A Florida Enchantment

A Florida Enchantment (1914)

Lillian Travers, a New York heiress, pops down to Florida to surprise her fiancé, Fred Cassadene, the house doctor at a prominent Saint Augustine hotel. The surprise, however, is Lillian's when she finds Fred in a series of compromising situations with a certain wealthy widow staying there. When she can take no more, Lillian discovers a box forgotten at an old curiosity shop in which lies a hundred-year-old secret: a vial of four rare and exotic African seeds that promises to transform whoever swallows one from a woman to a man or vice versa.

Date of release
1914-08-10
TMDB
4.4 / 10 (13)
Runtime
1h 3m
Genres
Comedy, Fantasy
Director
Sidney Drew

Casting

Interesting facts

A Florida Enchantment (1914) is a silent film directed by Sidney Drew and released by the Vitagraph studio. The feature-length comedy/fantasy was shot in and around St. Augustine, Florida, where its story is set. It is notable for its cross-dressing lead characters, much later discussed as bisexual, gay and transgender.

Production background

The film is based on the 1891 novel and 1896 play (now lost) of the same name written by Fergus Redmond and Archibald Clavering Gunter. The film, produced by Vitagraph Films, was shot in 1914 on location in three Florida locations: Jacksonville,. St. Augustine, and St. Petersburg.

The film includes white actors in blackface, an aspect carefully dissected in Siobhan B. Somerville's book Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Since its inclusion in Vito Russo's 1981 book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies and its 1995 documentary film adaptation, A Florida Enchantment has been seen as one of the earliest screen representations of homosexuality and cross-dressing i…

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