Reviews

Victoria Wood's first Christmas special in nine years and her long- awaited return to sketch-based TV comedy sadly turns out to be a disappointment for all but the maverick musician-comedienne's most indulgent fans. It's heavily hampered by an overblown pastiche of British costume dramas which drags on for segment after segment, relying far too heavily on silly anachronisms rather than character -- teenagers texting using needlepoint samplers, a 'whitening' booth rather than a tanning booth. I doubt Wood likes costume dramas very much, unlike Julia Davies whose ostensibly similar Hunderby (2012) shows it helps actually to have a grasp of the genre you're sending up. Even less inspired is a series of reports from the Middle-Aged Olympics, which invites unfavourable comparisons with Monty Python's skits on sports coverage from many decades before.

With the exception of a dance routine on the set of The Apprentice, which is funny both because it's so incongruous and so well mounted, the more successful sections retread old ground. There's a mockumentary on the life of Bo Beaumont, the mediocre but blissfully self-deluded actor who portrayed Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques, a fictitious soap that featured in Wood's 1980s BBC work and later became a musical. She's brought to life as ever by the great Julie Walters, the only significant member of Wood's old gang to pop up in this piece. And for a grand finale, our host dusts off her most famous comic song, The Ballad of Barry and Freda (aka Let's Do It), with a few new lyrics, a fabulous big band arrangement and an elaborate Busby Berkeley-style dance routine with a host of CGI- enhanced Barrys and Fredas complete with baggy Y-fronts and loose elastic. This sequence is a joy, but the song has been around since the 1980s.

Wood was successful as a dramatist before she broke through with sketch shows and stand-up. She's moved more and more in the direction of longer forms like sitcoms and 'serious' drama in recent decades, and very successfully. Perhaps her heart isn't in sketches any more. The Making Of, where Wood talks as herself direct to camera, at points reminiscing on her own odd childhood Christmases, is more engaging than the show itself, which certainly doesn't do justice to such a unique talent.

The story told in Rescued by Rover is banal and preposterous, with a tinge of nasty prejudice against the poor. But watch this modest six minute film shot in leafy Walton-on-Thames after some of the earlier silent classics and you should immediately see why critic Michael Brooke of the BFI labelled it "amongst the most important films ever made" and "possibly the only point in film history when British cinema unquestionably led the world." The Great Train Robbery was made only two years before, but in its editing and pace, Rescued by Rover is in a different class. Suddenly the cinema seems to have leapt light years forward and in a few sequences there's little to distinguish this film, now more than a century old, from the way such a story would be mounted today.

When a baby is kidnapped by a female beggar, Rover the collie, faithful pet of the baby's family, springs into action. He jumps through a window, runs down streets and swims a river to reach a row of meagre cottages where he locates the missing child. He's shooed away by the beggar, who is clearly a bad lot as she constantly swigs beer straight from the bottle. Back home, Rover employs the art of doggie pantomime to persuade his master to accompany him back to the cottages and reclaim his child.

The film's narrative breakthrough is most obvious in the sequences depicting Rover's journeys, and in particular in their narrative logic and their treatment of time. Previously films presenting longer narratives were constructed by stringing together a series of discrete tableaux-like single shot scenes. While the audience might imagine time elapsing offscreen in the gaps between scenes, just as in the theatre, the action within each scene took place in real time. Here, directors Cecil Hepworth and Lewin Fitzhamon entirely abandon the tableau structure, instead using editing, and particularly matches on action, to create narrative sequences from several shots, compressing time and eliding actions that the audience will take as read to create narrative drive, tension, pace and excitement.

So while the domestic interior where the mother reacts distraughtly to the loss of her child early on in the film looks like an old fashioned tableau, we can already see Rover moving excitedly around in the frame before jumping through the window. This action propels us into the first hunt sequence: the film cuts to the exterior of the house with Rover emerging from the window then, in succession, we see him running down a street, rounding a corner and swimming a river. This river is an important feature: it provides the opportunity to vary the action, to underline the challenge and to get a great closeup of the dog shaking himself dry, as well as providing a memorable landmark to help viewers apprehend the film's narrative geography. It also, incidentally, dramatically underlines the division between the comfortable world of Rover and the baby, and the 'wrong side of the river', the impoverished domain of the kidnapper.

