Kansas Saloon Smashers (1901)
by popegrutch
This short film from Edison gives a comic reproduction of then-recent prohibitionist activity in the Mid-West. Although her name is not mentioned in the title, it is clearly a film about Carrie Nation.
We see a proscenium-style wide-shot of the front of a bar, with various characters approaching the bartender to purchase drinks. There is a working-class woman, who buys a “growler” in a bucket, a friendly policeman, who buys and drinks a whiskey, and an Irish caricature, who carries a sod shovel and smokes a pipe. Suddenly, a group of women in black dresses and bonnets rush in with hatchets, smashing bottles of liquor. One of them grabs the “growler” the Irishman was buying and throws it on him, then she runs behind the bar and smashes the mirror. She is then sprayed by the bartender with his seltzer bottle, and the tide of the battle turns as the policeman returns to escort the women out of the bar. They leave, but the policeman slips on the beer and falls. The bartender also slips right as the film ends.
The Real Carrie Nation with a hatchet.
Carrie Nation was able to carry out her attacks on Kansas saloons in part because State law stated that they should not exist. She would be arrested for disturbing the peace, but released after a day because of the difficulty associated with prosecuting her for doing what the police were supposed to do already. The eastern Edison crew that worked on this movie don’t seem to have been terribly sympathetic, the cop we see drinking seems to be a nice fellow, and the prohibitionists are out of control and ultimately defeated with a seltzer spritzer. Still, it was a smart move, dramatizing events that were widely spoken about among the classes of people that were watching movies at the time. This movie was likely adapted both for individual kinetoscope viewing and for screening at venues that had projectors. It’s a pretty simple shoot, but note that the smashing of the mirror is accomplished with a jump cut, similar to the effects that Georges Méliès was now famous for. The narrator on the “Treasures” disc this is included with suggests that the women are played by men: if so, I couldn’t tell, but it’s true that women were pretty scarce at the early Edison shoots.
Director: George S. Fleming and Edwin S. Porter
Camera: Edwin S. Porter
Starring: Unknown
Run Time: 1 Min
You can watch it for free: here.
Century Film Project 
So could you call this is an early example of a plot that’s “ripped from the headlines”?
Yes, I think that counts. there was a lot of this sort of thing in the early years of cinema: creating images that reproduced news stories for audiences who may or may not have fully understood that what they were seeing was not documentary footage. See also, Melies and “The Dreyfus Affair” from a couple years earlier.