Blue Jeans
About Blue Jeans
June, an orphan in overalls, is taken in by Cindy and Jacob Tutwiler in Rising Sun, Indiana. She secretly marries Perry Bascom, who runs the local sawmill and is standing for Congress against Ben Boone. Sue Eudaly arrives claiming an earlier marriage to Perry; he leaves town to find the husband she already had. June bears his child and is turned out of the Tutwiler house. When Perry comes back, Sue and Ben overpower him at the mill and start him toward the buzz saw. June breaks out of the locked office and throws the lever in time.
Cast & crew
More about Blue Jeans
June Mathis and Charles A. Taylor adapted Joseph Arthur's 1890 play. John Arnold and William H. Tuers photographed it. Metro announced the screen rights in Variety on 24 August 1917. Viola Dana had wanted The Poor Little Rich Girl; after Adolph Zukor took that play for Mary Pickford, Metro gave Dana this lead instead.
Themes
Background
Arthur's melodrama stayed in the repertoire for decades. By 1917 the sawmill rescue was already being copied so often that it was turning into a joke.
Making
The stage sensation was the unconscious hero on a carriage rolling toward a sawmill blade. The film keeps that rescue, with June, locked in the mill office, breaking the glass and reversing the lever.
Look
John Arnold and William H. Tuers shared the photography. The mill sequence is staged so June watches the carriage through a glass door before she gets to the lever.
Preservation
Prints survive in several archives, including the George Eastman Museum Motion Picture Collection.
Notes
- Viola Dana plays June and Robert D. Walker plays Perry Bascom. Sally Crute is billed as Dora Eudaly; the AFI synopsis calls the same character Sue.
- The Chicago Board of Censors ordered cuts of the intertitle "You have transgressed the moral law," the starting of the saw, the laying of the man on the block, and three shots of him in front of the blade.
- The play opened at New York's Fourteenth Street Theatre on 6 October 1890. Metro star Mabel Taliaferro had appeared in it as a toddler.
- John H. Collins, Dana's husband, directed it. He died in New York in the 1918 influenza epidemic, at 28.
- Collins and Dana had left Edison for Metro in New York in 1916. This is a Metro release, not an Edison picture.
Scenes
- Perry finds June on the road and places her with the Tutwilers.
- Sue tells Ben Boone that Perry is her husband, and Boone sets the sawmill carriage moving.
- June smashes the office door and stops the blade.
Influenced by
- Blue Jeans (Joseph Arthur play, 1890)
Also available
- Internet Archive (blue-jeans-1917-ee.-uu.-john-h.-collins.-fyr-7-mi-0j-3wo)
