For a start this film is not "a relic". It is quite simply a film made in 1913 and not the "even for 1913" 1913 of people's imagination but the same 1913 that saw the appearance of such excellent films as Louis Feuillade's Fantômas, Albert Capellani's Germinal, Léonce Perret's Les Dents de fer, Georges Méliès' À la conquête du Pôle, Joseph Delmot's Das Recht aufs Dasein, Stellan Rye's Der Student von Prag, Max Mack's Der Andere, Carl Froehlich's Richard Wagner, August Blom' Atlantis, Enrico Guazzoni's Quo Vadis?, Mario Caserini's The Last Days of Pompeii, Marcel Fabre's Le Avventure Straordinarissime Di Saturnino Farandola, Yevgeny Bauer's Twilight of a Woman's Soul, Victor Sjöström's Ingeborg Holm. It was certainly a rather thin year for US films, Lois Weber's Suspense and D. W. Griffith's Judith of Bethulia being perhaps the best of head bunch. One regrets very much, however, that Thomas Ince's The Battle Gettysburg is still a lost film. If you've watched them and don't like any of them, fair enough but sad for you. BUT If you haven't seen these films or very few of them, never mind. No one can watch everything. But please, please stop saying "even for 1913" as though you knew what you were talking about!!!!!
In any year, there are good films and bad films and films that are somewhere in between. It is true in 2013 and it will b just as true in 2023 if the world survives till then. This film, made by a small company for a specific political purpose, is quite evidently not a very good film.
Historically it is, however, of some importance. Although it is true, as onother reviewer points out, that there were many women active in a variety of roles in the world of cinema, they were rarely accorded the same status or recognition as the men who ruled the roost. The great majority of films that treated the subject of feminism were mocking or antagonistic.
1913 was an extremely significant year in the history both of feminism and of the suffrage movement in particular. It was marked, especially in Britain, by parades and protests, increasingly violent, and hunger-strikes and was of course the year in which Emily Davison threw herself under the King's horse at the Epsom Derby. Hence the importance of the appearance in the film of the British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, then on tour in the US, whose name may only recall Mary Poppins for people in the US but who is perfectly well remembered in Britain (and I would have thought anywhere in the world where there is a decent education system).
It was also a year notable for the attacks on feminism (Ernest Bax's The Fraud of Feminism) and in the US, the New York anti-suffrage movement was at the apogee of its power and influence. So the appearance of a film explicit;y in favour of women's suffrage is not an insignificant matter.
Although the linkage here with Tammany Hall politics many seem to confuse issues, the two issues were linked in people's minds since the reformists favoured by the progressives and the feminists were increasingly finding themselves blocked or even excluded by the hostile city "bosses". This was after all the reign of Charles Francis "Silent Charlie" Murphy ("Boss Murphy") in New York on whom the equivalent character in the film is presumably based.
In terms of film history, this film is also part of a minor but interesting genre of such politicised docufictions. The anti-white slavery films of the same year (Universal's Traffic in Souls and Frank Beal's The Inside of the White Slave Traffic(, neither of them particularly "good" films, belong in some ways to the same genre and again the subjects are linked. Even prominent male campaigners against prostitution rackets like George B. Roe or socialist Reginald Wright Kauffman were also strong proponents of women's suffrage, Roe for instance believing that it was the only way to bring about necessary changes in the law. Many feminists (then as now) believed the prostitution issue to be a crucial one and these films (particularly the more politically conscious Beal film) received considerable support from reformists and feminists.
Another hero of the progressives, Judge Ben Lindsey, reformist Denver jurist and pioneer of the juvenile court system, found himself starring in similar docufictions - Saved by the Juvenile Court (1913) and The Soul of Youth (1920) and again the support for Lindsey and for reform was linked with the battle against city bosses. An extract from Saved by the Juvenile Court, another fairly tacky film produced by a very small company (Columbine) was even released as The Kid's Judge in support of Lindsey's contested campaign for re-election.
In the appreciation of films of this or any other era, it is important not to patronise the past and recognise the obvious fact that both good and bad films were made but it is also important to realise that the history of cinema is an integral part of the history of its time and that the importance of films, both to that history and to the specific history of cinema itself, is more than a simple aesthetic judgment of their quality "as films" (whatever that may mean).
