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My Old Dutch

My Old Dutch

Moving family drama of the life of a working-class Hackney couple over 40 years, inspired by the famous music hall song

This moving family drama - with time for some laughs - portrays the life and hardships of a working-class Hackney couple over a span of 40 years. Our intrepid couple (wonderfully played by Betty Balfour and Michael Hogan) have to face everything life throws at them with fortitude, from the Great War (a son in the RAF and zeppelin raids) to a raging oil fire during the Great Strike. The inimitable Gordon Harker provides sterling support.

The film the couple watch at the cinema is the 1915 version of My Old Dutch, starring Albert Chevalier (writer of the original music hall song) and Florence Turner. As the complete silent film is now believed to be lost, this 1934 version contains the only surviving footage.

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Cinema of WWI

A young film industry just settling into its own home - the cinema - found itself enlisted to record, report and dramatise a war unlike any other.

The films made during and just after World War I have a special directness, untainted as they are by layers of mythologising and cliché built up over the decades. There is a great variety of news, comedy and heartrending drama. A genre unique to this period of film production is the battle reconstruction film: the film equivalent of the stone memorials still to be found in every town and village of the UK.

11 videos in this collection

Young Lord Billy sniffs out sneaky German marauders in this flag-waving war drama - thrills for British boys, 1919-style.
1

The Warrior Strain

  • 1920-01
Humour and adventure as the returning heroes of an English village recount their exploits in the Mesopotamian war.
2

The Lads of the Village

  • 1919
The stirring story of poet Ellis Evans-Hedd Wyn, the Welsh poet posthumously awarded the Eisteddfod chair at Birkenhead in 1917 after failing to return from 1st World War trenches.
3

Hedd Wyn

  • Trawsfynydd
  • 1992
The moving true story of wartime heroine Nurse Edith Cavell, recreated in the aftermath of her execution.
4

Nurse and Martyr

  • 1915
Inventive WWI propaganda in which a rejected volunteer foils a German plot to blow up Parliament.
5

The German Spy Peril

  • 1914
Charming tale of East End lovers divided by a not so lucky windfall, with beautiful scenes in the Kent hop fields.
6

East Is East

  • 1917-02-12
Dramatic reconstruction of the Somme
7

The Somme

  • Hounslow
  • 1927
Dramatisation of the popular conspiracy theory surrounding the mid-WWI death of Lord Kitchener.
8

How Kitchener Was Betrayed

  • 1921
The son of a wealthy merchant fakes his own death to join up, but his heroic act at the Front is wrongly attributed to his cowardly cousin.
9

The Man Who Came Back

  • 1914
The nation's menfolk try anything to avoid being 'called up' in this raucous WWI comedy.
10

Conscription

  • 1915
Moving family drama of the life of a working-class Hackney couple over 40 years, inspired by the famous music hall song
11

My Old Dutch

  • 1934-11-12
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