The Drunkard

The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved is an American temperance play first performed in 1844. A drama in five acts, it was perhaps the most popular play produced in the United States before the dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin  in the 1850s. In New York City, P.T. Barnum presented it at his American Museum in a run of over 100 performances. It was among the first of the American temperance plays, and remained the most popular of them until it was eclipsed in 1858 by T. S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room.

The primary writer of the play was William H. Smith, who also directed and starred in the original production in Boston in the 1844–45 season. Smith was the stage manager at Moses Kimball's Boston Museum, where the play was originally produced. An anonymous collaborator, believed to have been Unitarian minister John Pierpont, co-wrote the script.

The play ran for an unprecedented 140 performances in the Boston Museums' 1844-45 season, sometimes running three times a day. This was astonishing at the time. The success of the play led to the beginning of the Temperance Movement's success.

A production of The Drunkard opened at the Theatre Mart in Los Angeles in 1933 and ran for 36 years. At one point, Boris Karloff suggested adding an olio, a musical number following the performance, played in front of a olio drop.

The dated melodrama of Smith's play made it a target of parody in films. In 1934, a production of The Drunkard was featured to comic effect in the W. C. Fields film The Old Fashioned Way. The following year, James Murray and Clara Kimball Young starred in a film called The Drunkard, a comedy-drama in which two theatrical producers present the play as a farce with their needy relatives in the cast. In 1940, Buster Keaton starred in another film parody, The Villain Still Pursued Her.

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