We then see the entire sequence of locations in reverse as the dog returns home – and both times, the journey is already taking much less time on screen than it would take in reality. When dog and master return together, time is compressed still further – now we know the route, we only need to see a shot each of the street and the river, where Rover has helpfully located a rowing boat for his human companion. The final journey isn't shown at all – the film cuts straight from the beggar's garret to the family home. Now that the baby is safe, the suspense is resolved, and the audience is expected to fill in the logical blanks so that the film can get on with satisfying the need for 'closure' by showing the family happily reunited.

There are some other interesting technical features too – the scenes in the beggar's room provide an early example of using artificial lighting to create mood rather than simply to make sure the action is clear – but they pale beside the triumph of continuity, framing and editing. There are a few precedents of multiple shot chase scenes and matches on action, but the extent to which these techniques were brought together and elaborated upon so skilfully here seems genuinely unprecedented.

Cecil Hepworth, son of a magic lanternist, was one of the leading founding fathers of the British film industry, continuing to make films into the 1920s. Rescued by Rover was a family affair: Hepworth himself, his wife Margaret and their baby are the family in the film, Rover is their own dog, and Margaret wrote the screenplay. The beggar and another minor character are played by professional actors, quite likely another first for British cinema. The film was a great success, and was remounted twice as the negative wore out from striking so many prints (back then, prints were sold rather than rented to exhibitors and the demand was huge). It is credited with, among other things, inspiring D W Griffith and popularising the name 'Rover' for dogs.

Many of its tropes were recycled in the swathes of films featuring resourceful animals that followed – the scene in which Rover tries to get his master to follow him, in which we're invited to share the dog's imagined frustration at being unable to talk, gave rise to a genre staple. But decades before Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo pressed their paws into the walk of fame, there was Rover, paddling gamely across a Thames valley stream.

Though by no means the first with a Western setting, this film was a breakthrough for the genre and, with a plot involving black-clad trigger happy bandits holding up a train then receiving rough justice at the hands of a posse following a horseback chase, helped established several elements of its iconography. Like so much else that was later to seem newly minted for the cinema, these images had precedents in other media, including popular fiction, graphic art and touring stage spectacles known as Wild West Shows which presented a romanticised, gun-totin' version of the American West in the late Victorian period. But location filming provided the opportunity to present these elements in a new setting of realistic visual grandeur and scale – even if, as here, New Jersey stood in for the West.

Like various other longer narrative films in these early days, The Great Train Robbery tells its story largely by stringing together a succession of tableaux, with studio and location scenes staged alike in long shot. At around 12 minutes, with 14 shots, it builds in length, ambition and achievement on Edison director Edwin S Porter's Life of an American Fireman, released a few months earlier, though in some respects is less visually imaginative. A lengthy scene where the villains force passengers off the train and rob them shows the limitations of the technique: the shot is perfectly set up for the dramatic death of a would-be escapee who runs towards the camera before being killed, and later after the bandits depart and the crowd swarms round the corpse, but otherwise it's difficult to see what's going on.

Elsewhere Porter makes good use of the opportunities for movement and energy. He shoots from the back of a moving locomotive across the top of the cab to the track ahead as the villains stalk towards the crew. And a contemporary director would likely choose a similar camera position for the shot where the mounted bandits are chased through the woods by the posse, exchanging gunfire as they go. Notably, there are two early examples of camera movement, put to very good use when the villains leave the hijacked loco. The camera pans and tilts with the characters, setting up the expectation that there's something of interest just off frame, which is then revealed as a group of waiting horses on which they make their final escape.

But the film is best known for a shot completely tangential to the narrative, in which actor Justus D Barnes, as the leader of the gang, expressionlessly points his revolver at the camera and fires six shots at point blank range. The shot is usually placed at the end of the film, after the character has been killed on screen, but Porter suggested it could also be re-edited as the opening shot if distributors preferred. It's a striking image of violence directed at the audience, but there are now no reports of screaming and ducking as with the Lumières' train.

Far from being 'realistic', the shot, and the film as a whole, exemplify the growing tendency of cinema to exploit the vicarious thrill of danger and violence in a contained, safe space. The image is cinema's second enduring icon after Méliès' moon, and has been much parodied and homaged, most notably in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, with Joe Pesci's psychotic gangster standing in for Barnes' outlaw. But in the later film it's actually the penultimate shot. It's followed by a view of the narrator, Ray Liotta's police informer, smiling smugly at the camera before retreating into the comfortable suburban home he occupies under his new identity, safe in the knowledge that the bad guys and their guns are now illusions, locked in their cel(l) of film.

