Traffic in Souls

Traffic in Souls is a 1913 American silent film directed by George Loane Tucker, a melodrama built around the contemporary public panic over so called white slavery, the coerced trafficking of young women into prostitution, following a young woman's efforts to rescue her sister from a criminal trafficking ring. At six reels it was unusually long for an American film of its time, when most commercial releases still ran a single reel, and its commercial success helped convince American producers and exhibitors that audiences would sit through and pay for feature length narrative films. It is regarded by film historians as an important early step in establishing the feature film as the industry's dominant commercial format in the United States.