When I lived in Salt Lake City, the local Art Movie House showed the 1922 film trapped by the Mormons about once a year. It was a British film about the awful things that happen to Nice Girls seduced by the Mormon missionaries. When it came out, the LDS church was understandably piqued, and protested. Sixty years later, the film is laughable, and those of us in SLC at school or wherever took the title as somehow symbolic of our situation, and laughed the thing off the screen.
If pressed, I couldn’t imagine where else you’d show the damned thing besides a Salt Lake City art cinema. Or a Bad Film Festival (I eventually got a copy on videotape and tried this. It went over like a lead balloon. But I wasn’t in SLC then.)
But now someone has gobne and remade the damned thing. Silent, and in black and white. Why? Wherre did they find an audience, when even my Bad Film aficionados didn’t like it? http://www.trappedbythemormons.com/
http://www.sltrib.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?article=2666257
Despite what they say about a 1992 revival, I saw it in the mid-1980s at the now-defunct Blue Mouise Cinema in SLC, and they’d run it before. I’m sorry I missed the time it was on a double bill with The Attack of the Giant Brine Shrimp, because they never showed TAotGBS again, as far as I know.
It looks like it was put together by a DC theater group that mostly does “adult” productions (i.e., random nudity and swearing). I haven’t seen any of their stuff, but I’ve heard they have more of a “let’s try and be controversial!” motiviation than “let’s create something worthwhile!” I suspect this film would fall into that category.
Thanks, Eve – I never heard of that one.
Evidently there was a sequel two monmths later in 1922 to Trapped by the Mormons – Married to a Mormon, which I’d never heard of:
The IMDB doesn’t list any movie connections for either version of Trapped by the Mormons or to Married to a Mormon. Someone’s asleep at the switch over there.
The 1922 movie was based on a book by Winifred Graham, who apparently knew Aleister Crowley, and some of whose books are still in print (but not this one). Eve’s movie doesn’t seem to be connected.
A Study in Scarlet was the very first Sherlock Holmes story. As I’ve noted in another current thread, Doyle screwed up the geography, putting the Saly Desert (“The Great Alkali Plain”) to the East of where Salt Lake City would be, and making Brigham Young and company trudge through it on their way there.
I don’t think Doyle was trying to go out of his way to bash the Mormons – he just needed a secretive organization to be his villains, and the LDS were handy. Later on he had the Ku Klux Klan, a Chicago Mob, the Molly Maguires (thinly disguised as The Scowrers), and even The Mafia (!) show up as villains. As one critic put it, in Doyle’s works America seems to be a land crawling with evil secret societies.
It requires a pretty broad definition of “turn of the century” to place ASiS there – the story appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887.