This film, with nine shots lasting around six minutes, is often seen as a dry run for director Edwin S Porter's major breakthrough with The Great Train Robbery, released later the same year. Both use themes with plenty of opportunity for action and movement, and indulging audiences' taste for experiencing danger vicariously. But Life of an American Fireman is more interesting for the storytelling ideas that didn't make it into the later film or, indeed, into the developing language of mainstream narrative cinema.

The film opens rather oddly on an optical effects shot of a dozing fireman, with his daydreams of a happy woman and child, presumably his own family, in a fuzzy circular mask to his right, a device borrowed from graphic art. This reverie is rudely interrupted by a striking closeup of a street fire alarm. The firemen then spring into action, speeding through the streets of a wintry New York City and its suburbs. They rescue a woman and child from a house fire, creating a thematic link back to the beginning and reinforcing the image of the fireman as heroic protector of families and communities, as befits his emerging role as a public servant – an integrated, professional fire service for the city had only existed since 1898.

The depiction of the rescue exhibits the oddest structure to modern eyes (although there's something of the same thing going on when the fire engine leaves the station). First we see a woman in a smoke filled bedroom crying for help at the window and then collapsing on the bed. A fireman bursts through the door, lifts the woman and carries her through the window down a now-waiting ladder. Seconds later he returns through the window, lifts a previously unseen child from the bed and disappears through the window again. Porter then shows us the same sequence of events again from outside the house: the fireman enters the house, the woman appears at the window, the fireman descends carrying her. Watch the bottom of the frame as they reach safety (yes, it's another of those crowded long shots): the woman recovers and begins gesticulating distraughtly. That's why the fireman returns up the ladder for the child.

The conventions of continuity editing shortly to be defined by D W Griffith and others dictate that consecutive events with a causal link take place in a single continuous time frame when depicted from different angles or even in a different location. This governs the principles of cross cutting, which would certainly be the default if a modern film maker were to shoot this story, cutting away to an exterior shot to show the recovering victim motivating her rescuer to return to the burning room, and then back to the interior again to show him lifting the child.

In fact continuity editing is just as artificial and conventional an approach to narrative as the one demonstrated here. Continuity editing creates the illusion of continuous time by cutting together shots that were invariably filmed at different times, and sometimes in completely different places. Yet it is now so fluent and familiar it seems natural, and so hegemonic that films that deliberately break its rules are seen as marked, experimental or trying to make a specific point: for example Rashômon and films inspired by it, which repeat the same events from different perspectives with subtle differences in order to challenge the audience's acceptance of the truth of what is shown on screen.

So intolerably odd did Life of an American Fireman seem to a later distributor that it was reedited to inter-cut the shots, which led to it's being hailed, rather ironically, as an early example of cross cutting. An examination of a paper print version in the 1990s revealed Porter's original montage.

Porter's film was very likely inspired by an earlier film from Britain's Brighton school, Fire! (1901), shot in Hove by James Williamson. This depicts an essentially similar sequence of events in only six shots, and though Williamson is less adept at handling the action than Porter, with much faffing around harnessing the horses and less exciting depictions of the fire engines racing through the streets, the burning bedroom (near-identically laid out to Porter's though with a male rather than a female victim) looks much more perilous, with real flames. There's no repeated continuity during the rescue sequence but instead an excellent early example of a 'match on action', with the cut between the interior and the exterior made precisely at the moment when the fireman first emerges through the window, logically linking the two shots. Williamson stays with the exterior to show the fireman returning for the child.

Le voyage dans la lune was Georges Méliès' longest, most ambitious and most expensive film to date when made. It was one of the earliest films to break the boundaries of the short single scene, stitching together numerous shots – most linked by primitive dissolves – to achieve a running time of approaching 15 minutes, depending on projection speed. The film proved a massive international success and remains the most famous of the director's works, though not his personal favourite nor arguably his best, and has recently become UNESCO's first World Heritage Film.

For his theme, Méliès plundered the work of the newly popular literary genre of scientific romance, as represented by Jules Verne and HG Wells, so this is also the first significant science fiction film, depicting a moon mission mounted by a society of astronomers, six of whom make the journey in a capsule fired from a cannon. Not that the director is especially interested in the science – crossing the final frontier is really an excuse to let his imagination run riot.

The lunar surface turns out to have a conveniently breathable atmosphere and earth-like gravity, and after seeing the earth rise on the horizon – a shot that presciently pre-echoes the later significance of real views of our planet from space – we witness stars and planets metamorphose into human form. Below the surface are caves full of giant toadstools, where an umbrella from earth itself turns into a toadstool and grows to giant size: the moon has the power to subsume even non-native matter within its own fantastic nature. The visitors are assailed by insect-like, gymnastic selenites who explode on impact, and the capsule literally falls back to earth from the edge of a cliff, splash landing in another curious anticipation of real space travel.

