The Man Who Came Back
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.
Dramas in the early days of WWI often focused on individual acts of heroism, as they had during the Boer War era. With little aesthetic or dramatic progression since those early reconstructions, The Man Who Came Back seems, in some ways, a pale imitation of AEW Mason's The Four Feathers. But the plot introduces an interesting class angle, with the hero condemning the irresponsible upper classes.
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
The Lads of the Village
Hedd Wyn
Nurse and Martyr
The German Spy Peril
East Is East
The Somme
How Kitchener Was Betrayed
The Man Who Came Back
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