Arrest of Goudie (1901)

Berry St, Liverpool
1901
Silent
4m

Crimewatch Mitchell and Kenyon style, in the first ever film to recreate a true crime.

This film recreates the arrest of Thomas Goudie, a bank employee who embezzled £170,000 to pay gambling debts, using the real locations. It shows the exterior of the house where he was hiding during a nationwide manhunt and re-enacts scenes of the landlady informing on him and his arrest. The film has no explanatory titles, so presumably audiences would have known, or were told, the story.

M&K 757: Films of various real locations involved with the case of the embezzler Thomas Goudie.

Fiction and Comedy

The other face of Edwardian local film specialists Mitchell and Kenyon.

For historian Rachael Low, writing in the 1950s, Mitchell and Kenyon was a minor film company, best known for some "faked topicals of the South African War". Thanks to the great 90s rediscovery, we now know that M&K’s specialty was non-fiction. But we also have more of their fiction than before: alongside the works presented here are some 80 more held elsewhere.

Alongside films recreating contemporary events, including the second Boer War and the 'Boxer rebellion' in China, are more straightforward short comedies and dramatic sketches. Together, they illustrate the kinds of entertainment enjoyed by British filmgoers around the turn of the 20th Century.