Rescued by Rover (1905)



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CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF CONTENTS

Rescued by Rover (1905)/The ? Motorist (1906)

Ian Christie

The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918)

Ian Christie

The Lodger (1926)

Sarah Barrow

Piccadilly (1929)

Lynda Townsend

Drifters (1929)

Sarah Barrow

The 39 Steps (1935)

Sarah Casey

Things to Come (1936)

Lincoln Geraghty

Love on the Dole (1941)

John White

Listen to Britain (1942)

Sarah Barrow

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

Nigel Wheale

Millions Like Us (1943)

Nigel Herwin

Brief Encounter (1945)

Melanie Williams

The Wicked Lady (1945)

Melanie Williams

The Red Shoes (1948)

Trish Sheil

Passport to Pimlico (1948)

John White

The Third Man (1949)

Sarah Barrow

The Cruel Sea (1953)

John White

The Ladykillers (1955)

Robert Shail

Sapphire (1959)

John White

We Are The Lambeth Boys (1959)

Dave Allen

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

Jean Welsh

Peeping Tom (1960)

Isabelle McNeill

The Innocents (1961)

Neil Sinyard

A Taste of Honey (1961)

Robert Shail

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Freddie Gaffney

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

Melanie Williams

Goldfinger (1964)

Nigel Herwin

If… (1968)

John White

Carry On Up the Khyber (1968)

Steven Gerrard

Kes (1969)

Corinna Downing

Performance (1970)

Justin Smith

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Simon Ward

Get Carter (1971)

Freddie Gaffney

The Wicker Man (1973)

Justin Smith

Pressure (1975)

Sarah Barrow

Jubilee (1978)

Dave Allen

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Neil Sinyard

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)

Nigel Wheale

The Crying Game (1992)

Isabelle McNeill

Gadael Lenin/Leaving Lenin (1992)

Trish Sheil

Orlando (1992)

Isabelle McNeill

Bhaji on the Beach (1993)

Sarah Barrow

Remains of the Day (1993)

Sarah Casey

London (1994)

Sarah Barrow

Land and Freedom (1995)

John White

Secrets and Lies (1996)

Jean Welsh

The Full Monty (1997)

John White

Ratcatcher (1999)

Sarah Barrow

Wonderland (2000)

Cathy Poole

My Summer of Love (2004)

Lynda Townsend

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF CONTENTS

39 Steps, The (1935)

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

A Taste of Honey (1961)

Bhaji on the Beach (1993)

Brief Encounter (1945)

Carry On Up the Khyber (1968)

Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, The (1989)

Cruel Sea, The (1953)

Crying Game, The (1992)

Drifters (1929)

Full Monty, The (1997)

Gadael Lenin/Leaving Lenin (1992)

Get Carter (1971)

Goldfinger (1964)

If… (1968)

Innocents, The (1961)

Jubilee (1978)

Kes (1969)

Ladykillers, The (1955)

Land and Freedom (1995)

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The (1943)

Life Story of David Lloyd George, The (1918)

Listen to Britain (1942)

Lodger, The (1926)

London (1994)

Love on the Dole (1941)

Millions Like Us (1943)

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

My Summer of Love (2004)

Orlando (1992)

Passport to Pimlico (1948)

Peeping Tom (1960)

Performance (1970)

Piccadilly (1929)

Pressure (1975)

Ratcatcher (1999)

Red Shoes, The (1948)

Remains of the Day (1993)

Rescued by Rover (1905)/The ? Motorist (1906)

Sapphire (1959)

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

Secrets and Lies (1996)

Things to Come (1936)

Third Man, The (1949)

We Are The Lambeth Boys (1959)

Wicked Lady, The (1945)

Wicker Man, The (1973)

Wonderland (2000)

CONTRIBUTORS


Dave Allen began his career as an art teacher but has been involved in teaching film and media studies for over 25 years. His doctoral research had a pedagogic focus and examined links between various forms of visual teaching. He has been at the University of Portsmouth since 1988 and is currently Head of the School of Creative Arts Film & Media.

Sarah Barrow is Senior Lecturer and Pathway Leader for Film Studies at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge. She has published various book chapters on British and Latin American cinema, and is preparing a book on Peruvian cinema, identity and political violence. She is a member of the Board of Management for the Cambridgeshire Film Consortium and advises on education events and resources for a number of film festivals.
Sarah Casey Benyahia is a film and media studies teacher. She is the author of Teaching Contemporary British Cinema (BFI, 2005), Teaching Film and TV Documentary (BFI, 2007) and co author of AS Film Studies: The Essential Introduction and A2 Film Studies: The Essential Introduction (both Routledge, 2007).
Ian Christie is a film historian, curator and broadcaster, currently Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College and director of the London Screen Study Collection. In 2006 he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University. He has written books on Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, Scorsese and Gilliam; and worked on exhibitions such as Film as Film (1979), Eisenstein: His Life and Art (1988), Spellbound (1996) and Modernism: Designing a New World (2006). His interest in early cinema led to a BBC television series The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (1994), and he is working on a history of Robert Paul and the early film business in Britain.

