Cecil M. Hepworth — Came the Dawn — Chapter 12 (1951) 🇬🇧
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Before I began on this rough and very incomplete resume of the general condition of the English film trade in the period from 1910 onwards, and was led on from that to a generalisation on the silent films then and their modern counterpart in 16 mm., I was dealing with Drake’s Love Story at the latter part of 1912. Then the very successful Oliver Twist, directed by Thomas Bentley, was the fore-runner, as I have said, of several other Dickens films, most of which, by the way, had already been produced by other firms and were to be followed again by many others. The next one on our list was the dreadfully difficult story of David Copperfield.
Bentley certainly loved his Dickens and there is no gainsaying the fact that he turned out a great deal of very good work which rebounded considerably to his credit and also to ours. He was a rum chap but I found him very pleasant to work with. He went to Dover among many other places in the making of this film. When he came back he told me that he had found the very house that Dickens had described. I remember the joyful glee with which he recounted how he had managed to secure in the picture, the fascia board upon it saying that it was ‘the House immortalised by Dickens as the Home of Miss Betsy Trotwood. I do not think he ever understood why I received this news with so little enthusiasm.
There came to see me at this time a wonderful little boy with masses of curly hair and a most angelic expression. He was a delightful child with the name of Reggie Sheffield [Reginald Sheffield] and he was tremendously interested in ‘wireless’ which had scarcely been heard of then. He had a little ‘set’ with which he could sometimes pick up morse from some unknown station. With his childish imagination he would picture some great ship in distress, or maybe only making port. He brought with him a slightly older boy, an awkward fellow named Noel Coward whom I disliked immediately. I looked down upon him then: I look up to him now with veneration and respect as one of the most amazingly clever people of our time.
Reggie Sheffield, under the film name of Eric Desmond, was cast for the part of the young Copperfield in the early part of the film, but direction failed there, for he too often looked at the camera or the producer when he was spoken to. Either of these faults should be the instant signal for the retaking of the scene. There is no excuse for not doing that. Reggie played in several other films for us before returning, to my sorrow, to his native America and he did not again repeat those faults. I hear that he now has a son exactly like he was at that age, playing at present in Tarzan pictures.
Copperfield was another success in spite of the great difficulties of dealing with such a complicated and diffuse story, and it was followed by others of the same line which I will mention as I come to them. In the meantime there was The Vicar of Wakefield which Blanche Macintosh cleverly adapted for me in August, 1913. It was a very pleasant little picture of gentle people with no great strength of incident. She also made a very good adaptation a few months later of The Heart of Midlothian which was well acted and well received, and then the same lady branched off on her own account with an original scenario specially written for us, with a skilful eye upon the histrionic material available in our stock-company. This was called Time, the Great Healer, and it was played by Alma Taylor, Tom Powers, Stewart Rome, Chrissie White and Violet Hopson, the very cream of the company. It was a pleasing story on somewhat conventional lines, but none the worse for that, and it gave ample opportunity for the various players to exploit their strongest capabilities to the best advantage.
Tom Powers came over from America at the suggestion of Larry Trimble who very strongly recommended him to me as a most useful actor of the type which was called on the stage at that time, ‘juvenile lead.’ Larry thought that both he and I might use him with great advantage. He was indeed an exceedingly nice boy who acted well and proved a valuable acquisition to our company of players. He had a much more powerful part in Morphia which was written for him by the same lady and produced by me. I remember it most for the fact that I was able to obtain without difficulty from a local chemist, a tube containing a considerable quantity of morphia tablets, so that the film might be as accurate as possible in an important detail. That is another instance of the difference between those times and these.
I alluded some while back to the American standing order for our films as being in effect ‘anaesthetising.’ Appropriately, it came to an end while we were finishing Morphia. I once wrote a film scenario myself called The Basilisk. The name part was played by William Felton and the thing I best remember about it was the very sinister effect I obtained, as he sat at a table facing the camera, by lighting his cadaverous face with brilliant green light through a hole in the table top. The ‘green,’ of course, was supplied by stain in the finished print. I haven’t mentioned this film before because it was not at all a good one and it was my only effort at writing for the film. But I wrote a story once of which I was inordinately proud. I was very young indeed and I was inflamed by the offer of a prize in some child’s periodical. It was to take the form of a bound volume for the whole year in return for a short original story. I got down to it. I chewed the handles off several pens, struggled with the difficulties of plot construction and sentence building and eventually evolved a tragic tale upon which I bestowed the glorious title of The Tragedy of Trundletown. I was as proud of this effort as I have ever been of a film since — in fact I should think it must have been very like a rubbishy film in embryo. It was with difficulty I lived through the long days and weeks till the magazine at last arrived. I scrambled through page after page until I came to my story. My glorious title had been changed to Poor Gertie and all my joy in life was dead. I have hated editors ever since.
Early in 1914, or perhaps at the end of the previous year, I personally produced for the Ideal Company, a film called The Bottle, written, I think, by Albert Chevalier and certainly played by him. Chevalier was an exceedingly nice man and a wonderfully good actor, and although he was temperamental and sometimes difficult he was on the whole a good fellow to work with. I think he liked me and we got on very well in this film which was quite a good job of work and was most enthusiastically received by the brothers Rowson, for whom it was made.
