By: Mehitabel Glenhaber

Paul Revere has featured in countless films and TV shows over the years, including Disney’s Johnny Tremain, and, recently, the Sons of Liberty miniseries. But Revere’s first appearance on the silver screen was actually in 1914, in The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, produced by Edison Studios and directed by Charles Brabin. This 11-minute film closely follows the version of Paul Revere’s story which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow narrates in “Paul Revere’ Ride,” but also adds some of its own cinematic flourishes. At a point in time when films would have been novel to most viewers, this film uses 1910s cinema magic to bring Paul Revere’s story to life, very much like Longfellow’s vivid poem did for audiences in the 1860s. Just as Longfellow’s poem transformed Paul Revere’s story from a specific incident in the Battles of Lexington and Concord to an generalizable story about patriotism which resonated with his Civil War era audience, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere brought Paul Revere’s story into a new medium as a patriotic myth which may have resonated with American audiences on the eve of WWI.

Edison Studios, a subsidiary of Thomas Edison’s Edison Manufacturing Company, was one of America’s first movie studios. In the 1890s through 1910s, Thomas Edison’s companies controlled the patents to the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope – the first successful video cameras and film projectors in the American market. These patents allowed Edison to control a monopoly on film production and distribution in the United States.[1] Thomas Edison maintained this monopoly by liberally suing for patent infringement, colluding with film stock manufacturers, and forming the associated Motion Picture Patents Company (or Edison Trust) to block smaller studios and European films from American theaters. This monopoly made the Edison Manufacturing Company a one-stop shop for movie theaters – early cinemas would purchase film projectors, projector maintenance equipment, and films to screen all from the same catalog, until the company was broken up under anti-trust law in 1915.[2]

Between 1894 and 1915, Edison Studios produced around 1,200 films,[3] most of which are now lost. Many of the studio’s earliest films were several minutes long and captured scenes from real life or stage performances – a boxing match, a burlesque dance, or a crowded scene in a public square. However, by the early 1900s, Edison Studios mostly produced 10-20 minute narrative films.[4] Some were original comedies or dramas, including the Wood B. Wedd series, which satirized the troubles of dating and marriage at the time. Others, like Frankenstein (1910) retold classic works of literature. The company also produced early documentaries and staged news reel footage – including completely re-staging president McKinley’s assassination or battles from the Spanish-American War at the company’s studio in New Jersey.[5]

In the 1910s, as Edison studios began to face more competition from other film studios and projector models, the company began to embrace the strategy of producing feel-good patriotic films, adapting stories which they already knew had audiences and would sell well. Many of the films produced during this time, such as The Birth of the Star-Spangled Banner (1914) adapted already famous events from US history. The studio also began to develop a stable of actors who had already featured in commercially successful films – the very beginning of movie studios attempting to use “movie stars” to attract audiences.[6]

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere is typical of films produced by the studio at this time. It starred Augustus Phillips, an established member of Edison Studios’ stable of actors who had previously played Dr. Frankenstein, and adapted an already well-known and well-liked story from American history.[7] The advertisement for the film in Edison Studios’ trade publication reads:

“Of all the characters of our Revolutionary period, none is more endeared to young and old than that of Paul Revere, whose exploit has been immortalized by Longfellow so effectively that the lines of the poem and the incidents portrayed are graven more deeply, perhaps, upon the average American mind than any other character or exploit in our American history.”[8]

The enduring fame of Paul Revere’s story would have made it a safe bet for Edison Studios at a time when the company wanted stories which were guaranteed to be a commercial success.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere may also be an example of Edison’s early forays into educational films which were intended to convey both historic facts and morality to its audience. Facing competition from other film studios in the commercial entertainment market, in the late 1910s, Edison Studios began to market films to schools and orphanages.[9]  Edison claimed publicly in the later 1910s that it would be possible to “teach the children everything from mathematics to morality, by little dramas acted out before the camera.”[10] Though this film was produced a little before Edison’s turn to educational films, it might represent an early experiment in the power of film to engage audiences in historic facts – advertisements for the film boast that large portions of the film were filmed on location, and that the film will “stir the minds of young and old.”[11]

In The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, Charles Brabin takes the patriotic approach to Paul Revere’s story, modeling its narrative on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s highly romanticized version of Paul Revere’s Ride rather than historical fact. The film uses intertitles from the Longfellow poem, presenting itself almost as a moving illustration of Longfellow’s words, and follows many of the beats of the poem, portraying Revere as a lone rider, dashing through the countryside to rouse and warn “every Middlesex village and farm” of the British Army’s advance. In reality, on the night of April 18^th, Paul Revere was on a specific secretive mission to warn John Hancock and Sam Adams, and undertook this mission along with a number of messengers riding other routes. We see how Revere “with muffled oar/silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,” and “watched with eager search/the belfry tower of the Old North Church.” The famous lantern signal was in actual fact a backup in case Paul Revere could not make it to Charlestown, and Revere would have already had all the information he needed when he left Boston. The film sticks so closely to the Longfellow poem, David Hackett Fisher observes, that it even includes pigeons in the belfry of the Old North Church – a detail which Longfellow added to the poem after observing pigeons on his own tour of Old North’s steeple.[12]

Throughout the movie, Brabin took artistic license to make Paul Revere look good on film. Revere rides a white horse – a terrible choice for avoiding British sentries at night, but a great one for maximizing contrast with Revere’s dark outfit and nighttime scenes on low-quality early film. The film also includes a dramatic scene not in the poem where Revere avoids capture by mounted redcoats in Charlestown. Though this scene very closely parallels an incident that Revere recounts in his own account of the ride, in this version, Revere hides behind a barn to misdirect the redcoats about the direction he’s gone. This change in blocking might have been to take advantage of a fun perspective trick of camera placement where the viewer can see Revere and the redcoats the whole time, while the redcoats miss Revere entirely.

