Views of English countryside and ducal park, displaying granite boulders, tropical palms and scores of American cars all on the wrong side of the road!
Another delightful oversight—a man who enters a strip of undergrowth wearing a tie, walks straight through and emerges with an up-to-date West End made-up bow, to the old miser in “Wuthering Heights”; the times are Victorian, and a conspicuous object is a safe made in 1915.
One laughs at the absurdity of the whole thing, when a lady in a crinoline is shown knitting a jumper; or a disreputable attic is furnished with a beautifully carved wooden bed, fitted with silken hangings.
Copies of the “Peerage” figure in this satire—of course it is American—and it is such instances which are creating a bad name for the cinema. American ignorance of the British peerage is shown in the film featuring an old Warwickshire family, Armitage by name; a beautiful daughter, the Honourable Diana Gwen Beaufort, etc., Armitage. Her young brother remained the plain unvarnished “Eddie”; her mother “Mrs. Armitage,” and they were apparently not on the same aristocratic level as the Hon. Gwen. A framed copy of the family crest is much to the fore. It is only too noticeable that the Hon. Gwendoline is in direct succession to the family honours, totally excluding her living brother. In the end this captivating young personage marries an ordinary American commoner; the honeymoon is spent at the ancestral home in Warwickshire—Armitage Castle. How, or why she got there the film story does not relate.
Such ignorance causes the public to distrust all films, and does much to lessen the attendance of intelligent people at the cinema theatres.
Natural Colour Films.
Most film pictures shown upon the screen are at present of the black and white variety, and colour films are sometimes spoken of as being generally impracticable. The main item which is the cause of the non-general appearance of these films in natural colour is the question of cost. Experiments have been highly successful, but the necessary standard of apparatus has to be secured to produce the colours of nature in reality, and this is the reason why natural colour films have been slow in receiving commercial recognition. The items entering into consideration are—extra equipment and extra help.
A colour-film has to be very realistic, and to secure its real market value its ascendancy over the ordinary black and white film has to be proved. If the “projector” required it to be elaborate, the stage effects to be in unison, its chances as a commercial venture are greatly reduced on account of the high cost of film rental. The various expensive processes of production have greatly retarded its progress—hence its rarity.
Colour films are usually accepted as natural colour films, whereas, in reality, natural colour sometimes does not exist. A great number of these natural colour films are hand painted, mostly produced in France, where this subtle art of colour deception is practised to advantage. Films are tastefully and artistically coloured, requiring excessive patience and skill from hundreds of workers; for it is no easy task to paint these miniatures, measuring one inch by three-quarters of an inch.
This process of painting is carried out by stages. One scene is gone through, taking a single character—a house, background or foliage in its various shades. The process is tedious and there lurks the ever-present danger of making mistakes which would spoil the whole effect.