Chevalier was responsible for the plot of My Old Dutch, which was based upon one of his most popular songs. It was probably put into script form by Larry Trimble who produced it, with Chevalier in the principal part, for the Ideal Company, to follow The Bottle. And I made another film with Chevalier on another of his stage scenes, called The Fallen Star, which was full of excellent work on his part. He was a really great artist as well as a thoroughly good fellow, and it is an honour to have worked with him.
In the early part of 1914, I also produced two more films from the prolific pen of Blanche Macintosh, a powerful and dramatic story with an important lesson in morals, and one with an entirely different theme called Love in the Mist. Meanwhile Bentley produced another Dickens film for us, The Old Curiosity Shop, with such members of our company as were suitable to the parts, and made what was generally conceded to be the best of his three, followed by yet another in The Chimes, before the year came to an end.
It was the fatal year of the outbreak of the biggest war the world had ever known and it heralded, rather curiously, an important increase in film production, though it was unlikely that the war was the cause. It probably just happened that the conspicuous success of a few films made from well-known plays or books led to a general run of productions on the same lines. That, I think, was certainly what happened in our case. I was never pre-disposed to the transplanting of film plots from another and different medium, holding that the course most likely to be satisfactory was the direct writing of material ostensibly and actually for the medium in which it was to be used. But public demand became too clamant to be ignored and I decided further to try out this alien method and see where it would lead us.
One of the many sad results of the outbreak of war, a very sad one from my point of view, was the sudden withdrawal of Larry Trimble and his colleagues back to America. Their presence in this country for the two or three years they were here had been a great pleasure and happiness to me, and, more than that, a real incentive and encouragement. I have no doubt they were right to leave while the leaving was good, but I missed them very badly.
Captain Baynes, who was perhaps more responsible than anyone else for persuading me to devote more and more of our efforts to the making of films from currently popular plays and to splash large quantities of posters and other publicity upon them, had been on the staff for some months when he called upon me at my house one evening. He asked me if I would like a St. Bernard puppy. I said I had always had collies and had no experience of bigger dogs, but when he put his hands in the two outside pockets of his waterproof and pulled out two puppies, one in each hand, and said I was welcome to whichever one I chose, my defences all broke down. For they were the most adorable things in the puppy line I had ever seen and my wife fell in love with them on the spot and so did the children. We chose the dog and in due course Baynes put the other one back in his pocket and left ‘Sturdee,’ as we promptly called him, in his new home. He grew up to be a glorious specimen of his noble race and he was my indispensable companion for many years, and though he did not take any ‘star’ part in films he often ‘walked on5 in minor roles or strolled about in the background. I am sorry to say he once or twice disgraced me by hurting children in over-exuberant demonstrations of what was supposed to be affection and got me into trouble with the police on one occasion, when they took me to court and suggested he ought to be destroyed. But while I was dreading the worst and wildly wondering how I could possibly evade it, he got off with a caution and set my spirit free.
The war, of course, played the dickens with most of our affairs and arrangements. For one thing it early drained away the younger members of the staff and although they were less important than many of the others, the work often had to be done by those others or by some different substitute. I call to mind a curious instance of this. I think I have mentioned that our method of drying was to wind up the wet film as it came from the developing machine, take it on its spool up to the drying-rooms and there festoon it on the hooks strung on wires under the ceiling. I had all along been intending to make the developing machines complete by linking them with drying-banks operating in close conjunction with them, but that project had somehow got postponed in the more exciting affairs of making film pictures and running a business. Meanwhile the hand- work was quick and not very difficult, but several youngsters had to be allocated to it.
I saw that they and many others would soon be withdrawn and I determined to make the drying arrangements automatic and linked mechanically to the developing machines. The scheme was easy to work out but it was difficult to get made anything mechanical. I wanted dozens of brass tubes with hundreds of flanges on them for the film to travel along. I obtained the tubes and got ‘blanks’ of approximately the right size for the flanges. But they had to be machined to exactly the right dimensions and shaped so as to lead the wet film on without damaging it.
Alma Taylor volunteered to do any work she could when she was not acting. So I set up my big lathe for her, showed her how to ‘chuck’ the ‘blanks’ for the flanges, and I set the tools in the slide-rest so that they could only be fed up against fixed stops, and showed her how to get on with it. She turned those hundreds of flanges exactly to dimension and then I heated them up and shrunk them one at a time in position on the long tubes. ‘Pretty sort of film star’ some people will say, but I thought it was pretty good, and I still think so.
One of the drying-machines was soon set up and it worked well. The wet film came up through a hole in the floor direct from the troughs below, dried without help and wound itself up on spools. Output was quickened and workers freed for other things.
For some curious reason, as I have said, which now seems very difficult of explanation, the onset of the first World War corresponded in time with the coming into fashion of film pictures made from well-known stage plays or from recently published books. Whether it was an understandable desire to cash in on popularity already acquired or only a result of the paucity of original material suitable for the purpose, I cannot be sure; probably it was a little of both. I remember I was very strongly urged by friends whose opinion I valued to look to books or the stage for material.
