His Brave Defender

1901
Silent
1m

When a couple's home is burgled, the missus proves her mettle by confronting the culprit, come what may

It's an embarrassing moment for the man of the house when a copper arrives to investigate a burglary, and discovers that his wife was the hero of the hour, while her ungallant hubby was hiding under the bed. Even when the burglar was tied up and threatened his wife, this coward failed to come to her aidw. This comedy uses a reversal of gender stereotypes to make fun out of a potentially dramatic situation. The arrival of a crowd of neighbours and a policeman at the end compounds his shame.

Robert W. Paul was one of Britain's earliest filmmakers. He was a successful instrument-maker by trade and became the co-inventor of the country's first moving-picture camera in 1896. He built a studio in London's Muswell Hill in 1898 and continued to make films there until around 1910, when he turned his focus back to instruments and military technology. This film was made by his company, Paul's Animatograph Works.

Robert Paul: Giant of Early Film

The most prolific filmmaker of the pioneer period of British film

The multi-talented Robert Paul (1869-1943) was the first British filmmaker to project film for a paying audience, in 1896. A contemporary of the Lumiere brothers, Paul had been producing film, in partnership with Birt Acres, for his own brand of Kinetoscope viewer since April 1895. Shortly after, he began producing for his Theatrograph and Animatographe machines, enjoying a long run at the Alhambra in Leicester Square. As an engineer, Paul made a number of significant innovations - such as an intermittent mechanism for efficiently projecting film. But he also made key innovations in film language, such as the first two-shot fiction film, Come Along Do! (1898). To cap it all, he was a shrewd businessman, with an instinctive grasp of audience tastes.