Found interleaved in an exercise book inscribed ‘ Recitations ‘, which contains a variety of both original material and copies in different hands of extracts from published recitations that were the staple of Music Hall acts from the late Victorian period to around the time of the First World War, is this piece of doggerel entitled ‘The Cinema Serial’.
The piece, which is probably original, describes the experience of viewing the ninety–third episode of an imaginary thriller entitled ‘ Philip’s Phantom Quest’ in a ‘large suburban’ picture palace, probably in Scotland. The whole item is of interest to historians of the Cinema, not only because the film’s subject matter reflects the contemporary panic surrounding the ‘ Yellow Peril ‘, but also because the preamble to the filmic action tells us something about the experience of visiting a cinema in the early twentieth century:
‘ In a large suburban palace with the
Latest films portrayed,
Where in darkness hands are clasped
And cupid’s hits are often made
Fair maids their heads on manly shoulders
Ceased awhile to lean
For the title of the next film
Has appeared upon the screen
There’s a buzz of approbation
From the young folks one & all
In excitement one wee laddie
Swallows half a butter ball.
Love’s whisperings subside
As folks prepare to gaze with zest
For ‘tis Episode the ninety-third
Of Philip’s Phantom Quest…’
The verse continues with an account of Philip’s enemy, a Chinaman humorously named Ah Choo, whose ‘average of weekly murders stands at four point three’. This villain is evidently modelled on the protagonist of Sax Rohmer’s famous novel The Mystery of Fu Manchu, which had been published in 1913. The narrative continues thus:
Fresh characters come in each week to help keep on the play
For Ah Choo kills the old ones off in such a wholesale way
3) Last week we left the heroine , the lovely Geraldine
With both her ears fixed firmly in a glass-cutting machine
While as for handsome Philip, he seemed on a loser too
With his neck tight in a printing press while Ah Choo turned the screw.
Ah here we are, here’s this week’s start, see Philip short of breath
As the press grows tighter, tighter, slowly printing him to death.
But look, before the final turn by Ah Choo can be made
A hand steals through the casement & it holds a long thin blade
4) Old Ah Choo snarls in Philip’s face & dashes through the door
And Philip by the strange masked maid is rescued yet once more
Now see the scene is changed, here’s Geraldine awaiting doom
For she’ll shortly die in rashers in the great glass-cutting room.
Not yet, not yet, the door’s dashed in –how frail they make them now
And as the keen blades reach her she is snatched away somehow
‘Tis Philip who arrived there, ask not how,for I don’t know
But you see, she‘s gotto be saved, for nine parts have yet to go…
5) Ah ha, again we’re switched away, here’s Ah Choo tall & grim.
He’s making bombs & poisons, just a pleasant little whim
That Ah Choo beats all shorthand systems none can ever doubt
For he writes a four page note in fourteen ticks or thereabout
This note enticing |Geraldine to come straight to his lair
And she hies her to the trysting place above the turret stair
But she she’s dropped that letter by the ancient castle moat
And Dan Murphy the detective sees it snapped up by a goat.
6) He rescues it & reads it, then for help he hears a call.
It’s his chauffeur being stabbed, for Ah Choo’s average mustn’t fall
Dan springs aside & stands quite flat against the castle tow’r
( Presumably to make folks think he’s just a climbing flow’r)
But Geraldine we left proceeding up the turret stair
And now we see her entering a chamber grim & bare
Immediately she’s gagged & bound by several men there-in
And Ah Choo stands before her with his most satanic grin
7)He presses on a panel and an aperture yawns black
And the party passes through before the panel glideth back.
They drag her with them to a point upon the mountain top
Then on an awful valley’s brink the merry party stop
Old Ah Choo hurls her downward towards the cruel rocks beneath
But see in her descent she grips a boulder with her teeth
Oh will she yet be rescued from the terrible abyss
Well all that’s plain to every person there is simply this
For seven days she’ll dangle by her molars from that peak
For on the screen appears To be Continued here next week.’
Incidentally,the criminal mastermind Ah Choo is not to be confused with Ah Choo, a Chinese immigrant who works as a delivery boy for a pharmacy in the early 1940s Hit Comics.
From a list of these ‘ film serials ‘ dating from 1910 – 20, which can be found online, we learn that ‘The Adventures of Kathlyn ‘(1913), which consisted of 13 chapters, is considered to be the first ‘ cliffhanger ‘ serial. In 1914 ‘The Hazards of Helen ‘, which at 23 + hours and 119 chapters is thought to be the longest serial ever made, exceeds in length the serial in which Ah Choo is the anti-hero, but a Chinese peril does seem to figure in a much shorter serial of 1916 entitled ‘ The Yellow Menace ‘. Perhaps the writer of the verse had this in mind.
R.M.Healey