With aid from her police-officer sweetheart, a woman endeavors to uncover the prostitution ring that has kidnapped her sister and the philanthropist who secretly runs it.With aid from her police-officer sweetheart, a woman endeavors to uncover the prostitution ring that has kidnapped her sister and the philanthropist who secretly runs it.With aid from her police-officer sweetheart, a woman endeavors to uncover the prostitution ring that has kidnapped her sister and the philanthropist who secretly runs it.
- Awards
- 1 win
- The Invalid Inventor - Mary's Father
- (as Wm. Turner)
- William Trubus
- (as Wm. Welsh)
- Mrs. William Trubus
- (as Mrs. Hudson Lyston)
- Bill Bradshaw
- (as Wm. Cavanaugh)
- 'Respectable' Smith
- (as Wm. Burbridge)
- A Country Girl
- (as Laura Huntley)
- The Emigrant Girls' Brother
- (as Wm. Powers)
- Director
- Writers
- Walter MacNamara(uncredited)
- George Loane Tucker(uncredited)
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThis was the first American movie about sexuality.
- Quotes
Newspaper Article: YOUNG GIRL DISAPPEARS. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED. A pretty little girl employed in well known candy store, reported last night as possibly having fallen into evil hands. Is it possible our candy stores can be used as a market for this infamous traffic?
- Crazy creditsOpening Title Card lists the name of the movie as: Traffic In Souls or While New York Sleeps". Further, it describes the film as "A Photodrama of Today".
- ConnectionsFeatured in The Universal Story (1996)
It is both a pseudo-documentary that reveals how "50,000 Girls disappear yearly" into "white slavery," a criminal organization abducts poor and immigrant women, forcing them into prostitution. The chief crook is a seemingly respectable businessman (William Welsh) who handles the money while his underlings do the dirty work. When a young woman (Ethel Grandin) is drugged and kidnapped, her sister (Jane Gail) teams up with her policeman boyfriend (Matt Moore) to rescue her.
Today, Traffic in Souls has at least two claims to fame. First, its sensational subject matter linked it and number of other more or less contemporaneous films with a moral panic that eventually resulted in the inclusion of the "white slave trade" (the entrapment of young women into prostitution) in the list of topics explicitly barred under the Hays Office's Production Code. Second, and more important for this study, it is a relatively early American-produced feature-length film, apparently, in fact, the first released on Broadway not based on a famous novel or play. It is also the first film of more than three reels produced by the Independent Motion Picture Company, whose president Carl Laemmle was at this time, and for some time to come, publicly committed against the feature film.
Though contrived, it still holds-up to modern scrutiny of what we might think a good film should be like, and its nevertheless a milestone in film-making. It paved the way for the kind of action films Hollywood would soon become noted for making. And to comment on Tucker's great talent, in a period when most films were still overly theatrical, Tucker displays a relatively naturalistic, low-key style. For the most part, the actors behave like real people instead of mugging for the camera, and the expert cross-cutting shows that D.W. Griffith wasn't the only director in Hollywood who could edit with vigor. Though most of his work completely forgotten or lost today, with the work of Traffic in Souls, The Prisoner of Zenda, and the highly acclaimed lost film The Miracle Man, Tucker should easily be credited as one of the finest pioneers of film making.
- Ziggy5446
- Jun 27, 2007
Details
Box office
- Budget
- $5,700 (estimated)
- Runtime1 hour 28 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1