''The Gray Nun of Belgium'' was a 1915 film announced for release on the Alliance Program by Dramatic Feature Films,

Frank Joslyn Baum Frank Joslyn Baum (December 3, 1883 – December 2, 1958) was an American lawyer, soldier, writer, and film producer, and the first president of The International Wizard of Oz Club. He is best known as the author of ''To Please a Child'' (a b ...

's short-lived successor to

The Oz Film Manufacturing Company The Oz Film Manufacturing Company was an independent film studio from 1914 to 1915. It was founded by L. Frank Baum (president), Louis F. Gottschalk (vice president), Harry Marston Haldeman (secretary), and Clarence R. Rundel (treasurer) as an ...

. Despite the advertising in ''

Motion Picture News The ''Motion Picture News'' was an American film industry trade paper published from 1913 to 1930. History The publication was created through the 1913 merger of the ''Moving Picture News'' founded in 1908 and ''The Exhibitors' Times'', founded ...

'' announcing its release date, Katharine Rogers, in ''L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz'', believes that Alliance found the film inferior and refused to distribute it. The exhibition copy, which may have been a work print, may have been the only copy ever struck. Baum himself thought that exchanges and exhibitors dismissed the film "rather arbitrarily" based on the Oz Company name. In the film, Betty Pierce played a

Mother Superior An abbess (Latin: ''abbatissa''), also known as a mother superior, is the female superior of a community of Catholic nuns in an abbey. Description In the Catholic Church (both the Latin Church and Eastern Catholic), Eastern Orthodox, Coptic ...

who aided Allied soldiers during

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

. Cathrine Countiss played the title role. It also starred David Proctor, Mae Wells,

Katherine Griffith Katherine Kiernan Griffith (September 30, 1876Katherine Kiernan Griffith's birthdate varies in sources; September 30, 1876 is the date on her gravestone in Colma, California, via Ancestry, IMDB, and Find a Grave. – October 17, 1921), also seen ...

, Raymond Russell,

Robert Dunbar Robert Dunbar (December 13, 1812 – September 18, 1890) was a mechanical engineer. He designed the first steam-powered grain elevator in the world and the majority of the first grain elevators in Buffalo, New York City, and Canada. Early l ...

, Harry Clements, and James Spencer. Wells and Russell were prominent actors in the Oz Company, having played roles such as

Mombi Mombi is a fictional character in L. Frank Baum's classic children's series of Oz Books. She is the most significant antagonist in the second Oz book ''The Marvelous Land of Oz'' (1904), and is alluded to in other works. Mombi plays a very impor ...

and Dr. Pipt, respectively.

References

*Richard Mills and David L. Greene. "The Oz Film Manufacturing Company." ''

The Baum Bugle ''The Baum Bugle: A Journal of Oz'' is the official journal of The International Wizard of Oz Club. The journal was founded in 1957, with its first issue released in June of that year (to a subscribers' list of sixteen). It publishes three times pe ...

''. Autumn 1973. *Katharine M. Rogers. ''L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz''. HarperCollins, 2004.

External links

* Lost American films Western Front (World War I) films Films set in Belgium Belgium in fiction 1915 films American silent feature films American black-and-white films 1910s American films 1915 lost films {{Oz-stub