"A record of the Indian rope trick, with magician, attendant and boy who apparently climbs the straightened rope and disappears. The boy is restored and tribute exacted from the crowd." (EAFA Database)
"Amateur filmmaker, cinema historian and railway engineer H.A.V. Bulleid mixes slapstick and romance in this portrait of the extra-curricular life of a Cambridge student. When our intrepid undergraduate first arrives in Cambridge, he forgets the name of his college and loses his ticket, leaving him struggling to reach his lodgings. After a dream-filled night spent sleeping on the streets, he arrives at a lodging where everything costs that little bit extra. Rarely in college, he spends his days stealing bicycles and chasing women until he finds one he wishes to marry. With the courtship in full swing, her father says they can only marry if the undergraduate earns £20 in a single day; an ultimatum with inflammatory consequences" (EAFA Database).
"A story, typical of the period, which includes - young lovers, a mother with high aspirations for her daughter, a rascally Count and much ‘ado’." (EAFA Database)
"Sally yearns for the better things in life. Her mother takes in washing and asks Sally to return some laundry. En route, Sally peers over the gate of a house. She is spotted by the owner, Mrs Bond-Regent, who has just returned from shopping for her niece's garden party to learn that her maid has left. Sally is dragooned into becoming the maid for the afternoon. The film involves Sally's mishaps. The guests, who are all women, include an artist, a musician, an actress, a dancer, a representative of The Simple Life League, and a woman dressed like a man (whom Sally mistakes for a man). Despite her shortcomings as a maid, the guests all see wonderful potential in Sally and try to teach her their respective arts, but to no avail. After being persuaded to smoke a pipe, Sally flees the party and returns home, eschewing the better thing in life" (EAFA Database).
"Much of the appeal of this confusing but fascinating amateur film is a gloriously camp performance by its writer, Evelyn Waugh. He plays the Dean of Balliol College, Oxford, and based his performance on the real Dean, 'Sligger' Urquhart. Urquhart, he observed, was Catholic, homosexual, and a snob; an epithet that could as well describe the author himself after his conversion in 1930. Filming took place at Hampstead Heath, Golders Green, and the Waugh family's Hampstead back garden in the summer of 1924. In the film the Dean is under orders from the Pope and his envoy Cardinal Montefiasco to convert the English monarchy to Roman Catholicism. The Dean holds a sinister influence over the Prince of Wales, but this is counteracted by the attractions of cabaret actress Beatrice de Carolle, played by a sinuous Elsa Lanchester (The Bride of Frankenstein) in her first film role" (BFI Player).
"A group of upper-middle class young men (dressed in shirts and ties, one in a striped blazer) sit on the grass. They are idle and bored and missing women. An intertitle states that `there is not a bird in sight'. A group of young women from the Amena Stich private school, led by their bespectacled female teacher, is walking out for exercise. The men see them and life looks better. They hide behind a hedge as the women pass by. The young women stray on a side path leaving their teacher to walk on alone. She eventually notices her young ladies are not behind her and goes to look for them. Meantime the men and women have met up and all sit around on the grass, the women being chatted up. Professor Stephen Chickwood is in the woods looking for insects. He meets the teacher and offers help to find her girls. They form a relationship and walk hand in hand. Eventually they come upon the young men and women who laugh and point at them. Amena shouts `Help'" (EAFA Database).
"a comedy about a group of dope smugglers on a canal" (HMHT 1933: 450).
"This comedy-drama is a skit on “Robinson Crusoe"(HMHT 1932: 181).
"In Ski Legs, the family filming team of Cinecoles has produced an able and amusing farce comedy on the perils of skiing for the novice. Spurred on by the waning love of his onetime sweetheart — newly devoted to the current ski champion — the hero risks life and limb on the snowy trails, to win out in the end through a series of adroitly conceived mishaps. The film is a pat illustration of the oft spoken truism that the best humor for amateur films is the humor of situation, not the "funny" acting of the actors. To Charles Coles goes the credit for crisp and competent photography, with Robert Coles responsible for the direction of a well developed plot and its genuinely amusing "gags." " Movie Makers, Dec. 1939, 635.
"SleepInn Beauty is a comedy situated around a bathing beauty contest based on a story adapted by Dorothea Mitchell. Filmed over two days North of Port Arthur near Mitchell's camp at Surprise Lake, Wally McComber (the "Goof" of A Race for Ties) played the leading man and Maye Flatt, the leading lady. Fred Cooper shared the photography duties with Lloyd Small and took a minor acting role. In addition, over sixty extras were bussed in from Port Arthur to take part. The film was never exhibited publicly although, considering Mitchell's efforts with A Race for Ties, it was most certainly shown privately." Ladylumberjack.ca
Total Pages: 23
Amateur Cinema