Two A.M.; Or, The Husband's Return

1896
Silent
1m

A drunken spouse gets his just desserts in a timeless scene

A tipsy husband's amorous advances get short shrift from his long-suffering wife in this very early film by pioneer RW Paul. Marital strife was a popular subject for music hall comedy, and translated easily to film.

A drunken husband returns home late at night to the great irritation of his wife. A top-hatted gentleman enters a bedroom. He is drunk and his wife remonstrates with him. He points to his cheek demanding a kiss. She refuses and pushes him down onto a chair. He picks up a bottle and attempts to drink from it. His wife takes it from him. He points to his cheek again and the wife hits him on the head, crushing his top hat, and making him fall from the bench on which he is seated. The man begins to undress and she pushes him behind a screen. He emerges having only taken his coat off and she helps him into bed.

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.