A Lively Quarter-day

1906
Silent
5m

Chaos reigns as the removal men do their worst...

Lively' doesn't begin to describe this landlady's ordeal as she tries to get a room ready for a new tenant in this entertainingly chaotic comedy. A trio of incompetent removal men reduce the furniture to kindling, then cause an explosion when they wreck a gaslight fitting. Fortunately the tenant, when he arrives, has a trick or two up his sleeve...

This is a film of two halves: starting with energetic slapstick - involving plenty of stunt furniture - as the removal men do their worst, and ending with some very effective trick work, mostly achieved with reverse filming, as the admirably composed tenant magically returns everything to order.

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.