William Palmer
Bogarde But Not Bogart
Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema
By Matthew Sweet
Faber & Faber 358pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Early British cinema is truly a lost world. A fair number of names from the American silent cinema still resound (Chaplin, Keaton, D W Griffith and quite a few more remain famous), but who has heard of Chrissie White, Henry Edwards or Lilian Hall-Davies? One insurmountable problem for critics trying to reassess these figures and their films is that, as Matthew Sweet says, ‘80 per cent of films shot in these islands between the death of Queen Victoria and the Wall Street Crash [have] been junked’. There may be lost treasures, although one can hardly imagine that The Smuggler’s Daughter of Anglesey and The Belle of Betws-y-Coed were among them.
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