local, the dying Portland Fancy (played by Juliet Brenon). He does so, though removed from the squalor of life on the street. The girl grows up to become a young women (played by Mary Brian), and Charlie hopes she will marry someone better off – someone well-to-do, but all along he must contend with Bridgeport White-Eye (played by John Harrington), another beggar who feigns blindness and is suspicious of the graft Charlie must surely be gaining by his act of kindness. (Louise Brooks is companion to Bridgeport White-Eye, who she calls "Whitey.")

Like other of Turner’s works, “The Street of the Forgotten Men” caught the attention of readers as well as movie makers, who saw its colorful characters and unusual setting as ideal for adaption to the screen. More about the story behind the film can be found on these earlier LBS blog posts "Louise Brooks and The Street of Forgotten Men, part 1" and "Louise Brooks and The Street of Forgotten Men, part 2" and "Louise Brooks and The Street of Forgotten Men, part 3."

 

 

 

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