Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird was at a time the only film that consisted of a whole reel, which ran longer than fifteen minutes, made in Britain in the year 1910. There were several humorous and dramatic subjects turned out by the British producers but most were concise anecdotes rather than stories. The vivacious and inventive spirit that had once given Britain leeway as the forerunners in the field, petered out. Pioneers, such as G.A. Smith, R.W. Paul and James Williamson would both resign themselves at this juncture. Production was led by a staid Cecil Hepworth, with his stock company and studio beside the Thames at Walton. Hepworth (1874-1953), the son of the famed lantern-show lecturer T.C. Hepworth, took an interest in photographic quality and aesthetics in setting that made his films visually outstanding, and his players were often encouraged to act with unusual restraint. However, when films from abroad had longer running times and foreign actors were now household names, it was clear a more industrious and adventurous approach should be imminent.
It was the arrival of a new producer, Will Barker (1867-1951), with his Bulldog Films brand, that inspired the revival. A no-nonsense gent with plenty of go, in 1910 would build the very first Ealing studio; and given the time - it's space was quite commodious, containing two stages that relied on the power of sunlight, and two that were inter-dependent on electricity. In 1911, he created quite a buzz with a truncated film version of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's (1852-1917) stage production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, with a duration of a then unheard of half an hour. After this, other eminent actors decided to preserve potted versions of their own favorite roles on film. Sir Frank Robert Benson was filmed in his portrayal of Julius Caesar's Mark Antony and the title roles in Macbeth and Richard III (from 1911). Barker continued the thread with a handful of thumping melodramas, East Lynne, which would be England's first six-reel feature and The Road to Ruin (both 1913), and broke new ground that same year with a film depicting scenes from the life of Queen Victoria entitled Sixty Years a Queen (an unheard of 12,000 pounds), the most costly production of its day which starred Blanche Forsythe. Other companies made a gallant effort to keep their fare up to the proverbial snuff. Industrial giants Cricks and Martin's futuristic airship story The Pirates of 1920 (1911), although technically speaking, still remained under a reel, it would be hailed as the first British feature film. British multi-reel movies became longer and infinitely more frequent.
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| A poster for Cricks and Martins airships of the future themed Pirates of 1920 (1911) |
Hepworth, realizing that the faces of his stock company were now becoming familiar and fixtures to the public, embarked on publicizing them by name. As Chrissie White (1895-1989) grew up to be a lovely flaxen-haired, blue eyed English rose, she and Alma Taylor (1895-1974), a brunette with gentle features, played in many love stories with two new members of the company, stage actor Henry Edwards and Stewart Rome. Oliver Twist (1912), a long film directed by Thomas Bentley, who was well known in the halls for his impersonations of characters from Charles Dickens canon of novels, as well as pioneering the DeForest Phonofilm sound on film technique, was the first in a line of literary adaptations in costume.
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| The legendary impresario extraordinaire Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson |
Hepworth's Hamlet (1913) showed the great thespian and impresario Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, on the eve of retirement, as an old roue version of the Prince of Denmark in the Drury Lane production. These distinguished theatrical knights, aging relics of the Victorian theater, made little concession to the different medium and their larger than life itself style of classical theater acting in reality contributed very little in the way of film technique, but they still managed to greatly enhance the prestige of cinema. Beauty icon Ivy Close starred in films made by her husband, the noted Bond street photographer Elwin Neame; self-consciously artistic, these were part of the new tendency to sit up and take cinema seriously.
Before the war broke out in 1914, there were other newcomers, Londoner George Pearson (1875-1973), a former schoolmaster who had been making educational films for Pathe, ventured into feature production and would soon become a leading director. Sir Maurice Elvey (1887-1967) embarked on a film-making career which would prove Britain's most prolific in their history of celluloid, that lasted an impressive forty-four years. The Birmingham distributor G.B. Samuelson (1888-1947) established a studio at Worton Hall, Isleworth, and the director Percy Nash built one at Elstree, both situated near London. The London Film Company, a big public company with vast capital resources, set new standards of business-like administration. Founded by Provincial Cinematograph Theatres, one of the biggest circuits, it would see the metamorphosis of an ice rink at Twickenham into a massive studio and announced its intention of solely producing films that reflected the British way of life. Its top directors, writers and leading ladies, however were all American nationals, for the American presence in British production was already marked by this time.
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| Late silent entry a la Hitchock - The Pleasure Garden (1925) |
The chief British studios were scattered around the smoke-free edges of London. The longer film; a most cruel mistress with her great demands on the script had already caused producers scrambling for the stage in hopes of stronger material, and the proximity of the London theaters reinforced this dependence by providing a convenient pool of acting talent. Immediately the war commenced and there was an outbreak of activity in the belief that American imports would fall. The countless dramas from the London Film Company, many of them adapted and reworked plays, tended to run longer and were more colorful than those from Hepworth. But Hepworth's major productions included two important adaptations from the plays of the dramatist and thespian Arthur Wing Pinero Sweet Lavender (1915) and Trelawny of the Wells (1916). Bentley continued to specialize in Dickens adaptations; and Barker concocted an historical drama about Edward IV's mistress Jane Shore (1915) which came replete with crowd scenes.
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| Violet Hopson the 'Dear Delightful Villianess' |
The new Samuelson studio was enlarged in 1915, and Gaumont opened a studio in Shepherds Bush, west London, where Pearson filmed four adventures (1915-1917) of his character Ultus the Avenger, which was somewhat precursory to Superman, created in answer to Leon Gaumont's request for a British equivalent of Louis Feuillade's silent french crime serial Fantomas. Broadwest Film Company was founded during the war by Walter West. It specialized in racing dramas from the popular stories of Nathaniel Gould (1857-1919), and daring society dramas and problem plays starring the beautifully-gowned Violet Hopson, an Australian born actress, affectionately referred to as 'Dear Delightful Villianess' who was a once Hepworth star.
