November 16, 1917: All the Distressing News. US Back in Mexico, in Combat in Europe, flag shaming in Lander, and Temptation in Philadelphia

The Laramie Boomerang correctly noted that the United States had crossed back into Mexico, but just right across the border.  This was something that the US would end up doing in a worried fashion for years, showing that while the Punitive Expedition might be over, armed intervention, to a degree, in Mexico, was not.

At the same time, the press was really overemphasizing US combat action in Europe. The US wouldn't really be fighting much for weeks and weeks.

And the on again, off again, hope that the Japanese would commit to ground action was back on again.

Meanwhile, in Lander, things were getting really ugly.  "German sympathizers" were being made to kiss the flag.

That probably didn't boost their loyalty any.

Villas expanding plans were also being noted. And, also, The Temptation Rag, a film, was being reported on, on the front page, something that takes a true scandal to occur now.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm 1917. Released this day in 1917. . .

I'll leave you to your own opinions on the well known film.

Monday Night at the Movies. . . the theme was sheep

A century ago, it seems, movies debuted on Monday nights.  Two such silent pictures hit the big screen a century ago today.

Barbary Sheep.

Yes, what an epic.  A well heeled couple travel to North Africa for travel and hunting of some kind (I'm unclear on what they were hunting. . . perhaps Atlas Sheep?).  While there, a desert sheik seeks to seduce Mrs. Well Heeled and Mr. Well Heeled it going to have to shoot him.  He doesn't, but it all resolves happily.

This film exists today on in the form of an eight minute segment of it.  It's a nearly lost film.

Well, if that was exciting enough, consider On The Level.

Merlin, the daughter of a sheep rancher, is kidnapped by Sontag who shoots here father and drives the sheep away.  She's then unwillingly employed by Sontag as a dancer in a Mexican saloon (really, are there a lot of saloons in Mexico owned by folks named Sontag. . . I doubt it).  She dances under the name of Mexicali Mae.  Fortunately, while there, she meets drug addicted piano player and . . . oh, it's so confusing you'll just have to see it.

Weird thing.  The piano players is played by Harrison Ford. But not that Harrison Ford.

Poster Saturday: Wild and Woolly (released on this day in 1917)

Poster Saturday: Patria

The headlines, sort of, were invading theaters fairly regularly by this time.

This film was a fifteen part serial released on this date in 1917. The plot involved espionage and intrigue as Japanese spies seek to steal the Channing "Preparedness" fortune and then invade the United States through New York while allying themselves with Mexico.  The feastibility of the Japanese invading through New York, or indeed at all, was apparently not an issue for the script writers but it is odd that a film based on an enemy alliance with Mexico would have come out during that period of time in which a German diplomatic note proposing just that was sitting in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.

Patria Channing, with the assistance of U.S. Secret Service agent Donald Parr, foil the plot.

The film, which was financed by William Randolph Hearst , was investigated after World War One to see if it might have been German financed propaganda based upon a scheme discovered to have been proposed to influence movies by a German propagandist whose articles appeared in Hearst's papers, which was similar to the plot of the movie, but presumably this was found to be a mere coincidence.