Helen of Four Gates

Trigger warning:

Attempted suicide

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Helen of Four Gates

Heptonstall
1920
Silent
77m

A tale of treachery, madness and thwarted love in this vivid rural melodrama set around Heptonstall in Yorkshire.

This vivid rural melodrama sees our heroine fall victim to a lurid revenge plot hatched by her mother's rejected beau. A fine performance from James Carew as the devious villain is a prime ingredient in this heady brew. But the extensive filming around Heptonstall in Yorkshire steals the limelight in a tale of treachery, madness and thwarted love among 19th-century country folk.

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.