Arrest of Goudie (1901)
- Berry St, Liverpool
- 1901
Young scamps launch a snowball attack on a hapless bobby.
One of the rare fiction titles in the BFI's Mitchell and Kenyon collection, this is a comic sketch which takes place in a snowy exterior against a stage backdrop. Some boys make mischief by ambushing passers-by with snowballs. It's not clear whether the snow is real, but it's certainly convincingly powdery as the fight gets increasingly boisterous. The policeman doesn't come off well.
This film has been labelled as from Glasgow, but we have no clues as to who commissioned it, who the players were or where the filming might have taken place. Mitchell and Kenyon had made some fiction films on a stage attached to their photographic shop in Blackburn and had an arrangement to borrow costumes from E.H. Page, proprietor of the town's Lyceum Theatre. It's likely that the stage scenery came from the same source. At this early date it wasn't possible to film in the low lighting conditions of a theatre, so this would have had to be shot outdoors.
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.