The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg

1910 American film

December 28, 1910 (1910-12-28)

^[1]

Running time

935 ft
(14 minutes)^[1]^[2]CountryUnited StatesLanguagesSilent film
(English intertitles at release in United States)

The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg is a 1910 American silent film produced by Kalem Company of New York and shot at the company's "winter studio" in Jacksonville, Florida. Directed by Sidney Olcott, the Civil War drama stars Gene Gauntier, Robert Vignola and JP McGowan.^[3]^[4]^[5] Gauntier, in addition to performing as the production's title character, is credited with writing its storyline or "scenario".^[6]

A full copy of this film, although with Dutch intertitles, is held at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.^[5]

Cast

Gene Gauntier as Nan, the Girl Spy
Robert Vignola
JP McGowan
Jack J. Clark

Plot

"In the absence of men, a Civil War commander asks his daughter (The Girl Spy) to sabotage a gunpowder transport. The girl disguises herself as a soldier and completes her task. After a dangerous escape, she returns to her crying mother."^[6]

Notes

References and notes

^ ^a ^b "Record of Weekly Licensed Film Releases" / "The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg"; published in The Film Index (New York, N. Y.), December 31, 1910, p. 29. Retrieved via Internet Archive (San Francisco, California), May 7, 2023.
^ According to the reference How Movies Work by Bruce F. Kawin (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987, pp. 46-47), a full 1000-foot reel of film in the silent era had a maximum running time of 15 to 16 minutes. Silent films were generally projected at an average or "standard" speed of 16 frames per second, much slower than the 24 frames of later sound films. This film, with its cited length of 935 feet, would have originally run somewhere between 14 and 15 minutes.
^ Wesley Alan Britton (2006). Onscreen and Undercover: The Ultimate Book of Movie Espionage. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 34–5. ISBN 978-0-275-99281-1.
^ Denise Lowe (27 January 2014). An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films: 1895-1930. Taylor & Francis. pp. 1932–5. ISBN 978-1-317-71896-3.
^ ^a ^b Laura Horak (26 February 2016). Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934. Rutgers University Press. p. 46. ISBN 978-0-8135-7484-4.
^ ^a ^b "The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg [ID FLM24827]". EYE Filmmuseum Collection Catalogue [online database] (in Dutch). Retrieved January 21, 2021.