Corinna Downing is a freelance film and event programmer for young audiences. Her work focuses on bringing the greatest variety of film to the widest audience of children, young people and educators. She is currently Film Programme Consultant for the London Children's Film Festival in addition to consultation, training and delivery of film projects for London-based and national organisations including the UK Film Council, British Film Institute, Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, Lambeth City Learning Centre and Film Club.

Freddie Gaffney is Course Leader for Broadcasting at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. A practising screenwriter and cinematographer, he has worked in both film and television. He is Principal Examiner for WJEC AS/A Level Film Studies, and has consulted for industry lead bodies. He is co author of AS Film Studies: The Essential Introduction and A2 Film Studies: The Essential Introduction (both Routledge, 2007).
Lincoln Geraghty is Principal Lecturer in Film Studies and Subject Leader in Media Studies in the School of Creative Arts, Film and Media at the University of Portsmouth. He is author of Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe (IB Tauris, 2007) and American Science Fiction Film and Television (Berg, forthcoming) and the editor of The Influence of Star Trek on Television, Film and Culture (McFarland, 2007), The Shifting Definitions of Genre: Essays on Labelling Films, Television Shows and Media co-edited with Mark Jancovich (McFarland, forthcoming), and Future Visions: Key Science Fiction and Fantasy Television Texts (Scarecrow, forthcoming).
Steve Gerrard is a film lecturer at University of Wales, Lampeter. He is currently engaged in researching the Carry On films as part of his PhD thesis. He has taught modules on Introduction to Film, The Western, Film Genre, and Film Stars. When he's not too busy he dreams of being the next Doctor Who.
Nigel Herwin is Course Director of Film and Television Studies for Continuing Education at the University of East Anglia. He also gives guest lectures on various aspects of Film and TV at sixth form colleges and regional film theatres. Special interests include silent cinema, European cinema, comedy, Doctor Who and depictions of bipolar affective disorder.
Isabelle McNeill is Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. She specialises in film theory as well as French and Francophone film. She has published articles on various topics, including memory, media and the city in recent French film, and decadent cinema. She is a founding member of the Cambridge Film Trust and contributes to the programming of the Cambridge Film Festival.
Cathy Poole is Director of Lifelong Learning at Bristol University, and lectures on the Bristol MA in Screen Studies. She was previously Head of Learning at Watershed Media Centre, then Education Advisor at South West Screen. She has published materials about film for teachers and students at primary, GCSE and A Level, and contributed the chapter ‘How to introduce Media Literacy to Schools’ to a compilation produced as a result of the ‘Media Skills and Competence’ conference in Finland (2005). She was a member of the BFI’s Associate Tutor panel, and is convener of the MovIES group (Moving Image Education Specialists).
Robert Shail lectures in film studies at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He has published articles and essays on film stardom, gender, and British cinema history. His most recent publications include British Directors: A Critical Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and Stanley Baker: A Life in Film (University of Wales Press, 2007).
Trish Sheil is Education Officer for the Cambridgeshire Film Consortium, and guest lecturer in Film Studies at Anglia Ruskin University. Before this, she taught English and Drama in schools and colleges in England and Wales. Her principal research interests are performance codes, melodrama and silent cinema, and the theatrical heritage of the post-war films of Powell and Pressburger. She has written on film for the Welsh Academy.
Neil Sinyard is Professor and Head of Film Studies at the University of Hull. He
is the author of more than twenty books on film, including monographs of
directors such as Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Steven
Spielberg, Richard Lester, Nicolas Roeg and Jack Clayton. He is also co-editor
of the series of monographs of British Film Makers for Manchester University
Press, and of a volume of essays on 50s British Cinema. He has been teaching
Film Studies for over thirty years.
Justin Smith is Principal Lecturer and Subject Leader in Film Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. A cultural historian with a specialism in British cinema his research interests and writing cover film fandom, reception and exhibition cultures, and issues of identity and memory. He has published articles in The Journal of British Cinema and Television and Fashion Theory and has recently contributed a chapter on web ethnography to The New Film History (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007). He is currently writing a book based on his PhD entitled Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema, 1968-86.
Lynda Townsend teaches film and English and in recent years has been working with the Open University and the Institute of Continuing Education at Cambridge University. She is a freelance writer on film and art, and has made contributions to frieze magazine. She has a particular interest in filmic representations of gender and contemporary expressions of modernity in world cinema.
Simon Ward is Head of Programming & Development at the Independent Cinema Office. His obsession with cinema began after sneaking into Romero’s Dawn of the Dead in a Dublin fleapit at the tender age of eleven. He took a degree in Film Studies at the University of Kent, and after graduating spent several years working at the London Film Festival before becoming Deputy Director of Cinema at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.
Jean Welsh is Head of Media Studies and Film Studies at Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge and teaches A-levels in these subjects. She has run INSET sessions on various aspects of film and media for both the BFI and the WJEC and contributed to the In the Picture Film Reader on British Cinema.
Nigel Wheale includes amongst his publications The Postmodern Arts (Routledge 1995), Writing and Society. Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590--1660 (Routledge 1999) and Remaking Shakespeare. Performance across Media, Genres and Cultures (edited with Pascale Aebischer and Edward J. Esche, Palgrave, 2003). His most recent publication is Raw Skies. New and Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2005).
John White is a teacher of film, English and media currently working at Parkside Community College and Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. He is a co-author of AS Film Studies; the Essential Introduction and A2 Film Studies: the Essential Introduction (both Routledge, 2007) and an A-level examiner for Film Studies with the Welsh Joint Education Committee. He is a co-editor of both Fifty Key British Films and its forthcoming companion volume, Fifty Key US Films (both Routledge).
Melanie Williams is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Hull. She has written on British cinema for various journals including Screen, Cinema Journal, Sight and Sound and Film Quarterly. She is currently working on a co-edited collection of essays on Ealing Studios (I.B. Tauris) and a monograph on the films of David Lean (Manchester University Press).

