“I wanted to write scenarios myself, so I tried one,” wrote Edison star Gertrude McCoy in the July 31, 1915 issue of Picture-Play Weekly. “It is awfully hard to have anything accepted at the Edison studio, no matter who the author is, but they took this one of mine. It was called United in Danger and was the story of a young actress. Of course, I played the part. It was successful, and after a while I tried another, this time for three reels, about a Southern girl, called What Could She Do? It came out so well that I felt encouraged to go further, and another three-reeler, On the Stroke of Twelve, was accepted and produced last winter. This was even more successful than the previous two. The Edison studio won’t put out anything under an actor’s name, so I used the name of Gertrude Lyons. Now I have just finished working on the one that I wrote, called Through Turbulent Waters, and I do hope it will be a success. Every one says very nice things about it, so far. Mr. Duncan McRae is directing and also acting in it.”
Alas, neither United in Danger nor Through Turbulent Waters appears to survive, though on the basis of her two extant films, both directed by John H. Collins, Gertrude McCoy seems to have been a screenwriter of some talent. Both What Could She Do? and On the Stroke of Midnight belonged to the transitional period in which the Edison company was taking its first reluctant, tentative steps into feature filmmaking. In both films, the first two reels end with brief previews of what is to happen in the following reel (“The result of the acquaintances Sylvia makes in the boarding house will be shown in Part Two following immediately”), an odd little crutch that has disappeared by the time Collins directed the three-reel The Slavey Student in 1915.
In this case, the three reels divide neatly into three acts: an expository sequence in which we are introduced to Sylvia Fairfax, a young Southern woman (McCoy) who has just graduated from a young ladies’ finishing school. When her father, a Kentucky-colonel type, dies suddenly after the failure of his investment in a mining company, Sylvia is left destitute and alone. A business acquaintance of her father offers her a job in Boston, as the governess to his daughter’s two young children, but Sylvia proves to be a poor disciplinarian (“The untrained girl finds the job a difficult one”) and she moves to New York in search of employment. She ends up in a boarding house in the theatrical district, where, in Reel 2, she makes the acquaintance of a boisterous vaudevillian (Harry Beaumont, the future director of The Broadway Melody), who takes her to a louche restaurant and tries to seduce her by forcing her to drink. Sylvia is saved from this fate by the timely intervention of another boarding-house acquaintance, Hetty Sharp (Marjorie Ellison), who gets her a job in the department store where she works, then attempts to draw her into a shoplifting scheme.
Captured by the store detective, she gallantly refuses to tell the police inspector (Frank McGlynn) of her friend’s involvement. Hetty confesses anyway and the inspector, impressed by Sylvia’s ability to hold her tongue, offers her a job as a police agent. In Reel 3 – which, alas, does not survive – Sylvia goes undercover and infiltrates a band of kidnappers, posing as an Irish maid.  She locates the missing child, who – wonder of wonders – turns out to be the younger sister of a handsome young man, Robert Gray (Richard Tucker), she first met back at her boarding school.
One senses a sort of emotional autobiography here, with the independent young woman from the rural South (McCoy was a native of Rome, Georgia) who foregoes familial and romantic entanglements to follow her own path in the urban North. Particularly suggestive is the notion that, although Sylvia is a failure as an actual governess, she is a success as a performative one.
Throughout, Collins’s direction is typically rigorous and well-considered. There are several striking examples of his frame-within-a-frame technique, as when Sylvia’s unsuccessful attempts to discipline her young wards are reflected in a perfectly placed mirror directly behind her, or in the restaurant scene, when a curtained-off private booth behind Sylvia and her would-be seducer hints at the nefarious activities taking place outside of Sylvia’s vision. Where so many of the Edison films of this period are characterized by unbroken proscenium shots through which the players seem to drift in and out at will, Collins carefully choreographs the entrances and exits of his players for dramatic effect. In the restaurant scene, for example, Hetty enters the frame from the right background, turns at the center of the shot, and approaches the couple seated in the foreground, her figure now coming between them and effectively putting the attempted seduction to an end.

Dave Kehr