Search results
The Spell of the Poppy is a 1915 short drama film directed by Tod Browning. It concerns Manfredi, a young opium addict. [1] Cast. Eugene Pallette as Manfredi. Lucille Young as Zuletta. Joseph Henabery as John Hale. Plot. This film is a cautionary tale about drug addiction that depicts the virtuoso pianist Manfredi who has become addicted to opium.
- Overview
- HISTORY Vault: World War I Documentaries
The Remembrance Day symbolism of the poppy started with a poem written by a World War I brigade surgeon who was struck by the sight of the red flowers growing on a ravaged battlefield.
From 1914 to 1918, World War I took a greater human toll than any previous conflict, with some 8.5 million soldiers dead of battlefield injuries or disease. The Great War, as it was then known, also ravaged the landscape of Western Europe, where most of the fiercest fighting took place. From the devastated landscape of the battlefields, the red poppy would grow and, thanks to a famous poem, become a powerful symbol of remembrance.
Across northern France and Flanders (northern Belgium), the brutal clashes between Allied and Central Powers soldiers tore up fields and forests, tearing up trees and plants and wreaking havoc on the soil beneath. But in the warm early spring of 1915, bright red flowers began peeking through the battle-scarred land: Papaver rhoeas, known variously as the Flanders poppy, corn poppy, red poppy and corn rose. As Chris McNab, author of “The Book of the Poppy,” wrote in an excerpt published in the Independent, the brilliantly colored flower is actually classified as a weed, which makes sense given its tenacious nature.
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian who served as a brigade surgeon for an Allied artillery unit, spotted a cluster of poppies that spring, shortly after the Second Battle of Ypres. McCrae tended to the wounded and got a firsthand look at the carnage of that clash, in which the Germans unleashed lethal chlorine gas for the first time in the war. Some 87,000 Allied soldiers were killed, wounded or went missing in the battle (as well as 37,000 on the German side); a friend of McCrae’s, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was among the dead.
Struck by the sight of bright red blooms on broken ground, McCrae wrote a poem, “In Flanders Field,” in which he channeled the voice of the fallen soldiers buried under those hardy poppies. Published in Punch magazine in late 1915, the poem would be used at countless memorial ceremonies and became one of the most famous works of art to emerge from the Great War. Its fame had spread far and wide by the time McCrae himself died, from pneumonia and meningitis, in January 1918.
World War I Armistice Day Celebrations
Stream World War I videos commercial-free in HISTORY Vault.
WATCH NOW
Back in France, Guérin organized French women, children and veterans to make and sell artificial poppies as a way to fund the restoration of war-torn France. As Heather Johnson argues on her website devoted to Madame Guérin’s work, the Frenchwoman may have been the single most significant figure in spreading the symbol of the Remembrance poppy through the British Commonwealth countries and other Allied nations.
Within a year, Guérin brought her campaign to England, where in November 1921 the newly founded (Royal) British Legion held its first-ever “Poppy Appeal,” which sold millions of silk flowers and raised over £106,000 (a hefty sum at the time) to go towards finding employment and housing for Great War veterans. The following year, Major George Howson set up the Poppy Factory in Richmond, England, in which disabled servicemen were employed to make the fabric and paper blooms.
Other nations soon followed suit in adopting the poppy as their official symbol of remembrance. Today, nearly a century after World War I ended, millions of people in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand don the red flowers every November 11 (known as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day) to commemorate the anniversary of the 1918 armistice. According to McNab, the Poppy Factory (now located in Richmond, England and Edinburgh, Scotland) is still the center of poppy production, churning out as many as 45 million poppies made of various materials each year.
In the United States, the tradition has developed a little differently. Americans don’t typically wear poppies on November 11 (Veterans Day), which honors all living veterans. Instead, they wear the symbolic red flower on Memorial Day—the last Monday in May—to commemorate the sacrifice of so many men and women who have given their lives fighting for their country.
- Sarah Pruitt
In Disney's prequel movie Oz the Great and Powerful, Glinda the Good cast a spell upon the poppy meadow with her magic wand to disguise the scarecrow army in a clever illusion by covering them all in fog.
Stream 'The Spell of the Poppy' and watch online. Discover streaming options, rental services, and purchase links for this movie on Moviefone. Watch at home and immerse yourself in this...
The Spell of the Poppy - Where to Watch and Stream - TV Guide. 1915. 0 hr 22 mins. NR. Watchlist. Manfredi, an habitual user of opium, is a piano player in a Chinese café. A wealthy...
Nov 9, 2016 · In 1914, only five years before Baum's death, the U.S. passed legislation to control the distribution of opium and coca. While we can't know for sure, these concerns over opium may have inspired the famous scarlet field. The objects below explore the power and seduction of the poppy for turn-of-the-century Americans.
