Movies and Film: The Beginnings

The Beginnings

In the closing years of the nineteenth century and the earliest years of the twentieth, England's film industry got off to a bouncing start with showings by the Lumire brothers in London in 1896 and the efforts of the country's own pioneer, Robert Paul.

Paul was the first to present short films to a paying English audience, and he went on to become a highly successful director and distributor of some of the world's first newsreels and short comedies.

But the presound era wasn't all roses for Gaunt's "sceptered isle." In fact, by 1910 competition from the United States and France was driving the fledgling industry into the ground. The story of England's first 40 years of cinema is a story of native ambition coupled with foreign incursions that constantly threatened to overshadow whatever advances British filmmakers made. Of the few prominent figures to emerge from the United Kingdom's earliest malaise, the most important was the filmmaker whom many historians see as England's answer to the great American director D. W. Griffith.

England's Griffith: Cecil Hepworth

Cecil B. Hepworth's family starring in his own Rescued by Rover (1905).

The towering figure of early British cinema is Cecil Hepworth, whose childhood had exposed him to the wonders of light-and-image apparatuses by virtue of his father, who traveled the country with a magic lantern show, son in tow. Cecil began his own slide and film show in 1896, a pursuit into which he channeled his considerable knowledge of projection and film technology.

By 1899 Hepworth had set up his own film laboratory; at the turn of the century, he was producing more than 100 films a year, sponsoring many of the country's earliest and most important silent directors, and virtually launching the British film industry in its first incarnation. Hepworth's most famous work, Rescued by Rover (1905), starring his own family members, is an early comic masterpiece, featuring innovations in narrative continuity and especially in editing, of which he was the undisputed master before Griffith. Other comic shorts from this period included How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900), The Glutton's Nightmare (1901), The Other Side of the Hedge (1905), and That Fatal Sneeze (1907).

Hepworth's pre-World War I feature films as a director were generally successful, and it's undeniable that he was almost single-handedly responsible for making British film competitive in the international arena in the first two decades of the new century. These features include, among many others, The Basilisk (1915), The Canker of Jealousy (1915), Sweet Lavender (1915), Comin' Thro' the Rye (1916), and Nearer My God to Thee (1917).

Unlike Griffith, though, Hepworth wasn't able to keep up with continually advancing film techniques. By 1924 he was bankrupt, and he spent the remainder of his career directing commercials. Ouch!

Those Bloody Americans

Hepworth's films were big hits in the 1900s and 1910s, and there were other directors who made some wonderful and even innovative pictures during the silent period: W. G. Barker (Henry VIII, 1911), George Pearson (A Study in Scarlet, 1914; Love Life and Laughter, 1923), Maurice Elvey (Hindle Wakes, 1918), Graham Cutts (Woman to Woman, 1923; The Rat, 1925), Herbert Wilcox (Decameron Nights, 1924; Dawn, 1928), and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock (The Pleasure Garden, 1925; The Lodger, 1926).

By the end of World War I, though, the situation was dire. Now even the government got involved in trying to come up with ways of protecting England's film industry from the flood of American products being shown on its screens, which represented a huge portion of what got distributed throughout the country.

The government's contribution was the Cinematograph Films Act, passed by parliament in 1927. The legislation established a firm quota system that demanded an increasingly large percentage of films released and shown in England to be English-made productions. While the immediate results were positive (the nation's film production shot up by 500 percent within a few years), the long-term effect was a steady decline in film quality as studios churned out low-quality productions just to meet the act's demands.

The coming of sound might have helped matters some. With the rise of directors like Anthony Asquith (The Battle of Gallipoli, 1931), Walter Forde (Condemned to Death, 1932), and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock (the United Kingdom's first talkie was Hitchcock's early suspense film, Blackmail, 1929), it looked like the '30s would be something of a cinematic boom for England. While a number of very good films were made during this decade, the nation's film culture descended into a long period of mediocrity from which it only gradually recovered.

Alexander the Great

It took an immigrant to inject some momentary life into the flagging British industry after years of French and American domination. In the early 1930s, a Hungarian-born journeyman director and producer named Alexander Korda came to England after a wide-ranging career in his native country as well as Austria, Germany, and France. Cobbling together financing from a variety of sources, Korda built what was then the largest English studio and thereafter became the country's most prominent producer.

For the English public, Korda's most important accomplishment was his behind-the-scenes launching of numerous acting careers. Charles Laughton and Robert Donat, for example, were both made into international stars with their performances (Oscarwinning in Laughton's case) in The Private Life of Henry VIII. Korda's contributions to the culture of British film were recognized in 1942 when he was knighted and became Sir Alexander Korda (though there have always been rumors that it was spying for his adopted country during World War II that won him the sword tap).