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.
Somehow fittingly, the first major British film star was a dog named, in his off-stage life, Blair. He seems to have spent most of his time in front of the camera, making a string of wonderful-sounding movies from Rescued by Rover (1905) to The Dog and the Desperadoes (1913).
Some of
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher
How did Uwe Johnson, the German writer who was friends with Hannah Arendt and Max Frisch, end up living out his days in the town of Sheerness, Kent?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/estuary-german
You only have a week left to take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/