A Florida Enchantment
About A Florida Enchantment
Lillian Travers (Edith Storey), a Northern heiress about to marry, comes to Florida and finds her fiancé, Dr. Fred Cassadene (Sidney Drew), with a wealthy widow. In a curiosity shop she buys a casket holding a note and a vial of seeds that the note says will change men into women and women into men. Angry at Fred, she swallows one. She wakes as a man and takes the name Lawrence Talbot. Fred, too, is changed into a woman.
Cast & crew
More about A Florida Enchantment
Sidney Drew directed. Marguerite Bertsch and Eugene Mullin wrote the scenario from the 1891 novel, also a 1896 play, by Fergus Redmond and Archibald Clavering Gunter. Vitagraph released it on 10 August 1914, in five reels. Grace Stevens plays Lillian's aunt, Constancia Oglethorpe. Ethel Lloyd plays the maid Jane. Jane Morrow, billed as Mrs. Sidney Drew, plays Bessie Horton. The company shot in and around St. Augustine, and also in Jacksonville and St. Petersburg.
Themes
Background
A Vitagraph comedy of August 1914, filmed on the Florida coast and built on a seed that reverses sex.
Making
Location work was done in St. Augustine, Jacksonville, and St. Petersburg.
Reviews
Vito Russo, in The Celluloid Closet (1981), placed it among the earliest American films to put homosexuality and cross-dressing on screen.
Preservation
A copy is on Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- The English Wikipedia gives five reels and 63 minutes.
- Siobhan B. Somerville has written about white actors in blackface in the picture.
- Later writers have also read Lillian's change as a butch woman rather than as a man, and Fred's as an effeminate man. The film shows each of them drawn to both sexes at different points.
Scenes
- Lillian reads the note in the curiosity-shop casket and takes a seed.
- She wakes as Lawrence Talbot.
Influenced by
- Fergus Redmond and Archibald Clavering Gunter's novel A Florida Enchantment (1891)
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (A Florida Enchantment (1914).webm)
