GROWTH OF BRITISH FILM INDUSTRY

Taranaki Daily News, 20 July 1935, Page 8 (Supplement)

GROWTH OF BRITISH FILM INDUSTRY

HISTORY OF TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

It is, at the moment, fashionable in England to look back 25 years to 1910, when the King ascended the throne, and E. G. Cousins, well-known studio correspondent, has taken the opportunity to review the history of the British film industry. In 1910, he writes, the British screen was receiving, of course, great tribute in celluloid from the United States (although Hollywood as a film-production centre had not been thought of), from France, from Germany, from Italy, from Scandinavia; nevertheless, British studios were active. It was the day of “stock companies” (a system now rapidly returning to favour), when producers did not. believe in letting popular players slip too easily through their fingers, but, placed them on hard-and-fast contract. But, in addition to the regular stock players, there were experimentalists, such as Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who was so impressed with the potentialities of this new scratched and flickering art-medium that he actually made extracts from Macbeth and Trilby which the public was never privileged to see, for Sir Herbert, like many, a dabbler after him, decided the new invention was not yet ripe for'plucking. In those days film-production was not huddled nervously round London as it is to-day, When King George V had reigned for hardly a year, an epic was made (in grilling sunshine on an openair'stage) by the Brightonia Film Company of Brighton—a gruesome melodrama called “The Stranglers of Paris,” in which close-ups of the Strangler’s victims were made more realist with a mouthful of sherbet.

Talkies did not start with Al Jolson. Edison’s first projector in 1888 incorporated a phonograph. Fifteen years before America sent us the Vitaphone, we sent America the Vivaphone—which, like Edison’s system nearly a quarter of a century earlier, drove a projector and a phonograph in double harness. By 1912 there were 500 small halls in Britain equipped to show the Vivaphone pictures of people singing popular songs. But in America the invention was demonstrated in too large a hall for the sound to carry, and a couple bf hundred telephone receivers had to be placed at intervals among the audience to broadcast the music. These singing pictures, were only 400 feet long; but as film-stock came in 50-foot lengths, even for one of these the camera had to be loaded eight times. In those days film players were recruited exclusively from the stage; they were usually not-so-successful touring actors who saw a chance of a little easy money while “resting” between engagements—and they liked to keep it quiet. Only a few took the permanent plunge. But, in 1912, a new principle was established; Charles Hawtrey, already a famous stage actor, came to the screen in “A Message From Mars”—the first of a long, long line of stage stars to try their luck in pictures, openly and unashamed.

A year later, in 1913, four important new principles were established. First, two eminent statesmen were “interviewed” by Vivaphone. Secondly, an electrically-driven camera was demonstrated to the press at the Walton-on-

Thames studios. Thirdly, Grindle Matthews, an Englishman whose name is better known in connection with the invention of the death-ray, conducted experiments in sound-on-film recording, and, fourthly, Wardour Street, which had hitherto been a street of fake-antique furniture shops, became the street of celluloid. In 1914, war!—but at first this did not materially hinder British production; indeed, in this year Sir Herbert Tree and his full West End company, convinced at last, made a film version of “Trilby.” By the second year of the war there were seven healthy production companies in operation, led by the London Film Company at Twickenham, but Lord Derby’s recruiting scheme and conscription drained the studios of their man-power, and Twickenham had to close down. At Walton-on-Thames, this year saw the first organised studio publicity—a penny monthly magazine; “vamps” were introduced to the screen (from Hollywood); and Britain’s greatest actress, Ellen Terry, .played at the Ideal Studios at Elstree (now renamed the Rock Studios) in “Her Greatest Performance.” War films began to be made, some running to 4000 feet; Owen Nares came into films (as “Young Lochinvar”); and an optimistic critic wrote, “This wave of sex that is sweeping through British films will soon pass.” Still, despite the war, British production kept going. In 1917 occurred the first “all-star" screen performance—- “ Masks and Faces,” with Irene Vanbrugh, Gladys Cooper, H. B. Irving, Ben Webster, Lillah McCarthy and Gerald du Maurier. At two studios, Walthamstow and Esher, Broadwest had Violet Hopson, Stewart Rome, Gregory Scott, Cameron Carr, and—Ronald Colman. After the Armistice British production withered and all but died. Paradoxically, however,, that year ; saw one of the greatest British pictures —“Alf’s Button,” with Leslie Henson and Alma Taylor. In 1919, also, Grindle Matthew’s ihvention was demonstrated in a London store, and three years later British Talking Pictures made a series of sound-.on-film shorts at Clapham. These were the birth-pangs of the talkie. In 1928 it burst upon us in the horrific shape of the “part-talkie,” a curious hybrid affair which broke into song or lapsed into silence in the most arbitary manner. “The Jazz Singer” was the first of these, an importation from Hollywood; and it was followed shortly after by, among others, the all-talking British effort, “Blackmail,” the only film for a year or two to apply the true principles of cinema to the sound screen. Before this,. almost every West End actor or actress had, at some time or other, tried his or her luck on the screen —and scuttled furtively back to the stage; but usually such departures were “unwept, unhonoured and unsung.” However, many of them began to make their “film debut” with banners and trumpets. Now in the twenty-fifth year of the reign of King George V and the seventh year of the reign of King Talkie, there is hardly a stage player in England (with a few notable exceptions, like Marie Tempest) whom the screen cannot command to its service.