Introduction
This book is not an attempt to assert that the 50 films discussed here are the ‘greatest’ or ‘best’ British films ever made. The suggestion is more simply that this selection of films operates to provide an initial appreciation of British cinema over the past 100 years. As an introductory survey focusing on individual texts several other ‘50s’ would serve equally as well. There is neither effort, nor wish, to promote a particular canon of British films. The very nature of a ‘canon’ is that it is exclusive and this list is not designed to be that (other than in the sense that we only have room for 50 essays in this book. Nor is this list ranked in order of merit; there are two contents lists, one in date-order and the other in alphabetical order, and both of these structures leave a virtually infinite space for your own additions.
It is true, however, that compiling lists of films according to various criteria has always been a favourite pastime of both cinephiles and movie-goers. It is fun; and film, like all storytelling and art-forms, is built around different types of pleasure. Therefore, beyond the theoretical seriousness of discussions about the potential elitism, exclusivity and political maneuverings associated with the notion of canons, hopefully you will also simply enjoy agreeing and disagreeing with the inclusions and exclusions you find here.
What were our benchmarks for deciding on these particular 50 films? We wanted to include a spread that extended from the period known as ‘early cinema’ (roughly 1895-1910) to the present. We wanted to have a range of mainstream genres but also a few titles that took us beyond commercial cinema. We wanted readers to see that certain titles that have reached ‘classic’ status had been included and were present for their consideration, but we also wanted other films to be included that might encourage the adoption of a wider viewing experience. We wanted the selection to be useful to both students and the general reader looking for an introductory range of material.
We cannot speak for each of our contributors (1), but for ourselves in the writing we wanted to stress that film form, narrative structure, genre, authorship and other technical approaches to film analysis only have significance within the social experience of making and reading film; that the crucial context of film and film studies is that of producers and audiences making films and making sense of films within a social context. We wished to stress the historical and cultural, as well as the cinematic contexts. Films are clearly not created in isolation from what is happening in society during the period in which they come into being. They are products of particular societies and each is made at a particular moment in that society’s history. In viewing them, for us, it is crucial to see them as determinedly exploring, purposefully commenting upon, or unwittingly reflecting issues relevant to their particular socio-historical moment, but also to see them as being continually re-framed and re-constituted by their reception at different times. Films do not exist, cut off from the world in splendid isolation within the cinema auditorium, or behind the drawn curtains of the home cinema experience or blackout facilities of the university or college screening room. In their conception, their production, their distribution, their exhibition and their reception, they take their place within the social sphere; and to be properly understood they need to be seen within this context. Although it is the case that films are re-created in every act of viewing by the individual spectator, and although any social action and historical moment can be seen and understood in a plurality of ways, still invalid and incorrect readings are possible and the validity or otherwise of any particular reading is a vital matter for discussion. Equally, every reading that has been argued clearly from the evidence of the social and historical context remains contestable. The contesting of readings is, after all, the testing of readings and this process is at the heart of both academic debate and everyday political engagement.
To finally be truthful, as our emphasis on social context suggests, as editors we cannot escape charges of ‘canon building’.
That canons exist in film studies and that canon formation is involved with the political sphere is evident. Much less evident is the shifting politics, past and present, of the factors contributing to canon formation. (2)
However lacking in political ‘malice aforethought’ we assure you the process has been, we have ultimately chosen this list of 50 films over all other possibilities and in doing so we are displaying vested interests; but that is merely in the nature of all social exchange. What matters is that as viewers of film we should engage in this social exchange with critical awareness. As Barbara Klinger has suggested, there are ‘competing voices involved in a particular film’s public signification’. (3) We should not attempt to stand apart from this creation of ‘public signification’, detached from this discussion, aware of each of these ‘competing voices’ but never entering into the fray; rather we should ‘get our hands dirty’, become involved in discussing the implications of these voices and through this action arrive at our own voice and political position.
Despite our strong initial focus on the films themselves we agree with Janet Staiger when she suggests that:
interpreting texts or films is a historical reality determined by context, not an inherent or automatic act due to some essential human process …
and would emphasise with her that it is at this point that the critical debate can begin, because:
once interpretation becomes historical rather than universal, then claims for privileging some interpretations can be refuted. Interpretations-in-history become politicized since they relate to historical social struggles, not to essences. (4)
In discussing her concept of a ‘totalised view’, Staiger talks of achieving an approach to texts in which the discovery of meaning and significance has been displaced from text to context. More accurately for us, in an alert reading, context is recognised as being fully sutured into text.
With essays of this length, the number of questions raised is always going to be greater than the number successfully answered, but that is as it should be. Hopefully, these short essays will encourage you to return to, or seek out for the first time, at least some of these films with the enthusiasm to explore further and with one or two questions for which you are determined to seek answers. Each entry aims to be suggestive rather than exhaustive, attempting to introduce selected aspects of film form and thematic content in relation to the focus text, as well as considering historical and cultural contexts. A synopsis is not given since it is assumed the reader is familiar with plot and storyline, or can become so very easily. Similarly, details of a film’s production history are not supplied unless this is in some way relevant to ideas at the core of the film. There is, as we have emphasized, a strong underlying concern throughout to place these films within social, historical and political contexts, and not simply to analyze the ‘look’ of a film. Concepts and debates relevant to film studies as an academic subject are considered within individual entries, where appropriate. So, ideas relating to genre, narrative structure, auteur theory, representation, spectatorship and performance, for example, are dealt with at various points.
In summary, this book offers brief introductions to a range of films, many of which have gained ‘classic’ status through critical and/or popular acclaim. The contents pages provided give both date-ordered and alphabetical listings allowing both students and the general reader to use it as a reference work, and the index of key names, institutions and topics has been designed to help with more specific research activities. The effort throughout is to offer entries that are accessible to the well-informed general reader but also sufficiently exploratory and analytical to be useful as models for students of film.
Notes

