East Is East

1917-02-12
Silent
70m

Charming tale of East End lovers divided by a not so lucky windfall, with beautiful scenes in the Kent hop fields.

This quintessentially British story, played with exquisite naturalness by Florence Turner and Henry Edwards, deals with the impossibility of finding love across social classes and in defiance of stifling social conventions. Edwards, the biggest star of the British cinema at the time, plays a Cockney boy-done-good, while Florence Turner, ex 'Vitagraph Girl', is his childhood sweetheart from the slums of Poplar who inherits a fortune but is miserable without her soulmate. In the end, happiness is achieved only through escape to a middle ground between the two social worlds.

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.