This is currently (April 2012) being offered as a free treat (members only) on the British Film Institute's website. The BFI claims that it was made by four young technicians while they waited for Cricklewood Studios to be wired for sound. The plot, typical of the silent serial, follows a mysterious parcel as it passes from hand to hand. The punchline is that the film is in fact episode 1 of a serial that will never be completed (because of the arrival of the talkies). Enormous care has been taken with the lighting, done by Gerald Gibbs and Desmond Dickinson (not "Desmond Dickens" as credited here). The direction is also stylish, but this seems mainly to have been the work of Harcourt Templeman, whose career petered out in the 1930s. Gibbs and Dickinson, however, went on to have long careers behind the camera.
2 Reviews
Interesting experiment made by youngsters who went on to be great cameramen
davidvmcgillivray-24-90581110 April 2012
Warning: Spoilers
A apparent spoof
Igenlode Wordsmith25 April 2007
I think this film was intended to be intentionally obscure, incomplete (featuring the equivalent of a "Tune in Next Week for..." trailer) and indeed a spoof on contemporary detective thrillers, but I really had very little idea what was going on most of the time.
I suspect that it is also lampooning 'arty' composition; scenes are shown from strange angles, the characters' faces are almost never seen, and the opening reel tells its story almost entirely via images of various feet.
Unfortunately, my attention span is rather limited for melodramas where I can't deduce even a vestige of common thread between the assorted events. Someone may have been killed, at the beginning; a mysterious package is involved; a crowd of seamen seem to be stalking someone. A man picks up a woman under a lamp-post.
To discover the solution, and indeed the crime, the hapless viewer must tune in next week (once the editor has managed to insert the relevant intertitle the right way up, anyhow...)
I suspect that it is also lampooning 'arty' composition; scenes are shown from strange angles, the characters' faces are almost never seen, and the opening reel tells its story almost entirely via images of various feet.
Unfortunately, my attention span is rather limited for melodramas where I can't deduce even a vestige of common thread between the assorted events. Someone may have been killed, at the beginning; a mysterious package is involved; a crowd of seamen seem to be stalking someone. A man picks up a woman under a lamp-post.
To discover the solution, and indeed the crime, the hapless viewer must tune in next week (once the editor has managed to insert the relevant intertitle the right way up, anyhow...)
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