  1. The central feature of a book structured around individual contributions from colleagues working in film education and the film industry is that it allows for a diversity of approaches, and is likely to absorb within itself something of this core aspect of film studies.

  2. Janet Staiger, The Politics of Film Canons’, Cinema Journal 24, No 3, Spring 1985, pp 4-23.

  3. Barbara Klinger, ‘Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies’, Screen 38 (2), 1997, pp107-28.

  4. Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema, Princteon, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1992, p18.


Rescued by Rover (1905)

[Production Company: Hepworth. Director: Lewin Fitzhamon. Producer: Cecil Hepworth (also as ‘the Father’).]

The ? Motorist (1906)

[Production Company: Paul’s Animatograph Works. Director: Walter Booth. Producer: Robert Paul.]
If there are any familiar images of early British cinema to match the workers filmed leaving the Lumière factory in 1895 or the Western gunman of The Great Train Robbery (1903), they may well be either the sheepdog star of Cecil Hepworth’s Rescued by Rover (1904), or a vintage jalopy circling Saturn’s rings in Robert Paul’s The ? Motorist (1906). Both of these films were considerable successes in their own day, and testify to a thriving British industry, before American cinema became the universal diet of filmgoers in most countries.
During the mid-twentieth century, early films were usually considered ‘primitive’ examples of what cinema would eventually become; it is not too hard to imagine Rescued by Rover being described as an early version of the family adventure, or The ? Motorist as a shape-shifting fantasy anticipating the flying car of Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang (1968). The very terms once used to describe early film – ‘silent’, ‘flickering’, ‘black and white’ – all suggest something missing, not yet achieved. Such attitudes persist, but early film is now more widely seen in good conditions, thanks to presentations of ‘live silents’ and high-quality DVD restorations. (1)
More recently, historians of early media have also argued that early films need to be seen as part of the world that created and consumed them, since their themes and stories are often ‘intermedial’, or shared across different media. (2) Another key concept is the idea of a ‘cinema of attractions’, rather than one of narrative efficiency. (3) From this standpoint, such films used devices and strategies to give exhibitors the material to attract audiences and hold their attention. Their aim may be to surprise, amuse, or shock – and only incidentally to tell a story. Straightforward storytelling as the main function of cinema would come later, after 1907, and it would involve losses as well as gains – especially loss of the variety in a mixed programme of short film that early audiences expected.
To place these two landmarks of early British cinema, then, we need to realise that they belong to the second decade of moving picture entertainment, coming after the early years of brief comedies and ‘actualities’. This is also just before the time of specialised cinema buildings, when films are being shown as part of music hall programmes, at fairgrounds, and in every kind of hall imaginable, from town halls and assembly rooms to church halls. Some of these programmes were long – up to two hours in the case of Mitchell and Kenyon’s shows of local films. (4) They could also be highly topical, covering national and international events, such as the Anglo-Boer War, or the comings and goings of royalty. But with films such as Rescued by Rover and The ? Motorist, experienced producers were reaching beyond simple attractions and anecdotes towards a more ambitious kind of story film with something of the complexity of the short fiction that was then common in newspapers and magazines.
Rescued by Rover manages to combine a number of familiar motifs in what would prove to be a winning formula. One of these, a maid’s rendezvous with her soldier beau in the park, had already been filmed twice by Paul, in 1896 and 1898. (5) In Hepworth’s film, a nursemaid is taking baby for an outing in the pram near a park, but is more interested in the soldier she meets (‘every afternoon’, we learn from Hepworth’s catalogue). Her distraction allows a beggar-woman, whom she has just snubbed, to take the infant from the pram, which would have chimed with the widespread belief that gypsies commonly stole babies. (6) These two components, the careless maid and the callous kidnapper lay the groundwork for the film’s main ‘attraction’: the family’s faithful dog discovering the child and alerting the father.
Stories about dogs’ powers of detection and extraordinary devotion had been popular for decades, especially in dog-loving Britain. In Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four (1890), it is Toby, “a queer mongrel with the most amazing power of scent”, that leads Holmes and Watson to the heart of the mystery. As for stories of canine devotion to children, the most recent example would have been Nana, a Newfoundland who acts as the Darling family’s nursemaid in J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan and Wendy, which had its premiere in December 1904. These stories, together with countless more anonymous ones on similar themes, would have made Rescued by Rover an up-to-date version of the ever-popular rescue narrative – as featured in a film like James Williamson’s Fire! (1901) where a fireman rescues a baby from a burning house.