The astronomers are portrayed as a comic bunch of squabbling, gesticulating elderly eccentrics, led by Méliès himself, almost unrecognisable in a ludicrous long white wig and beard. Their depiction has been interpreted as a critique of establishment science, but it seems to me more a logical expression of Méliès' factional world, rooted in stage magic and illusion. These astronomers are more like wizards – they even dress up for their meeting in robes and pointy hats decorated with stars and planets.

Similarly pantomimic is the film's best known shot, depicting the moon itself as a big round grinning humanoid face – Méliès again, of course – that zooms into view using the same technique as in the same director's L'homme à la tête en caoutchouc, before getting a capsule in the eye in yet more early cinematic ocular violence. The shot gave film its first icon, still parodied today. Interestingly, it's followed by a shot of the capsule sliding into view on the moon's surface, so what in narrative terms is the same event is seen from two very different angles (compare for example Porter's Life of an American Fireman). Other innovations include an early use of stock footage of the sea and a model shot through a fish tank to show the capsule crashing to the sea bed and bouncing up again, a technique later much favoured by Gerry Anderson.

For all these innovations, the storytelling remains primitive and stilted, accomplished in a simple series of tableaux. The film consists of just 18 setups, most of them long shots – you can almost imagine the curtain falling and rising or the stage rotating during the dissolves. Méliès packs the frame with crowds of characters all on the move, including a chorus line of pretty young women in swimsuits obviously added for no reason other than sex appeal.

Modern audiences used to being guided through the narrative by a complex vocabulary of camera angles and cuts may well find it hard to follow what's going on, for example in the scene near the beginning where the lead astronomer explains the mission to his colleagues using a blackboard on the extreme left. Early audiences had the benefit of a live narration read from a script supplied with the prints, written by the director himself. Contemporary film makers who ask viewers to look so hard at the frame (for example Michael Haneke in Caché) may please the critics but risk baffling audiences.

Some original prints of the film were hand coloured, and a digital restoration of an example rediscovered in the 1990s was released in 2011.

Here's Georges Méliès abusing his own head again. He places a clone of it on a bench, then pumps it up to monstrous proportions with giant comedy bellows, while the head itself looks increasingly disturbed. Delighted with the result, he invites an assistant to pump too, but the assistant goes too far. The head explodes in a puff of smoke, wrecking the equipment, and the assistant is booted from the frame in time honoured slapstick fashion.

The action is presented as a single all-encompassing camera setup, though of course the inflating head is another shot that's been layered in, and there's a jump cut to create the explosion. The reference frame is still theatrical – there's even an obviously painted backdrop, though this time no direct acknowledgement to the audience (in several of his films, Méliès bows to the camera on the conclusion of a trick).

But this is another illusion impossible on stage, as it directly exploits the fact that the moving image was (and predominantly still is) a two dimensional one, so the brain has to rely on cues from perspective to interpret relative sizes of objects. Méliès dollies in and out on his own head (actually using a fixed camera and a wheeled chair on rails) so it grows and shrinks in relation to the frame, and then grafts the result optically into a different image with clear fixed perspective, so the head itself seems to change size. Space and time have become malleable within the boundaries of the frame.

Given its age, the effect is impressively well achieved, but as often Méliès' own performance really sells it. Here, he's one of cinema's first mad scientists, constantly on the move and literally dancing with delight at the results of his bizarre experiment. No doubt in real life he was equally delighted with the visual results. And his dual role as the head enables us to see those silly, gurning features in more detail than usual, as the fully inflated head is effectively a closeup. Mind expanding in more ways than one.

The British film industry may have had its ups and downs since but in the pioneer days of cinema the UK stood alongside the USA and France as one of the most important centres of film making. Louis Le Prince shot the earliest known moving images in and around Leeds in 1888, while Bristol-born photographer William Friese-Greene patented his ultimately unsuccessful Chronophotographic movie camera the following year. Robert W Paul and Birt Acres shot the first British film, using a camera pirated from Edison's, early in 1895, about the same time the Lumières began their experiments in Lyon.

Friese-Greene worked on his invention from a studio in Brighton, which a few years later became the centre of a cluster of cinema pioneers, most notably George Albert Smith, who contributed numerous technical, formal and storytelling innovations to the evolving art of film. Though Grandma's Reading Glass might seem simple and innocuous today, it's highly remarkable for its time.

