He would like to thank the Academy.
I babbled about this in the tags of my last post. Frederick Cook made it to the North Pole, and he was there first, or so he claimed. He was determined to defend his honor with words, in the newspapers, on the lecture circuit, or, if push came to shove, with a few punches. In 1911, he added a new tool to his arsenal: the “moving picture.”
The Truth About the Pole is a little over 15 minutes long. It features Cook as himself, replicating his “heroic” feats and facing off against the “Arctic Trust,” a gaggle of dastardly characters who stand in for Peary and Cook’s other detractors. With their sinister moustaches and hammy gestures, they make for classic silent screen villains straight out of central casting. Spoiler alert: they lose. Onscreen if not off, Cook’s reputation as the discoverer of the North Pole remains intact. The film even ends with some footage of Cook arriving in Copenhagen after having (allegedly) reached the pole. The whole film is available on YouTube. It’s also on the Internet Archive, which is, hooray, back up and running!
For what it’s worth, I find this little movie charming in its way. If you’re on my blog and reading this post, then you already know how charismatic a guy Fred Cook is. That comes through here, even in the grainy 110+ year old footage. I particularly like the bit toward the end when he removes his hat and bows to the camera. You can see the hint of a sly smile on his face.
An advertisement published in Moving Picture World, April 1911. This was a trade publication, aimed at film distributors, theater owners, and other industry professionals. Cook incorporated The Truth About the Pole into a vaudeville act. He’d give a lecture and show the movie, along with slides of images from his expedition. This mixture of live entertainment (in Cook’s case, a lecture) with movies was common at this point in the history of the medium, when short films were the norm and feature-length productions had not yet taken off in earnest. His “North Pole Picture Co.”—really just Cook and the film’s producer-director, Wilbert Melville—took out ads in this magazine in order to sell the film to to distributors and get it into as many theaters around the country as possible.
I’m currently digging into when and where this movie was made, contemporary reactions, and Cook’s adventures in vaudeville. More to come.