Here it is the family’s collie, Rover, and no fewer than 16 of the 22 shots that make up this fast-moving film show Rover’s mission: setting off from his master’s suburban house, swimming across a river, and searching a terrace of mean hovels, before he finds the baby in the old woman’s garret, then makes the return journey to bring his master. We see the same journey three times – although when the husband uses a convenient boat to cross the river, we catch sight of a bridge that both dog and man could have taken, although with less dramatic effect. For drama is what Rescued by Rover concentrates on delivering, by means of showing motive and generating narrative momentum. After an appealing close-up of the baby at the centre of the story, the first scene shows how the nursemaid’s refusal of the beggar’s appeal leads to an opportunistic kidnapping. And after Rover intuits the reason for the distress of the nursemaid and his mistress, a series of five varied shots show him moving constantly towards us in his search.
The garret scene offers a sharp contrast with the comfortable family home of the baby and its parents with roof timbers and bare brick exposed and a jumble of rags on which both baby and beggar sleep. But the action is also purposeful, establishing motive, as the kidnapper first removes the baby’s plentiful clothes, and takes a swig from a bottle of something undoubtedly alcoholic. After the father has rescued the baby, the old woman will content herself with still having the clothes to sell, no doubt funding another bottle. But it is the handling of the three legs of the rescue journey that has been best remembered about this film, essentially because Hepworth’s ‘director’ (although the term was not yet in use), Lewin Fitzhamon, uses a highly fluent grammar of narrative, with Rover seen consistently moving away from the camera in his journey back, and the third leg, as he leads his master, following the same route, suitably varied and accelerated by means of shorter shots.
Rover indeed proved to be a runaway success leading to so many orders that Hepworth had to re-shoot the film twice to make new negatives. Rover would also return, two years later, to co-star with a horse in Dumb Sagacity, another film celebrating animal instinct. This might suggest that Hepworth had turned his back on modern subjects of the kind that British filmmakers needed to make to remain internationally competitive; and indeed he would be increasingly identified with traditional English stories. But it might be more accurate to say that he failed to realise the full potential of animal-centred adventure films, in view of the enormous success enjoyed by the Rin-Tin-Tin series, produced in Hollywood between 1923 and 1931, and the later Lassie films.
Hepworth had actually made several early motoring comedies, but it was another pioneer British filmmaker and motorist, Robert Paul, who would produce an eccentric manifesto for the freedom offered by the new horseless carriage. The ? Motorist begins as if anticipating an adventure serial, with a speeding motorist and his female companion running over a policeman who’s tried to stop them. But it quickly turns fantastic when they escape by driving straight up the side of a building and off into space, orbiting the moon and Saturn. They crash land through the roof of ‘Handover Court’, scattering the lawyers, and make another fantastic escape from the law by turning briefly into a horse and cart, before triumphantly driving away. The car used in the film was Paul’s own, a 1903 model, and his own experience of the law’s hostility towards ‘horseless carriage’ drivers may have inspired the film as a kind of fantasy revenge. (7) Another inspiration was probably Georges Méliès, Paul’s one-time client and now competitor. (8) Méliès’ The Impossible Journey / Voyage à travers l’impossible, (1904) similarly transported its travellers through a nursery-style Solar System, while his 1905 version of a madcap road race from Paris to Monte Carlo, may have prompted Paul’s own motoring fantasy.
This may be primarily a ‘trick film’ showing off what Paul and his ex-magician collaborator Walter Booth could achieve with a combination of live-action shooting and model work in Paul’s Muswell Hill studio. But it’s also a film inspired by the new freedom of motoring and the friction this caused in Edwardian society, as would be reflected in the ambiguous treatment of Mr Toad’s reckless driving in The Wind in the Willows (1908). And at a time when English producers still enjoyed world-wide export markets, it made a strong impression on at least one distinguished spectator – the Russian Symbolist writer Andrei Bely, best known for his modernist novel Petersburg. In a 1907 essay, Bely wrote of a car that crashes through a wall, rushes up another wall, “defying the laws of gravity”, and “zooms up into the sky”, dodging meteors, then rather bizarrely described the driver as “death in a top hat, baring his teeth and rushing towards us”. (9) Here Bely seems to be linking the imagery of the film with his own apocalyptic view of modernity. And set alongside the conservative social world of Rescued by Rover, Paul’s Motorist is a reminder of how anarchic, even avant-garde, early filmmaking could be, before feature-length storytelling dictated a more sober realism.
Notes

