A 19th-Century Poker Movie: Poker at Dawson City

Just a quick post today to share an interesting find I happened upon while doing some reading around for Poker & Pop Culture.

The newest installment of the series went up on PokerNews today, a fun discussion of a couple of paintings by Frederic Remington featuring poker games -- one about to break into the violence, the other one having already ended in bloodshed. Check it out: “Poker & Pop Culture: Frederic Remington’s Cowboys, Cards, and Carnage.”

While reading around for that one, I happened on another old, old, old poker-related film clip. A week ago in the series I wrote about the 1912 short A Cure for Pokeritis, a topic of earlier posts here on HBP. As I’ve noted here, it’s more or less the “first poker movie,” although there exists an earlier one from 1910 by D.W. Griffith called The Last Deal (something I mention in the column).

Well, there’s an even older “poker movie,” although again it’s hard really to count this one as it is merely a 20-second clip directed by James H. White, one of about 1,200 films made by the Edison Manufacturing Company studio during the last years of the 19th century and first years of the 20th.

The title suggests what we’re seeing takes place at Dawson City, a town in Yukon, Canada where the Yukon Gold Rush was attracting many at the time the film was made. However, the scene was certainly shot in New Jersey in Edison’s studio.

There’s no poker at all, really -- just a funny-to-watch brawl apparently resulting from some sort of argument caused by the game. Kind of a humorous, light version of the deadly scene depicted in Remington’s painting, A Misdeal discussed in today’s column.

Here’s the film, in its entirety -- neat to see:

The mention of Edison gives me an excuse to point out that one of the tracks on my pop album Welcome to Muscle Beach is called “Thomas Edison” and is about the inventor. In fact, the song features Edison himself!

Click here to visit my Bandcamp page to hear it. Then you might as well download it (and everything else from my seven albums) for free!

(And if you do listen or download anything, let me know what you think.)

Is The Last Deal the First Poker Movie?

For a good while I’ve been under the impression -- and have written and said so on more than one occasion -- that the 1912 short A Cure for Pokeritis was almost assuredly the oldest “poker movie.”

A couple of years ago the 12-minute silent film starring John Bunny and Flora Finch was selected by the Library of Congress as one of the 25 films they pick each year to be added to the National Film Registry.

The selection was done mostly because of Bunny starring in the film, I believe, to help underscore the comic actor’s important place in film history after having starred in more than 150 productions during the silent era. But as I’ve written about the movie also helps highlight poker’s prominence in the early-20th century, another reason why A Cure for Pokeritis might like other selected films be said to have “enduring significance to American culture.”

You can read more about A Cure for Pokeritis plus watch the film embedded in a post here. Meanwhile, I was snooping around recently to find at least one poker-themed film to have predated that one.

It’s called The Last Deal and was written and directed in 1910 for Biograph by D.W. Griffith (Birth of a Nation, Intolerance). Running about 11 minutes, it tells a story not unlike the one told in A Cure for Pokeritis, although apparently in more of a dramatic than comic vein.

Like in Pokeritis, The Last Deal presents poker and gambling as a kind of illness in need of curing. A character is introduced as an addict whose poker-playing threatens to lose him his job and family until his brother-in-law comes along to help him with his “gambling fever” (so go the synopses). There’s also a classic (or clichéd) four-aces-versus-four-kings hand somewhere in there, too, I’ve discovered.

The Last Deal stars Owen Moore who appears in a lot of Griffith productions and was secretly married to Mary Pickford with whom he appeared in several films.

Not really seeing The Last Deal as readily available online as is Pokeritis, although I think there are existing copies including on VHS. It was included as part of a series of RKO shorts in the 1940s called Flicker Flashbacks, albeit in an imperfect form. That series (created in the 1940s) involved chopping up old silent shorts and adding soundtracks for comic effect, so one would only get a partial glimpse of the film there. It also might pop up in one of the many compilations of Griffith shorts out there.

I’ve only just started looking in earnest for it, though, so perhaps there’s a more obvious way to get ahold of it of which I’ve yet to discover.

(Faux title card above aided by CopyCatFilms.)

W.C. Fields Forever

Early in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” course I show the students what I believe must be the oldest poker movie ever made, A Cure for Pokeritis (1912). I’ve written here about that short silent film starring John Bunny more than once -- click here for the most involved discussion of it (including clips of the entire film).

Soon after showing Pokeritis I usually share with them a clip from Tillie and Gus, a 1933 film starring W.C. Fields. Fields is one of my all-time favorites from the early era of cinema. He plays poker in several of his films, and even in ones where he doesn’t, many have titles that sound like they were somehow derived from poker (Six of a Kind, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break).

Fields actually wasn’t that big of a poker player himself, I believe, but the game nonetheless became intertwined in some respects with the trickster persona that tied together many of his crazily-named characters like Augustus Winterbottom in Tille and Gus.

