Rogues of London

1915
Silent
74m

Charismatic silent star Fred Paul is cast against type as a real rotter preying on innocents in the big city, in an enjoyably lurid London melodrama.

A night club called the Mephisto, decorated with devils; that den of vice, the Empire Music Hall, and a back-streets rat pit all feature in this lurid drama about villains preying on innocents in the big city. The Ealing-based Barker Studios made many feature-length melodramas in a similar vein, which shared good production values and some fine locations but suffered from some ponderous direction.

Forgotten Features

A hand-picked assortment of hard-to-see British feature films, featuring mischievous mermaids, murderous minors and military mayhem.

Thanks to decades of DVD and online publishing, not to mention archive revivals and restorations, more of Britain’s screen heritage is available today than ever before. You might even be forgiven for imagining that the whole of British cinema is now just a click away.

But much of that history - from the silent era to the relatively recent past - remains out of reach. This selection from the vaults, hand-picked by the BFI's curators, goes some way to remedying that. These fresh rediscoveries offer something for all tastes: whether futuristic fantasy, battle-of-the-sexes comedy, subversive provocation or an Indian-British rarity.