The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918)

User Rating:

7.8/10   

Director:

Maurice Elvey

Writer:

Sidney Low (writer)

Genre:

Biography | Drama

Plot:

Bio-pic of Britain's World War 1 Prime Minister. |

Plot Keywords:

Historical

Cast

Norman Page	...	David Lloyd George
Alma Reville	...	Megan Lloyd George
Ernest Thesiger	...	Joseph Chamberlain
Douglas Munro
Thomas Canning
Judd Green
Winifred Sadler
Miriam Stuart
Eric Stuart
Leonard Tugwell

Country:

UK

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Silent

Company:

Ideal

Trivia:

The film was thought lost for over 75 years, and was rediscovered by the Welsh Film and Television Archive in 1994, at the home of Lord Tenby, grandson of David Lloyd George. It has been restored, and has been given several international screenings, and was scheduled to be shown on 29 May 1999 to mark the 80th anniversary of the Versailles peace conference, which Lloyd George attended.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Labour of Love (2000)

Amazing to discover a film of this importance.

The story of Maurice Elvey's THE LIFE OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE is amazing. Elvey considered it his best work but, at the point where he was about to send the camera materials and edited work print for duplication, it was siezed by the British Liberal party who felt it might taint war time Prime Minister Lloyd George in the coming election.

The film was believed lost till the nineties, when rusty cans discovered in the Lloyd George family attic were opened. Beautifully restored by the new Welsh film Archive, it had a world wide success, spawning a small Elvey retrospective at the Silent Film Festival at Pordenone in Italy.

Not only is the movie's appearance eighty years after its production and twenty years after the death of it's director, an amazing story but the work itself is exceptional, accepted as the best British film of it's day.

A mixture of newsreel like reconstruction - mill girls dance on the edge of the crowd as Lloyd George inspects a factory, helmet wearing bobbies hold back a rioting crowd in a frame masked to wide screen, debates with Randolph Churchill in the Chamber - and visionary tableaux - the spectre of past Prime ministers super-imposed on the entry into the office, an atrocity frozen as spike hat huns march in the background and we can forgive Elvey for the future as waves breaking viewed through a figure eight mask.

Performances, settings and the film's unfamiliar structure (compare the Thomas Ince CIVILIZATION) support the authoritative handling which still registers in the Twenty First Century. What impact would it have had at it's time of production?