The film also uses early special effects and film editing techniques to heighten the drama. Despite the film’s promise of being filmed on location,[13] some key scenes, like Paul Revere seeing the Old North Church signal, used painted backdrops of historical landmarks to create a more picturesque scene. One particularly interesting shot near the end of the film uses a technique that’s rare for the period, mounting the camera on a vehicle so it can retreat as Revere rides towards it. This very cinematic shot emphasizes the speed and drama of Revere’s ride – rather than, for example, the covert nature of his mission. Brabin’s film builds on Longfellow’s imagery, for the first time transforming Paul Revere into the cinematic action hero that many people think of him as today.

Compared to Longfellow’s poem, Brabin’s film also focuses substantially on war and violence, including an extended scene of the fighting in Lexington and Concord. Perhaps, because they had already been re-creating battles for news reel studios,[14] this was the sort of dramatic scene which Edison Studios directors and technicians knew they could pull off well. As Revere rides through the countryside, rousing his countrymen to “be up and to arm,” the camera dwells at length on goodbyes and tearful domestic scenes, wives checking their husband’s equipment, and young boys arguing with their parents about whether they will join the battle. Interestingly, a large number of women are present in the battle scenes of the film: mourning loved ones, caring for the injured, and, in one case, taking up a gun to avenge a fallen husband. While these characters are given some individuality, many of them appear in group scenes, staged as theatrical archetypes – the young boy leaving his mother to go off to war, the bereaved widow, the scrappy underdog patriot. Like Longfellow’s poem, published on the eve of the Civil War, this film gives the viewer the impression that Paul Revere’s Ride was not just a one-off event, but an immortal story about war, sacrifice, and American patriotism, which may have also resonated with audiences on the eve of World War I.

When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his poem in 1860, he was interested in Paul Revere not just as a historical figure, but as an immortal symbol of American patriotism, relevant to the challenges of his time. In the last stanza of his poem, he wrote:

“A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.”

At the time, poetry was perhaps the most immersive medium available to Longfellow to bring this story to life for audiences far and wide. But 50 years later, Charles Brabin was able to use the new technology of cinema to carry Paul Revere “on the night-wind of the Past” by creating a living image of him on the silver screen which could be shared in nickelodeons across America. Just like Longfellow’s poem, Edison Studios’ advertisement for this film promised to bring Paul Revere and the viewer into the same time period: “We follow him today as he rides along the country side, rousing the men to fight for their and our liberty, and our pulses leap with each stride of the mount.”[15] The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere is one among many examples of how despite living 250 years ago, Paul Revere is a character whom artists are forever reviving, in whatever most vivid medium they have at their disposal.

You can view Edison Studios’s “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” on our museum’s YouTube page!

[1] Jeanne Thomas, “The Decay of the Motion Picture Patents Company,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1971), pp. 34-40.
[2] Library of Congress, “History of Edison Motion Pictures,” https://www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/history-of-edison-motion-pictures/.
[3] Robert Conot, Thomas A. Edison: a streak of luck. New York City: Da Capo Press, 1979.
[4] Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915, University of California Press, 1994. and Paul C. Spehr, “Motion Pictures,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, Vol. 23, No. 1 (January 1966), p. 74.
[5]  LOC, “The History of Edison Motion Pictures.”
[6] LOC, “The History of Edison Motion Pictures.”
[7] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0680232/
[8] The Edison Kinetogram., Vol. 11 No. 1, October 1914, p. 27.
[9] Amanda R Keeler, “John Collier, Thomas Edison and the Educational Promotion of Moving Pictures,” Marquette College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications, (2012), pp. 124-126 and Conot, 421.
[10] Keeler, 128-129.
[11] Edison Kinetogram, 27.
[12] David Hackett Fisher, Paul Revere’s Ride, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 333
[13] “The action throughout this film is finely sustained, and many of the scenes, including Revere’s house and that of Hancock and the wall at Lexington where the first shots were fired were all taken on the exact historical spots where the original action took place.” – The Edison Kinetogram. Vol. 11 No. 1, October 1914, p. 27.
[14] LOC, “The History of Edison Motion Pictures.”
[15] Edison Kinetogram, 27.

Works Cited:

Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915. University of California Press, 1994.

Conot, Robert. Thomas A. Edison: a streak of luck. New York City.: Da Capo Press, 1979.

 The Edison Kinetogram. Vol. 11 No. 1, October 1914.

Fisher, David Hackett. Paul Revere’s Ride. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Keeler, Amanda R. “John Collier, Thomas Edison and the Educational Promotion of Moving Pictures.” Marquette College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications, (2012), pp. 124 – 141.

Library of Congress. “History of Edison Motion Pictures.” https://www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/history-of-edison-motion-pictures/.

Spher, Paul C. “Motion Pictures.” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, Vol. 23, No. 1 (January 1966), pp. 70-74.

Thomas, Jeanne. “The Decay of the Motion Picture Patents Company.” Cinema Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1971), pp. 34-40.