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| The Copper Beeches (1912) - Georges Treville homes in on Sherlock. |
It would be unfortunate that in the light of all this home activity, American films far from floundering during the war, now poured into Britain and greatly increased their share of the market. The multi-reel superpicture was now quite common fare, with costly stars and lush settings, crowd scenes and elaborate costumes. The big American companies could in the first place spend more on their pictures because of their huge home market, and they were able with these attractive and well-advertised films to take over the British market as well.
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| From the Adrian Brunel quiet comedy - Cut it Out (1925) (courtesy of BFI) |
The old 'open-market' in films, involving sales of many copies of each film was now obsolete, and the new expensive features were exploited by their renters, who would bid for exclusive rights for particular areas. This so-called 'exclusive' system enabled renters full reign of power over exhibitors, who found that they had to painstakingly book large blocks of films in order to get the few they actually wanted. British producers with their scant films, already suffering as a result of comparison to their more lavish competitors, now found that there were fewer and fewer booking slots left for them, and their releases were often delayed for months.
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| The life of the notorious moiderer Charles Peace, whattasurname! Walter Haggar above from the 1905 film. |
British producers sought import protection as early as the year 1915, and by 1917 had suggested a quota system to guarantee British films a proportion of screen time, but nothing had been done. In this unfavorable climate production dissipated. The London Film Company and Barker forfeited and by 1923, most of the small pre-war companies went into obscurity.
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| An aerial view of the famed Elstree Studios. |
The American firm - Famous Players-Lasky had turned a barn-like former power station at Islington into a studio in 1919, bringing over technicians, actors and equipment from the States. Using British talent, they claimed like the London Film Company before them, they had aspirations of producing British themed films, they would throw the towel in however by 1923. The major renting company Ideal, conscious of the importance of the story in these now longer films, took over the studio at Elstree and went into mass production of specifically literary adaptations - namely Victorian novels.
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| Betty Balfour. |
The films were produced on anemic budgets and resulted in poor quality entries that were unappealing to the more sophisticated post-war public. Theater owner Sir Oswald Stoll, considered the English writers to be possible saviors of the British film and secured rights to the works of many contemporaneous writers and went into further production with the Eminent British Authors series in what was a former aircraft factory in North London's Cricklewood, with director Sinclair Hill and Elvey and many others. But much like the case of Ideal, the films were turned out on the cheap and irrespective of the popularity of the trilogy seires of Sherlock Holmes films (1921-23) the critical tag -'Stoll films are doll films' was sadly a case of truth in jest. Stoll lasted a little longer than Famous-Players-Lasky and Ideal, but his star would be fading come the mid-Twenties.
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| Comin' Thro The Rye, they were all out of Semolina. Alma Taylor, Ralph Forbes. |
So awful was the slump in production by 1923, that producers convened and would hold nation-wide British National Film Weeks, in which their films got special promotion with exhortations to the public to support them for patriate reasons. Consequently, no standard of selection seems to have been imposed and many of the films were far from being good.
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| Aurelio Sidney was the Man from U.L.T.R.U.S. |
One of them Comin; Thro' The Rye' (1923) based on a Robert Burns poem was Hepworth's pet project and would also be his very last. In production until his company, which he unwittingly decided to expand - was heading for the financial crash that single-handedly curtailed his career. It was a heart-rending tale of a broken engagement with Alma Taylor as a soft-spoken Victorian heroine, but it was sadly out of the loop - and out of touch with the jazzy post-war era. Pearson, on the other hand barely managed to survive the Twenties, although he too was a Victorian at heart. He opened his own studio after the war and produced a number of thought provoking and interesting films. But the real success of his company was fortuitous and due to a string of comedies between 1921 and 1923 about a cockney flower girl, Squibs, Betty Balfour (1903-1977) equally as bubbly and ebullient as Squibs became the one true British film star, ranking with the Hollywood stars as far as the British public was concerned, in fact after she left the company it completely floundered.
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| Mae Weather and hubby Julian Gordon in the Asquith western Shooting Stars (1927) |
By 1926, Output would hit rock-bottom there were only 37 new features as compared with 103 in the year 1919. Among them however were some highly rated films with greater quality than before, made by post-war newcomers to the industry.
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| Blue Bird, Blue Bird Through My Window... |
Working in an old army hut at Elstree, Harry Bruce Woolfe who had formed British Instructional Films in 1919, made an original contribution to cinema when he laboriously put together a compilation film with animated maps and diagrams, The Battle of Jutland (1921). Moving to a studio in Surbiton, he then began a series of filmed reconstructions of famous wartime engagements, including the Battle of Caramel and Falkland Islands (1927). This would be made with Admiralty assistance with naval vessels re-creating their movements for the camera; pioneering from the early 1920's onward with Secrets of Nature, an inspired series of films made by naturalists using stop-motion photography techniques and microphotography, he led the way in the serious and factual film until the arrival of the documentarian John Grierson with 1929's Drifters. Harry Bruce Woolfe also turned to the production of features and gathered a band of young university graduates, one of whom - Anthony Asquith, the son of the former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, dazzled with a film about film-making, Shooting Stars (1927), which he both wrote and co-directed. A melodrama in which the starlet seeks to murder her husband so as to run off with her Chaplinesque lover, but contrives the latter's death instead. A display of technical virtuosity and wit, it was testament to the German influence and Russian advances (particularly that of auteur Sergei Eisenstein) in film technique and heralded the appearance of decidedly more sophisticated cinema in Britain.