  1. Abel Gance’s Napoleon was shown in London with an orchestral score in 1979. Many festivals now show silent-era films in this way, including the annual ‘Giornate del Cinema Muto’ in Sacile, Italy, and ‘Bristol Silents’, specialising in comedy film. The two films discussed here are available on the DVD, Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers (BFIVD643).

  2. On ‘intermediality’, see the introduction and various essays in Rick Altman and Richard Abel (eds.) The Sounds of Early Cinema, Indiana University Press, 2001.

  3. A term coined by Andre Gaudreault and Tom Gunning. See Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’; in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (eds.) Early Film, BFI, 1989.

  4. See Vanessa Toulmin et al, (eds.) The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, BFI, 2004.

  5. The second of these is included on a DVD, R.W. Paul: the Collected Films 1895-1908, BFI (BFIVD642).

  6. The kidnapper here is not strictly a gypsy, since we see her attic lair, but this would not prevent her being associated with supposed gypsy behaviour. On the persistent belief that gypsies abduct babies see, for instance, A. T. Sinclair, ‘Notes on the Gypsies’, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 19, No. 74, Jul. - Sep., 1906, pp. 212-13.

  7. Paul’s conviction for speeding in the same car used in the film appeared in The Barnet Press, 10 August 1907, p. 8. He admitted he had been to a ‘club meet’ – presumably a motoring club – in Hatfield, and knew that ‘the police were timing cars’, but claimed his car could not exceed the speed limit.

  8. Méliès bought a batch of projectors from Paul in 1896, and converted one of these into his first camera. By 1901 both were leading producers of elaborate trick films.

  9. On Bely’s reaction to this film, see Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, Routledge, 1994, pp. 150-51.

Further reading

Ian Christie, The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World, London, BFI/BBC, 1994.

Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (eds.) Early Cinema, London, BFI, 1989.

Simon Popple and Joe Kember, Early Cinema: From Factory Gate to Dream Factory, London, Wallflower, 2003.

Ian Christie



The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918)

