RW Paul the 2nd & Adolphe the 1st... The King on Main Street (1925), Kennington Bioscope with Colin Sell

"Yes, yes, by all means sure-fire box office values ... the Menjou fans will eat this up ... it is mighty fine entertainment, and they will like it!" Film Daily

Mr Kevin Brownlow was rather incredulously reading out some of the notices for The King on Main Street with one paper claiming it was up there with Valentino in The Eagle and The Big Parade as one of the best releases of the month although the King’s budget could barely have covered a week of Vidor’s epic. We were seeing Kevin’s 16mm print and this has some parts missing, namely the starting reel and the saucier aspects of Greta Nissen’s role, excised for the home market and, rightly so judging by the way the actress was wearing silk in her Paris boudoir.

In truth the film is a modest effort but it does feature superb playing from Adolphe Menjou as the runaway King Serge IV of Molvania who, on a business trip to America nips out from the confines of royal duty for a day of adventure at Coney Island. Here he meets a young kid who shows him the ropes vis-à-vis hot dogs and the business of fun including a memorable roller coaster ride filmed with the camera close-up on Menjou as he acts his way up and down and, indeed, around Coney’s biggest dipper.

Gotta love Bessie 

He is also reacquainted with the excessively lovely Bessie Love as the all-American Gladys Humphreys who has already thrown her iced bun at him in Paris overcome with the sight of royalty. As Kevin explained the film was cashing in on the royal fad sparked by the handsome Prince of Wales, Edward the Abdicator, albeit a few years before our King ran for his life.

Love’s always a treat and here she absolutely rips the floor up as, ukulele in hand she Charlestons the heck out of the carpet at small-town Little Falls reception for the King arranged by her beau John Rockland (the disturbingly Ford Sterling-esque Oscar Shaw). Wikiparently, Love’s rip-roaring helped popularise the dance in the US and strictly speaking, she’s 10+ in comparison with the Saturday night kids we get from the BBC’s dance show.

Theatre Magazine was definitely impressed "... Bessie Love gives a perfect exhibition of the Charleston, proving that it can be danced with extreme grace and agility, and yet without a single hint of wriggling vulgarity. We hereby award Miss Love the palm as the greatest Charleston expert on the screen if not on the stage -- which is by way of being a miracle, for ordinarily a film dance looks as silly as the capering of goats".

There’s some business involving selling oil to unscrupulous American Arthur Trent (Joseph Kilgour) – how little things change – and the King may even be forced to betray his country’s best interests in order to protect Gladys’ honour but, y’know, it’s probably a “great deal” when you look at it closely. The King also finds a way to smuggle Greta’s saucy Therese Manix by getting her to marry his butler Hugo (Londoner Edgar Norton) and it makes a man of him in scenes largely cut to preserve our frail morality.

Monta Bell directs with straightforward efficiency influenced, as Kevin pointed out, by his time working alongside Chaplin on A Woman of Paris a couple of years earlier – Adolfe was also in that too. Other existing elements of The King on Main Street include two sequences filmed in early two-strip Technicolor which might explain its success along with the charm of the King and his women. Lois Wilson is also an uncredited "guest" extra in a hotel lobby scene – I think I spotted her but I do see her everywhere I go.

Colin Sell accompanied and riffed in divine style on By the Light of the Silvery Moon as well as launching into a spirited Yes, We Have No Bananas as the jazz band at the reception tried to find something that would pass as the Molvania national anthem.

Is Spiritualism A Fraud? (1906) 

The first half of the evening had featured Professor Ian Christie continuing his birthday tribute to RW Paul with some films he hadn’t shown at the BFI last month. One particular delight was A Soldier’s Courtship (1896, repeat 1896!) which has a good deal of performance and plot as a young couple on a bench are disturbed by an old woman as they canoodle leading the titular soldier to upend the seat and the bothersome intruder. Made the same year as Edison’s The Kiss, this film is far ahead in style and entertainment.

Edison’s failure to extend the patent for his Kinematograph to Europe was, possibly, because he was wary of a legal wrangle with William Friese-Greene’s very similar machine and there is another major step up the Ladder of Recovery currently being climbed by Bristol’s finest “father of cinema”.

This laid the way open for Paul to manufacture his own version and to advance the design and implementation of the technology. His wife Ellen, featured in heavy disguise as the annoying old lady in the first film, introduced Paul to more theatrical ideas and collaborations and the first couple of British film became established as both innovators and commercial hits.

A Soldier’s Courtship... well, they'll have to get wed after *that*!

Paul’s illustrated catalogues make it clear that his film’s were colourised even from 1896 and exhibitors would pay a pretty penny to see the likes of Comic Costume Race (1896), The Twins' Tea Party (1896) and – Christie’s suggestion for the first two-act film - Come Along, Do! (1898) recently completed with an animation based on just two frames by his son. A further four frames have now been found by the BFI and so there is more to be done.

Christie is hopeful that there will be a lot more to come as archives around the world begin to re-evaluate their possible-Pauls.What we have is fascinating and, as at the BFI, it was interesting to see how the filmmaking developed into longer-form with trick camerawork as in Artistic Creation (1901), the bizarre The Magic Sword (1901) – knight loses girl to giant devil and wins her back thanks to Fairy and Sword (I think) – up to Is Spiritualism A Fraud? (1906) a rather violent take down of the fad for communication with the dead.

The Magic Sword (1901)

Once again Paul’s documentary work was also covered including two films he made of the tragic events around the launch of HMS Albion in 1898 – 34 people were drowned when the huge wash smashed into the pontoon on which they were standing. Though criticised by former collaborator Birt Acres for exhibiting the films, Paul gave them away for free and a fund was set up to help the families who had suffered. Paul was using an electric camera which kept on running and the proof of the pudding is in the striking close-up of Ellen on the boat approaching the launch.

John Sweeney accompanied these cinematic gobbets with his uncanny period feel and sense of dramatic timing; many of the films are missing starts and ends and could catch out the unwary. Nothing got past the safe hands and quicksilver thematic inventions of Mr Sweeney though!