In Devon everything is fine… Lorna Doone (1922), with Costas Fotopoulos, Kennington Bioscope

The new Bioscope season kicked off with a screening of Kevin Brownlow’s own 16mm print of Maurice Tourneur’s florid Lorna Doone, in which the director proves that you can indeed fit a quart into a pint pot.

Richard Doddridge Blackmore’s novel has everything the moors the merrier in fact with passions surging like waterfalls, opening the doors to death on two occasions and muscles being rendered from the flesh of evildoers. This is, indeed – perhaps – a story that “outlives modern literature… never old, never new… a literary heritage of Civilization…” but all that aside Tourneur made a fun film even if Madge Bellamy looks a little too modern with her thick eyeliner and jazz-age pout.

Before we hit those highlights though, Kevin talked us through Tourneur’s backstory with clips from his own collection illuminated by Colin Searle’s sparklingly sure-handed piano improvisations. We started with The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England (1914) which as a young collector her almost left behind in Keswick Library believing it to be a British film and, therefore, of less interest! He managed to grab the copy and it’s an interesting curio, very much highlighting the step-change in technique that the French director was about to help lead.

Whereas the camera is fairly static, the close-ups are limited and the staging is formal, by the time of Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915) there’s a stunning use of angled camera, meticulous stage direction over an open plan office which forms the basis of a bank robbery. It’s far too good not to copy and low and behold, a clip from Fritz Lang’s Spiders shows an almost identical sequence.

John Bowers and Madge Bellamy

Tourneur was regarded as on the same level as DWG and DeMille by the time of Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) with Mary Pickford playing the wealthy child in a cast full of very tall people and normal sized sets on which he was rightly confident that the protean Canadian could present as a 12-year old. This film and his famous The Blue Bird (1918) demonstrated his way with fantasy with the latter being described by one projectionist as like dreaming when you’re awake.”

 

By 1922 Tourneur had shifted away from the fantastic to the historic and Lorna Doone (1922), filmed near the Thomas Ince Studios in New York and not Devon, England as the director requested, is full of fluid moments of striking storytelling whilst being as plot heavy as a month of EastEnders.

One moment has always struck me especially hard and that is when the Doone Gang attacks young Lorna and her mother’s carriage; heavily outnumbered their carriage is driven into the sea and Lorna’s mother is pushed to the ground as her daughter is taken. The gang rides off, we can almost hear the girl’s pleas, the camera shows her mother trying to raise herself from wet sand, a cut showing the sea lapping around the carriage after the tide has come in and the back to the mother, face down in inches of water…

It's a sign.

The film is far from grim but it has the occasional moment of artful violence in between a narrative that just won’t stop. Set in the late seventeenth century it tells the tale of various families in the Exmoor across the borders of Devon and Somerset. It begins in the White Horse Inn – famous among the taverns of old England - I’m sure you probably know it… where two youngsters meet, John Ridd (Charles Hatton), son of a farmer and Lorna (Mae Giraci), daughter of the Countess of Lorne… it’s love at first sight and the young lad, on hearing his new friend is to travel through the dangerous lands of the Doone bandits, gives her his pen knife. In spite of warnings from others, the Countesses troop head off and duly get ambushed by the rogues on the coast – rather brutally, as above, with the head of the clan, disgraced former nobleman (wrongly so in the book) Sir Ensor Doone (Frank Keenan) who decides to steal the child.

But John has followed and watches on helpless vowing to revenge himself on every one of the Doones!

Flip forward and we find Lorna all grown up as Madge Bellamy and living an uncertain existence amongst the Doones. She has caught the eye of Carver Doone (Donald McDonald) the most unhinged of the clan but can rely on the fatherly support of the suddenly decent Ensor: maybe she has allowed the man to remember the best of himself? It’s an uneasy existence though as Sir Ensor bats down Carver’s marriage request…pronouncing that Lorna can chose who she marries, so long as he lives.

The hunkiest man in Devon and the strongest.

Meanwhile John has grown up into John Bowers – the strongest man in Devon! He is out juggling logs in a stream when he is swept down river into the waters of the Doone Valley. He wakes to find a beautiful brunette leaning over him and they quickly realise who each other is: Lorna pulling out John’s long-cherished penknife. They have not forgotten.

But it is not safe in the valley and Lorna helps John escape back to his world: there can be no reconciliation for fear of Doone reprisals apparently… John returns to his farm, his heart a perfect L, for Lorna, for love… His cousin Ruth (Norris Johnson) looks on, lost in her own longing… an incomplete triangle that will break before the film is done. Lost more besides.

The plot is of its age and genre but Tourneur makes sure that Lorna Doone flies by at an irresistibly entertaining pace. The cinematography from Henry Sharp is also superbly advanced and delivers the richness and range you’d expect for his director.

Madge miscast?

Costas Fotopoulos came with his Old Romantics Toolbox brim-full of longing poignancy, laced with dramatic dynamics and horse-chasing rhythms… he added the classic to the classic and ensured that we arrived breathless at stories end.

Lorna Doone isn’t the best of Tourneur but tonight, with Mr Brownlow’s film, his introduction and the playing of Colin and Costas, we wouldn’t have been anywhere else.