I once wrote a lengthy “Poker & Pop Culture” piece for PokerNews about W.C. Fields in which I summarized some of the poker-playing scenes in his films, including Tillie and Gus. Click and read for a more thorough discussion.

Unfortunately most W.C. Fields stuff has been scrubbed away from YouTube, or I’d include the clip from Tillie and Gus here for you to enjoy. Instead I’ll just share a few screen shots with some dialogue from the scene in which some passengers on a train invite Augustus Winterbottom to join their poker game.

“Pardon me, folks. We have a poker game going. Would you care to play?” asks a man whom we come to learn is named Mr. White.

“Poker?” answers Winterbottom. “Is that the game where one receives five cards and if there’s two alike that’s pretty good, but if there’s three alike that’s much better?”

“Oh, you’ll learn the game in no time,” assures White, not realizing he’s the one about to be hustled.

Winterbottom joins three others and they cut for the deal. They explain to him that the ace is high. “You must forgive the ignorance of a novice,” he says. The others successively draw a queen, a ten, and a king. Then Winterbottom makes his cut. “Ace,” he says, showing his card so that we can see it but his opponents cannot.

When the others note they weren’t able to see his ace, he apologizes, sorts through the deck to find an ace, and shows it around.

He begins to deal a hand of five-card draw while his ex-wife Tillie (played by Alison Skipworth) -- a fellow con artist -- positions herself behind White so she can see his cards as well as those of his neighbor.

“By the way, I saw those two sailors off the ship today,” she says casually after spotting two jacks in White’s hand.

“See anybody else?” asks Winterbottom, and she looks at the other player’s nine-high hand. “Not a soul,” she replies.

They chat about other games. “I prefer Pinochle,” says White. “Pinochle?” asks Winterbottom. “That’s the top of something, isn’t it? The pinochle of a hill, for instance?”

When Winterbottom looks at his hand, he sees he’s dealt himself four aces and a deuce. “Shucks,” he says at the sight of the deuce, rapping the table with his fist as though it disappoints him.

They draw. “What happened to the two sailors?” asks Winterbottom of Tillie. “Three more sailors joined them,” she says. “Three more sailors?” asks Winterbottom, eyebrows raised. “I mean two,” she corrects herself.

There are bets and raises, with all four players staying in to the showdown. White has four jacks, the player to his left four queens, and the third player four kings. Winterbottom then turns over his four aces.

It’s a fun, goofy scene, with Fields singing “Bringing in the Sheaves” as he leaves the befuddled players adding a satisfying touch of lunacy to the proceedings.

Tillie and Gus isn’t as consistently funny as some of Fields’s other features. My faves are his great quartet of later titles You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, which verge on the surreal sometimes with the all-out wackiness of their loosely-connected, howlingly-hilarious set pieces. But Tillie and Gus still has plenty of grins throughout its short running time.

Like I say, for more on Fields and poker, see that old PokerNews piece.

(Post title from a Firesign Theatre track from their first LP, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him.)

A 100-Year-Old Poker Movie: A Cure for Pokeritis

At the end of every calendar year, the Library of Congress announces an annual list of films to be preserved as part of the National Film Registry. Among the selections made in 2011, a film was chosen that probably deserves designation as the oldest poker movie ever made, a 12-minute silent film titled A Cure for Pokeritis first released over a century ago on February 17, 1912.

Since 1989 there have been 25 films selected every year to be added to the National Film Registry, each selected for “enduring significance to American culture.” Each year’s list typically includes a wide variety of features and shorts, including both mainstream fare as well as more obscure titles. Thus does one find everything from The Wizard of Oz to The Exorcist to The Muppet Movie to the Zapruder film among the works that have been chosen to date.

A Cure for Pokeritis is not the first film involving poker to have been selected for preservation. In 2005, both Cool Hand Luke (1967) and The Sting (1973) were chosen, two films which each include highly memorable poker scenes. That said, A Cure for Pokeritis is most certainly the only “poker movie” to have been chosen for the National Film Registry thus far. It is also an interesting document of the place and significance of poker in American culture during the early 20th century.

The process for selecting films begins with the National Film Preservation Board and the general public compiling a list of films. Then James H. Billington, currently the Librarian of Congress, personally selects the 25 films for inclusion. When announcing the 2011 list -- yet another eclectic bunch that included both Bambi and Silence of the Lambs -- Billington referred to the National Film Registry as “a celebration of America… in all its variegated richness.”

While the selection of A Cure for Pokeritis helps bolster the case for poker’s prominence in American culture, the choice was mostly made thanks to the starring turn of the comic actor John Bunny. Bunny appeared in more than 150 silent films, making the rotund actor one of America’s most important early film stars and a national celebrity prior to his untimely death in 1915.

