Trapped by the Mormons (1922)

Shown at the recent Sunstone Symposia in Salt Lake, Trapped by the Mormons is a 1922 British made silent film based on the 1911 novel of the same name by Winifred Graham. The movie is derivative of the 'Mormons as stock villains' trope of Victorian era dime novels. Isoldi Keene is the most successful Mormon missionary in England, this is do in large part to his hypnotic powers, powers which he uses principally on young women, with the intent of shipping them off to Utah to be plural wives.

Isoldi is particularly taken with the lovely young Nora Prescott (Evelyn Brent, the only performer in this movie whose IMDb page contains photographs) who lives with her mother and partially paralyzed father in Manchester. Isoldi strikes up a 'nodding acquaintance' with Nora on her daily walk to work, he eventually introduces her to Mormon pamphlets, fakes a miracle healing to impress her, gets her to invite her female co-works to listen to the missionaries, and hypnotically convinces her to break her engagement to good guy navy man Jim Foster. Suspicious of Nora's sudden and unexplained breaking of their engagement, Jim hires a private eye to help him get the bottom of it. The two quickly discover that Nora, only now realizing the trouble she's in, has become Trapped by the Mormons.

The nefarious Mormons hope to secret Nora out of the country and off to Utah, convincing her parents that she will be taking a trip to The Netherlands as the traveling companion of a lady novelist (actually a Mormon woman in disguise). Nora's father accepts this, thinking it will get his daughter away for the influence of the Mormons he knows she has been seeing, because as he says in title card dialogue "They don't allow Mormons in Holland."

Nora is actually taken to a hotel, which seems to be run by the Mormons, as they prepare for their journey. Jim and the PI track her there, Jim want's to go right in and bust her out, but the seasoned detective cautions they can't do that yet because, and they actually use this term in the title card, it's too much "red tape".  The good guys eventually find just cause to break into the hotel, there is a fight with the Mormons, but eventually the police arrive and all is set right.

This movie is actually pretty entertaining, and though it feels a little unnecessarily stretched out at the end, at 72 minutes in length it's quite watchable. The fact that the LDS Church had officially given up the practice of polygamy more then three decades before this film was released is casually glossed over in the plot with a line or two about how the Mormons are lying about that. The writer of the story obviously had enough exposer to Mormonism to work in a few distinctly Mormon phrases such as "pure and delightsome" and "time and all eternity", but in still more ways is widely inaccurate, including a depiction of a Mormon baptism consisting of a vaguely Catholic hand gesture of blessing and standing about knee deep in water.

The copy of the film I saw was mostly fair, but there were times when the actors facial features became indistinct, almost bleached, this 95 year old movie could do with a good restoration. For its historical novelty and strangely endearing oddness I give Trapped by the Mormons ***.