The Perils of Pauline (1914 Serial) - Legacy

Legacy

The Perils of Pauline is the prime example of what author Ben Singer has called the "serial-queen melodrama," noted as a typification of damsel in distress cinema, as well as for its extensive use of the cliffhanger technique in film serials.

There has been a recent reassessment of Singer's model in the light of broader film forms.

In feminist film theory, it has become a byword for the negative archetype of the vulnerable woman requiring male rescue; in the first episode, for example, Pauline is bound and gagged and left in a burning building until a man saves her. However, the character of Pauline was also distinctive in her time as an unmarried New Woman who was free to engage in adventure, and her adventures proved themselves an early commercial success, primarily among women film audiences.

The film's style was later subject to nostalgic caricature in many forms (e.g. Dudley Do-Right), but the original heroine was neither as helpless as the caricatures, nor did the original film include the much-parodied "tied to railroad tracks" or "tied to buzzsaw" scenarios which appeared in later films in this vein. Even the title phrase "Perils of" was often adopted by later serials, for example, in Universal's Perils of the Secret Service, Perils of the Wild, and Perils of the Yukon.