I realised that that would always mean the rebuilding of the story entirely, for the stage and book technique is necessarily very different from that of the studio. We had a clever scenario writer at hand and that difficulty was easy of solution. After considerable thought and discussion, I took the advice of my friend Baynes, who had first put the idea to me, and very strongly urged that I should at least try it out with that enormously successful book, Coming Thro’ the Rye, and I asked him to get in touch with the authoress, Helen Mathers, whose real name was Mrs. Helen Reeves. He did so and eventually purchased the film rights for five years for a sum that did not appear unreasonable. We had, as I have pointed out, dealt with several other books before and made them into films, but these were all books of which the copyright had expired and there was no question of payment for the use of the material.
This was a different matter. Copyright now in any original work ‘subsists,’ as they call it, during the life of the author and for fifty years after his death, and he, and afterwards his heirs, can do anything he likes with it and demand any price he can get for an outright or partial use of it. So we acquired the rights of Coming Thro’ the Rye for a limited period to adapt it and produce it as a film. Blanche Macintosh again turned her art to the making of a working script — by no means an easy matter, but she was very successful — and I produced the film with Alma Taylor in the principal part. With the rather reluctant consent of Mrs. Reeves, I dealt with the story as up to the date of that time and dressed the characters in modern clothes; for I did not see the necessity of going to the extra trouble and expense of dating it back some fifty years and making it a ‘costume’ piece, which the cinema industry was never at all inclined to favour.
Perhaps I was wrong there, for many people objected to the introduction of a motor-car in a story that their children had known and loved very many years before such a thing was invented. But if you have heard at all of Coming Thro’ the Rye, it isn’t this version of which you will be thinking. A much more ambitious film was produced many years later and of that I will tell when I come to it.
Nevertheless there were thousands of people who had no previous memories to inhibit them, who liked this film tremendously and our first venture into the market-place where sole rights are purchasable was such a pronounced success that there was no difficulty in the future in persuading me to venture again. Helen Mathers, the authoress, was particularly pleased with the film version of her book — I think she was rather inclined to ‘see’ herself in the part that Alma played so convincingly! Anyhow, she pulled some strings which were to her hand and Queen Alexandra commanded a performance of the film in her presence.
This took place, if I remember rightly, at Marlborough House, the scene of my first glimpse of royalty, when I was only a boy and she, this most beautiful lady — was the Princess of Wales. I do not know directly what she thought of it, but Helen Mathers, with shining eyes, reported that Her Majesty had been very pleased indeed with it. A week or two later I received the special tie-pin which goes to people in royal favour on these occasions, so I was duly gratified and I have kept the tie-pin ever since.
After the undoubted success of Coming Thro’ the Rye, which was a complete vindication of friend Baynes’ contention about the purchase of film rights in currently popular books, I willingly agreed to the purchase of the rights of Iris, a very dramatic Pinero play with an almost unbearably pathetic ending. It may, of course, be quite properly argued that Iris, who was certainly no better than she should be, had only got just what she thoroughly deserved. But when a clever author and a clever producer, too, and a very charmingly innocent actress have spent the whole time of the play and of the film in building up the sympathy of the audience for the erring girl, she seems to deserve something better than a terrible fate.
Alma played the part beautifully and she was most admirably supported by Henry Ainley as Maldonado, though that was a part much away from his usual type. The scenery and dresses were entirely in keeping with the rich elegance in which the story was laid. With Pinero’s consent I made an endeavour in the film version to soften the cruelty of the ending of this play. It gave me a great deal of trouble and I am not sure that it was at all successful. I wanted a view of the sea where there was a wide stretch of sand, the idea being that Iris, full of the thought of suicide and half demented, should be struggling towards the water when she sees, or thinks she sees, the man whom she has learned to love too late, and lost. It was not meant for a happy ending — there could hardly be that for Iris — but a kind of suggestion that there might be peace for her in the end.
I certainly would not have attempted it if I had known what trying to take photographs on the sea-shore in wartime would be like. It took very many weeks to get permission and then the nearest place where I could be allowed to take a camera to the sea was on the north coast of Flintshire in Wales. I don’t know how many times we were stopped on the two or three hundred miles to the sea or how many soldiers, policemen and coastguards questioned our right and disputed our authority, but we got there at last and my heavy Metallurgique car promptly settled down in the soft sand and looked as if it meant to stay there until the tide came up and buried it for good. But we managed to get it away before the tide reached it, and before we did that we secured the scene, which wasn’t up to much after all.
One week-end in the early days of the war there was a big scare in Walton because of great clouds of smoke seen to be pouring up from the side of the new studio or from the enclosed space between that and the old one. People began to rush to Hurst Grove from all sides under the assurance that Hepworths had got alight again. Miss Macintosh who lived just opposite and had a key of the studios in case of accidents, let herself in and telephoned to the fire brigade, who arrived much more promptly than they usually did for a real fire. Then the god out of the machine, in the shape of dear old Hales, the handy man, the stove-tender and general fellow-of-all-work, strolled casually out and wanted to know why a man could not trim the furnaces with a little small-coal without causing all that fuss!
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