enda
Film

The White Slave Trade

August Blom, Denmark, 1910

33 min.DK/FeatureSilent films

Anna, a young girl from a poor but honest household, is offered an attractive position as a lady's companion in London. Her childhood friend is worried, but she goes anyway. To Anna's horror, the "distinguished house" turns out to be a brothel, but she manages to overpower her first customer. A helpful maid smuggles out a letter to her parents, and they alert the League for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic. The childhood friend travels to England and hires a detective. Together, they find the brothel and Anna. They arrange her escape. Anna lowers herself down from her window, but after an automobile chase, the slavers overpower her liberators and abduct her again. Fortunately, the maid alerts Scotland Yard, and on board the ship they had hoped to escape on, the villains are caught and Anna freed.

This film is a brazen, setup-for-setup rip-off of an identically titled film, Den hvide Slavehandel, made in the spring of 1910 by the film company Fotorama in Denmark's second-largest city, Aarhus. The Fotorama version was the first Danish feature-length film (3 reels), and it was phenomenally successful. Nordisk wanted in on the action, and they simply plagarized the film, scoring a huge hit outside Denmark. Fotorama threatened legal action, but the matter was settled out of court, apparently to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. Only a few fragments of the Fotorama version survive, but the similarity is evident. Nordisk even copied technical refinements like the three-panel split screen image, where two of the villains have a telephone conversation in the side panels while the central panel shows a busy street (this portion of the Fotorama version does not survive, but it was described in a contemporary newpaper review).
Basic information Credits Materials
Original title Den hvide Slavehandel
Danish title Den hvide Slavehandel
International titles The White Slave Traffic
Other titles Den hvide Slavehandel I
Director August Blom
Director of Photography Axel Sørensen
Appearance Ellen Diedrich, Lauritz Olsen, Victor Fabian, Einar Zangenberg
Production country Denmark
Technical info 603 meter, 35 mm, 1,33:1, tinted, Silent
Danish theatrical release 02.08.1910
Cinemas Panoptikon
Download PDF

Companies

Production company Nordisk Films Kompagni

Direction

Direction August Blom

Cinematography

Cinematography Axel Sørensen

Appearance

Anna Ellen Diedrich
Georg Lauritz Olsen
Appearance Victor Fabian
Appearance Einar Zangenberg
Appearance Svend Bille
Bordelværtinde Ella la Cour
Appearance Doris Langkilde
Annas far Otto Lagoni
Annas mor Julie Henriksen
Appearance Rigmor Jerichau
Appearance Aage Lorentzen

Download PDF
Download PDF

Reviews and articles

On the library you can find these articles and revies and other material about the film.
Type Source Author Date
Artikel
Varia
Program - stumfilm & mikro
Program - stumfilm & mikro