The White Caps

Vigilantes tack a poster on a man's house. He comes home and abuses his wife and daughter. The women flee and the vigilantes attack the house to take the man a prisoner.

It's never made clear to the audience why the man was being attacked. Spousal abuse? Siding with the Tobacco trust against the independent farmers? (That, believe it or not, was also a vigilante group) opposing the Klan? Clearly this was an important movie for 1905, when Edison was still producing lots of 40-second peepshow movies. Looking at it, we can see some padding when the victim escapes and it turns into a chase movie.

Clearly the film makers are sympathetic to the vigilantes. Let's hope it wasn't the Klan.

The overall quality of this film impressed me, for something that was made nearly a century ago.

Grainy as to be expected for such an early film. I viewed this movie online at some point. It's a bit disturbing for it's time. I was interested and intrigued Lionel Barrymore was listed in it.

But it's in error that the abusive husband is listed in the cast as Lionel Barrymore (uncredited), It's not him. This was 1905. He did not start make his debut in films until 1911. He was most likely living in Paris by 1905. He went there to avoid stage and film work for a number of years. So it makes no sense that would be him. I've seen many of his early Silents and it does not favor him here at all. Not sure who that actor was.

Such old films like this one, "The White Caps", which take on matters of justice, morality and social order, can be interesting, outrageous, and even offensive today. The racist "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) is the most obvious example of a film that many people once considered truthful or moral, but is now widely criticized for its immorality. Edwin S. Porter, Wallace McCutcheon and the Edison Company, the makers of this film, also made a comedy based on racist stereotypes, "The Watermelon Patch", the same year. The previous year, they satirized eugenics (a pseudoscience invented by racists and classists) in "The Strenuous Life; or, Anti-Race Suicide". "The White Caps" especially reminds me of another early film, made across the Atlantic, "Is Spiritualism a Fraud?" (1906). In it, a spiritualist medium is assaulted and publicly humiliated by being paraded downtown while bound. As in "The White Caps", vigilantes punish a wrongdoer extra-judiciously, swiftly and violently.

Reportedly, the white caps were real organizations of vigilantes around the time of this film and located mostly in rural communities. Although the white caps they wore to hide their identities and their violent and clandestine methods remind viewers of the Ku Klux Klan, the gangs supposedly didn't necessarily hold ideals of a racist social order, although I think it's safe to assume many of them did. In this film, they tar and feather a wife beater. As the historians on the "Edison: the Invention of the Movies" DVDs say, the film doesn't allow most viewers a comfortable position to identify or align themselves with. We may want the abusive man to be punished, but we don't want him tarred and feathered. A chase sequence, as the white caps try to capture the accused, consequently, is rather horrific for such a primitive film.

The chase was a very common plot in early cinema and the Nickelodeon era, in comedies and dramas. The chase and the rest of "The White Caps" is, overall, well paced for its time--with 14 shots and some extended panning.

The Snow Leopard review really says it all. I'll add that I agree this is an unpleasant, disturbing movie, though powerfully made for its day. The editing and cinematography are inspired by the standards of 1905, even including a tracking shot of the abused wife stumbling for shelter.