Mormonens Offer (A Victim of the Mormons)
R: August Blom. B: Alfred Kjerulf. K: Axel Graatkjær. D: Valdemar Psilander, Clara Pontoppidan, Henry Seemann, Carlo Wieth, Carl Schenstrøm, Frederik Jacobsen, Carl Petersen, Emilie Sannom. P: Ole Olsen / Nordisk Film Kompagni. Dk 1911

Intertitles in English:
– It’s my schoolmate, Mormon priest Andrew Larsson.
– Admission card for the Mormons Great Meeting. Wednesday, June 15th at 8:00. The acquaintance Andrew Larsson speaks.
– Nina blames her gentleman friend for neglecting her.
– On the way to the Mormon Meeting.
– Andrew has persuaded Nina to flee with him to Utah.
– Police station in Havnestaden.
– Andrew fools the police and goes over the rails.
– Andrew seeks help from his old friend, old Pens.
– Nina regrets what she has done.
– A mistaken arrest.
– Grief at home.
– If Mormon Priest Andrew Larsson, age 30, (height), dark-haired, clean shaven; and Nina Gran, age 22, (height), blonde, blue eyes, are on board, then have them arrested. Wühlertz, Chief of Police.
– About time we were in New York.
– The telegraph operator becomes suspicious when Andrew loses the fake beard.
– At the hotel in Havnestaden.
– Olaf and Sven decide to travel to Utah.
– Outside Andrew’s house in Utah.
– A friend in the emergency.
– Olaf and Sven arrive in Utah.
– A Mormon baptism in the temple.
– Outside the temple.
– Where’s my sister? Answer or ….
– Talk to me, my dear, don’t you know me?

“The second decade of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of Hollywood films demonizing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly known as the ‘Mormon’ church, including the blockbuster The Mountain Meadows Massacre (director unknown, 1912). (…) Instead of the Western U.S., the film Mormonens Offer (August Blom, 1911, A Victim of the Mormons) plays out primarily in Europe (presumably in Copenhagen, but the urban setting is generic enough to represent any medium-sized European city) and deals with the infiltration of society as a whole and a single family in particular by a Mormon missionary. (…) The film premiered in Copenhagen at the Panoptikon Theater, on October 2, 1911. It was released in London soon after, on October 11, 1911, and in the United States on February 5, 1912. The commercial success of this film in Britain and the U.S. inspired the wave of anti-Mormon films mentioned above. The question remains, however, why a Danish studio made the first anti-Mormon film in the first place and what this particular film can suggest about the priorities and preoccupations of Danish film and society in the early twentieth century. (…)

The introduction of religious freedom in the mid-nineteenth century disrupted Danish society in very tangible ways, while the rapid spread of Mormonism in the succeeding decades aroused considerable fear and consternation among Danes. These negative emotions were in part a response to the somewhat abstract, existential crisis inherent in the fact that thousands of their neighbors were abandoning the church that had, until a few years earlier, defined their national identity. (…)

On a metaphorical level, the film’s exaggerated depiction of Mormonism, in the style of the white slave trade films, as a contemporary threat to the safety of Danish women that could only be defeated by the aggressive intervention of male protectors suggests that the film is engaging with broader cultural discourses about gender roles and modernity in early twentieth century Denmark. At a time when women’s emancipation movements were gaining momentum across Scandinavia and America, the implicit allusions to the Mormon practice of polygamy, which had already been defunct for two decades by the time the film was made, not only trigger righteous Lutheran indignation that any man should think himself entitled to more than one wife but also indicate a lack of confidence in women’s mental and physical abilities to make choices that are best for either themselves as individuals or society as a whole.

By way of example, Nina chooses to run away with Andrew to Utah, but her susceptibility to making such a choice is attributed to her irrational emotional reactions to her fiancé’s boorish behavior and her seducer’s aura of mysticism. When she changes her mind, her physical weakness and timidity prevent her from being able to escape successfully, even when Andrew’s housekeeper in Utah helps her flee through her open, unbarred window. Although a single film is certainly not foundation enough upon which to base a definitive judgment on the state of Danish society in the early twentieth century, there is enough correspondence between the film and the economic, social, and historical conditions that inspired it to justify considering the film’s depiction of Mormonism in Denmark as one thread in a complex web of contemporary Danish sociocultural identity constructions. (…)”
Allen, Julie K. (2013): The White Slave Trade gets Religion in “A Victim of the Mormons“