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  • Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion
  • Amy Sargeant
Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion. Christine Gledhill . London: British Film Institute, 2003. Pp. x + 214. $70.00 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).

Christine Gledhill's scholarly study of a neglected decade in British film making challenges the opinion received from Rachael Low that "it was widely accepted at the time, and has been so ever since, that few of the films made in England during the twenties were any good."1 The only comparable volume, Kenton Bamford's Distorted Images, took Low's dismissive, prejudicial account (largely inherited from the Film Society's agenda) at face value and used an extensive trawl of the trade press to support this stance. For Bamford, British cinema failed to compete successfully with the American films which dominated British screens in the 1920s as a consequence of its inability to portray working-class characters and interests. Betty Balfour, the cockney star of George Pearson's Squibs series, is the exception which proves his rule. While acknowledging the importance of class and geography, Gledhill provides a more complex and nuanced reading than Bamford allows, and eschews simplistic standards of identification and representation through a close viewing of numerous films and a detailed examination of critical appraisals, offering a revisionist account of the popularity and pervasiveness of British themes and styles.

The discussion is broadly divided between "Co-ordinates" and "Conjunctions." The first section mines a rich field of theater history, most notably the social history of melodrama from the late eighteenth century onwards and such practical considerations as stage and house lighting, visual culture—salon paintings and their dissemination through mass-produced prints—and popular and canonical fiction, which was, she reminds us, frequently illustrated. Following Martin Meisel, Gledhill demonstrates "how techniques and materials were borrowed from, and exchanged between, media under a dominant pressure to pictorialise narrative and to narrativise pictures" (32), fixing a general observation with specific reference to the comments of directors (such as Pearson), their practice (as in Maurice Elvey's conspicuous appropriation of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper in his 1923 The Wandering Jew and John Collier's A Fallen Idol for The Fallen Idol from 1913) and the experiences of actors (including top-billing Ivor Novello, Noel Coward and Matheson Lang) who crossed between stage and screen. The urge towards [End Page 731] pictorialism is further located in camera placement, framing and mise-en-scène. Addressing the notoriously vexed issue of "A Distinctive English Style of Underplaying," Gledhill notes the exportability of the style to America in the performances of, for instance, Ronald Colman and Clive Brook, and comments on "passion in restraint" as its key feature. She notes the play-off between these performers and the broader delivery of such character actors as Marie Ault (in The Lodger, Hindle Wakes and Madame Pompadour), Gordon Harker (in Champagne and The Farmer's Wife), and Humberstone Wright (in Hindle Wakes and High Treason), delivering "types" which were as much derived from documented observation as inherited. "Crucial for the poetics of British cinema," concludes Gledhill, "pictorial articulation produces not only legible signs but contributes to the work of differentiation" (46).

Occasionally, she notes the continuation of styles and themes into sound cinema in the 1930s and beyond. This is a welcome intervention, given the prevailing tendency to regard silent cinema in Britain as somehow separate and irretrievably distinct. Where the American example promoted continuity, British practice, suggests Gledhill, has frequently favoured the picaresque and the inclusion of a series of staged theatrical "turns": "Despite the competitive pressure of American continuity cinema and the challenge to pictorialism from Continental modernism, these broadly popular and intertextual conditions of pictorial existence persisted into the 1920s as a continuing set of culturally determined models of perception and meaning-making" (57).

The second half of the book is devoted to a succession of close studies and analyses of particular films, culminating with Maurice Elvey's glorious 1928 Palais de Danse, exemplifying British cinema's mixed sources: "heterogeneity," suggests Gledhill, "had been largely lost to a critical view dominated by literary assumptions at the expense of the profligate medium...

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