[Production company: Ideal Film Company. Director: Maurice Elvey. Screenwriter: Sir Sidney Low. Producer: Simon Rowson. Cast: Norman Page (David Lloyd-George), Ernest Thesiger (Joseph Chamberlain), Alma Reville (Megan Lloyd-George), Douglas Munro (Benjamin Disraeli)]
How can a film that doesn’t appear in any history of British cinema be a ‘key British film’? The story behind The Life Story of David Lloyd George is as remarkable as the film itself, and helps to explain why British film history now needs to take account of its biggest discovery from the silent era. If this ambitious film had been released at the end of 1918, it might have changed the reputation of filmmaking in Britain. Instead it lay forgotten in an attic, until Lord Tenby, grandson of its subject, brought it to the attention of the Wales Film and Television Archive, which led to its restoration and a premiere in 1996, delayed by nearly 80 years.
Why then was it not released in 1918? During the First World War, film had come to play an increasingly important role in public life. It delivered propaganda of different kinds, against the enemy and on behalf of the war effort. It communicated news of major events; and with the official film The Battle of Somme (1916), it contributed to boosting national morale after the huge losses in this battle. Film also provided welcome distraction from the war, for civilians and service personnel alike, with films ranging from the ‘Ultus’ adventure serials to Charlie Chaplin’s knockabout comedies. (1) With the end of the war widely anticipated, there were various plans to make major commemorative films, one of which was D. W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918), following America’s entry into the war in 1917. The British company Ideal, led by Harry and Simon Rowson, had already enjoyed success with several speciality films, such as Masks and Faces (1917), featuring an all-star cast of famous stage actors, and decided to make a biography of Britain’s war leader, the Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
The working title for the film was The Man Who Saved the Empire, and the film press carried increasingly impressive advertisements for the film during late 1918. In December, these stopped abruptly and the film that was to mark the climax of Ideal’s ambitions disappeared. What had happened was that a blustering journalist, MP and convicted swindler, Horatio Bottomley, had attacked the Rowsons in his influential paper John Bull, suggesting that because they had changed their name from ‘Rosenbaum’ and had employed some foreign-born extras to play the parts of soldiers in the film’s war scenes, their motives in making the film were less than patriotic. (2) The Rowsons retaliated with a writ for libel, but in the meantime were informed that Lloyd George now wanted the film suppressed. According to Harry Rowson, an agent called at Ideal’s offices with £20,000 in cash to cover the production costs – a high figure for this period in Britain - and took away the negative and a print, which were never seen again.
Many questions remain unanswered, even after the film’s discovery and restoration. Lloyd George appears to have supported the production initially. With war over, was he advised that appearing in a film might harm his chances in the forthcoming general election? Was he afraid of the slur in Bottomley’s scurrilous article, implying that the Rowsons had not only concealed their German background but their Jewishness? Or even, as Lloyd George’s biographer suggested, might his mistress have influenced him by objecting to the film’s conventional portrayal of his domestic life? (3)
Although none of these speculations can be confirmed, the simple fact that a prestige production could be made to disappear on the eve of release indicates how potentially powerful film was seen to be in the Britain of 1918. But now that we have The Life Story of David Lloyd George resurrected and, unusually for a film of this period, complete and in excellent condition, what can we make of it today? (4) For a modern audience, it offers a curious mixture of what seems almost Victorian along with episodes that are startlingly modern in their staging. In this respect, it can usefully be compared with one of the few models that could have guided the producers and director Maurice Elvey as they tackled an epic of modern history: Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith’s film is largely fictional, although set against the background of the American Civil War and featuring the historical figures of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War generals. For all its fame as the film that gave cinema a new status – quite apart from its notoriety in legitimising the Ku Klux Klan – Birth of a Nation also combines sentimentality and pantomime antics with a sometimes astonishing sense of historical presence and real epic sweep. The war that occupies the last third of Lloyd George offered no such opportunities for visual display, with Lloyd George’s direct contact with the actual conflict limited to his visit to the Western Front, accompanied by his French allies. But the sense of accurate historical reconstruction throughout is, if anything, even greater than in Griffith.
As the original title indicated, the film makes no bones about wholehearted praise for its subject, ignoring all of the controversy that surrounded Lloyd George. Although the script was written by a respected historian, (5) it follows the traditional pattern of biography of a ‘great man’, showing how the experiences of Lloyd George’s childhood and youth shaped – or foreshadowed – his adult qualities. When the family is forced to leave their house after the early death of his father, young David is shown fiercely resisting those who have bought the furniture, with a title spelling out the moral that this is the future Liberal politician’s ‘first revolt against authority’. Similarly, a children’s mock battle based on the still-recent Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, in which David leads the French against the Germans, pointedly anticipates his role as national leader in the Great War. The idea that ‘the child is father of the man’ was a staple of inspirational biographies in the nineteenth century, (6) and it continued to play an important role in biographical films, even while new styles of psychological and subjective biography were appearing, notably from Bloomsbury group writers and followers of Sigmund Freud. (7)
The film’s most unexpected aspect, at once archaic yet also highly filmic, is its use of ‘supernatural’ devices to lend extra weight to Lloyd George’s actions. The first of these follows the children’s mock battle, which turns into a duel between a youngster and a giant figure in ancient armour. The future prime minister has become David battling Goliath in the Biblical story, with his adult image and that of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany briefly superimposed on the two figures to make clear the allegorical significance of the scene. This might have been suggested by the name ‘David’, leading by association to ‘David and Goliath’, but it also recalls the tradition of political caricature in such journals as Punch, in which the Kaiser, always portrayed in his spiked helmet, could be cast as a heavily-armed warrior destined to be defeated by a weaker but more resourceful enemy. Such boldly metaphorical insertions would continue to play a part in films during the silent era, easily incorporated into the film’s flow, but would quickly disappear in the sound era, when similar effects would be achieved by more realist means.
Other non-realist effects include the gradual appearance of a row of elderly figures against a long wall to illustrate dramatically how ‘the workhouse doors opened’ as a result of Lloyd George introducing old age pensions as Chancellor of the Exchequer; and his being surrounded by the ghosts of past politicians, both British and American, as he takes responsibility for leading the war against Germany. The effect here is not unlike Griffith’s allegorical use of a woman rocking a cradle, as a kind of muse of history, in his Intolerance (1916).
But if such episodes link the film with traditional forms of representation that pre-date cinema, Elvey also clearly wanted to situate it in the modern world of press photography and cinema newsreels. Two of the most impressive sequences in the film are crowd scenes, filmed in recognisable public locations and with many hundreds of extras. In the first, Lloyd George escapes from an unruly mob besieging Birmingham Town Hall in 1900, when he has taken a stand against Joseph Chamberlain and the war against the Boers; while in the second, he is pursued outside the Queen’s Hall in London by militant Suffragettes during the long campaign for women’s right to vote. Both sequences have an immediacy that looks forward to Eisenstein’s handling of crowds in his revolutionary epics The Battleship Potemkin (1926) and October (1928), or even to more modern films that aim to reproduce the feel of newsreel, such as The Battle of Algiers (1966). Yet with its combination of different styles and its sense of a mysterious, overriding destiny at work, it might also be compared to Oliver Stone’s controversial JFK.
Opinions differ among the relatively few who have so far seen The Life Story of David Lloyd George as to whether it is a lost masterpiece, or a curiosity. Yet it has a confidence in its subject and a boldness of execution that are disarming and undeniably impressive. This may not convince sceptics that Maurice Elvey, one of the most prolific of all British directors, is a neglected British auteur, but it certainly challenges received opinion that British filmmaking in the 1910s was uniformly lacking in ambition. Had the film been released in early 1919, and no doubt generated controversy by making an intervention into post-war politics, might cinema have had a higher profile in British history? Could ‘Elvey’s Lloyd George’ have been mentioned in the same breath as Griffith’s and Eisenstein’s now famous films about recent American and Russian history? We shall never know, but now at least we can speculate.
Notes