A number of Bunny’s films saw him playing the role of a henpecked husband, often starring opposite Flora Finch as one of cinema’s first comedy teams. A Cure for Pokeritis, directed by Laurence Trimble for Vitagraph, typifies that formula, pitting the two against one another with poker being the wedge that divides a married couple.



An initial title card explains the opening scene: “A game of poker. Loser again.” We watch the round-faced Bunny as George Brown don his hat and jacket as he leaves a smoke-filled poker game, apparently having to borrow money from another player before he exits just to cover the fare home. He returns home late, endures a berating from his wife Mary (Finch), and tries to smooth things over by swearing to her he'll never play poker again.

A week passes, and George receives an invite to be initiated into the “Sons of the Morning,” a men’s lodge that meets every Wednesday night. According to the terms of the lodge, failure to appear incurs a fee of ten dollars, thus giving Mary no choice but to agree to her husband’s participation.

Of course it’s all a ruse -- the “Sons of the Morning” is just an cover for the same weekly poker game Brown had been playing before. The plan works until Brown starts talking in his sleep, giving away his secret to his wife. She then recruits strait-laced Cousin Freddie to help with her plight, and he in turn recruits his Bible club to help him out.



Soon Cousin Freddie and Mary’s plotting involves more wives who are also angry about their poker-playing husbands, and they all have “an indignation meeting” with Freddie in which a plan is finalized. Freddie and the other Bible club members then dress up as policemen and with the wives in tow conduct a faux raid on George's poker game.

Fears of arrest soon dissolve into animated expressions of relief among the players, with George and Mary's film-ending embrace apparently signaling his having once and for all agreed to stop playing poker.

Besides highlighting the general prominence of poker at the time, A Cure for Pokeritis reminds us of a couple of other cultural significances of poker from a hundred years ago.

One is the way poker had by the early 20th century found its way from the saloons and steamboats into private homes and clubs to enter the domestic sphere. No longer a game just for cardsharps and cheats, poker had found its way into the living rooms of all classes, a move similarly indicated by C.M. Coolidge’s famous “dogs playing poker” series of paintings from 1903.

And like Coolidge’s paintings -- in which only male dogs play (while female dogs occasionally watch) -- the cigar-chomping, masculine culture of poker is on display in A Cure for Pokeritis as well.

The other idea -- indicated by the film’s title and plot -- is that poker represents a kind of disease or illness in need of curing. With the temperance movement in full swing (the Volstead Act and start of prohibition would come just a few years later), poker and gambling were associated with other vices thought by many in need of being remedied.

Besides being one of cinemas first stars, John Bunny also was mindful of the great potential of motion pictures both for entertainment and instruction. Anticipating the age in which we currently live where video and other means of “visual learning” have become commonplace, Bunny once famously told an interviewer he believed “many branches of learning now so objectionable to children will be made interesting by the use of motion pictures.”

Bunny was right. And indeed, among other things, A Cure for Pokeritis certainly teaches us something about poker’s place in American culture a century ago.

A Cure for Pokeritis (1912)

Wanted today to point everyone to a new “Community Cards” column over on the Epic Poker blog, this one about a 1912 silent film titled A Cure for Pokeritis. Has to be just about the oldest poker movie ever made, I would guess.

The 12-minute movie was recently chosen by the National Film Registry for preservation. Each year a fellow named James H. Billington, a Librarian of Congress, selects 25 films from a list compiled by the National Film Preservation Board and the general public.

The idea is to pick movies that are of “enduring significance to American culture.” In other words, one might regard the list as kind of like a time capsule in which all sorts of examples of cinematic storytelling are being kept, all indicating various ideas or themes or values thought to be representative or important to the U.S.

The list started in 1989, so now there are 575 films total on the list. Most of the titles are familiar insofar as they are films that were very popular or critically acclaimed or both. But there are a number of fairly obscure ones there, including some non-commercial fare.

Here’s the full list, if you’re curious. Would probably be fun to go through and watch them all. You’ll see that along with A Cure for Pokeritis this year’s list included Bambi, The Big Heat, The Silence of the Lambs, Porgy and Bess, War of the Worlds (the original), Forrest Gump, and a one-minute film from 1972 called A Computer Animated Hand.

According to the little blurb about A Cure for Pokeritis that came along with the announcements of this latest round of choices, the film was picked primarily because it stars John Bunny, one of cinema’s first comic stars. That’s him on the right, having to borrow money from a friend for the fare home after losing all he had at the tables.

But in my “Community Cards” column I speculated a bit about how its inclusion also could be said to help preserve something of the significance of poker to the U.S.

The column includes two YouTube clips which deliver the entire film. So if you’re curious about this disease “pokeritis” and how it can be cured, go check it out.