  1. After the success of Ultus and the Grey Lady in 1916 George Pearson made three further adventures in the series for British Gaumont, developing a home-grown version of the popular French and American serials. Chaplin made twenty films in 1914 alone, becoming the most popular film star in Britain, as elsewhere.

  2. For details of the legal and political manoeuvring that led to the film’s withdrawal, see Sarah Street’s introduction to and extracts from ‘The Memoir of Harry Rowson’ in David Berry and Simon Horrocks (eds.) David Lloyd George: The Movie Mystery, University of Wales Press, 1998, pp. 33-49.

  3. John Grigg, ‘Speculating on the Projections of History’, David Lloyd George: The Movie Mystery, pp. 60-61. Grigg is also the author of the most authoritative biography of Lloyd George.

  4. The film material found by Lord Tenby left archivists with a number of choices in selecting what to include in the restoration, and how to tint it in the authentic style of the time. The resulting film is almost certainly longer than it would have been, at over two and a half hours, but is also of higher quality than any other surviving British film of the silent era (indeed it is one of the best preserved of all silent films). On the restoration, see chapter 5 of David Lloyd George: The Movie Mystery.

  5. Sidney Low was lecturer in imperial history at King’s College, London, and knighted in 1918, probably for his services in wartime propaganda and as chairman of the Ministry of Information’s Wireless Service. But when his central European origins were exposed he was forced to resign, paralleling the scandal that led to the film’s suppression. See Appendix D, David Lloyd George: The Movie Mystery, pp. 199-200.

  6. From Wordsworth’s poem ‘My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold’, 1802.

  7. On early twentieth-century trends in biography, see Laura Marcus, ‘The Newness of the “New Biography”’, and Malcolm Bowie, ‘Freud and the Art of Biography’, both in Peter France and William St Clair (eds.) Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 193-218 and pp. 97-122.

Further reading

David Berry and Simon Horrocks (eds.) David Lloyd George: The Movie Mystery, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1998.

Ian Christie, ‘A Life on Film’, in Peter France and William St Clair (eds.) Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 283-302.

Ian Christie, ‘Mystery Men: two recent archival rediscoveries’, Film Studies No. 1, 1999.

Ian Christie





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