In the beginning films were single scenes shot from the same angle throughout. This is one of the first to have been edited together from several different takes using different camera angles at varying distances from their subjects but made to look like it takes place in a single coherent space and time frame. This is so commonplace today we're unlikely to think twice about it, but it's a big conceptual leap and Smith guides the audience through it in a particularly interesting way.

While his grandmother fiddles with her sewing basket, her grandson borrows her magnifying glass to look at various objects — a watch, a caged bird, a cat, grandma's eye. Each time, the film cuts to a presentation of the object enclosed in a circular mask, clearly intended to represent the view through the glass. The film is sometimes cited as the first to use closeup (though not all the viewed objects are shown in closeup); it's certainly one of the founding documents of the point-of-view (POV) shot, linking the images logically together through the performers' eyelines and actions.

The circular mask or vignette is inherited from magic lantern slides and graphic art where it was also used to frame detailed depictions of faces and smaller objects. It became a regular part of the visual vocabulary of early cinema, developing an animated offshoot, the iris-in and iris-out. For decades after such tricks went out of fashion, masking continued in use, as here, as shorthand for POV shots through restricted apertures — periscopes, binoculars, keyholes (even though the real experience of looking through these things is nothing like the sharp-edged cinema version).

This is also an early example of reflexive film making, reminding us that viewing a film is itself an act of looking. The most striking closeup is grandma's eye: disturbingly separated from the rest of her face, it still looks scary, particularly when hugely magnified on a big screen. Though the character is depicted as nothing more than mildly irritated, the eye startles and seems angry, as if it's just appeared unexpectedly on the other side of a keyhole. Its appearance is almost an act of visual violence, like the screen hitting back.

Later films self-consciously mined reams of dark Freudian scopophilic significance from images of eyes, lenses, mirrors and the act of looking. Smith is more innocent, and doesn't seem to appreciate the eye's power — he leaves us with a view of a cute kitten instead.

It's tempting to see the two great French pioneer film makers, the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, as two opposing poles of the cinema — the documentary depiction of reality set against the drive to enhance reality, and show things that previously couldn't be shown. But this is over-simplistic. First it underestimates the extent to which, even in their earliest films, the Lumières were taking aesthetic decisions about exactly which slices of reality to depict, and how — consider the camera placement and timing, for example, in L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat. Not long afterwards, they took to re-enacting events they weren't able to film for real.

Meanwhile Méliès, for all that he seemed to take a more forward looking and adventurous approach to the possibilities of cinema, was deeply rooted in a much older tradition. He was a stage magician and illusionist, owner of Paris's Théâtre Robert-Houdin, an heir to the staged spectacle, the Fantasmagorie and the magic lantern show. Attending the Lumières' first Paris exhibition in 1895, he immediately saw the potential of this technology in achieving illusions he'd already been pursuing by other means. The brothers refused his offer to buy one of their machines, but within a year he bought a projector from Robert Paul in London and built a camera himself.

Méliès' tradition is explicit in this film, which is staged as if in a theatre, with the man himself as the magician performing to an imaginary audience, and even taking a bow at the end. But the illusion presented would be impossible to achieve so convincingly without film. Méliès several times removes his own head and places it on a table, then regrows a new one, until he's surrounded by three detached heads, all jabbering away animatedly at each other to prove how alive they are. He attempts to wrangle them into singing together, but soon gives up in frustration and extinguishes two of them with a blow from his banjo.

It's funny and visually striking but also poignant — the film externalises our experience of conflicting inner dialogues. How much we've sometimes wished to shut up some of our own jabbering heads with the swat of a banjo.

A wiry, balding man with a naturally comical appearance, Méliès regularly performed in his own films, often decomposing and distorting the image of his own body, and particularly his head. He's always worth watching and this is a particularly fine example of his eccentric, athletic and manically energetic style — you can believe he's capable of bullying reality into new shapes by force of gesticulation. Like many of the pioneers, he never reaped the just rewards of his foresight, and it's rather saddening to see his energy here and then remember that he ended his career scraping a living selling sweets and toys from a kiosk at Gare Montparnasse.

L'arroseur arrosé was one of 10 films included in the Lumière brothers' historic first presentation of projected moving images to a paying public in Paris in December 1895, but it's radically different from the rest of the programme. Most of the films are documentary records of everyday activity, and while there's an element of staging to some of them, including some professional entertainers and party tricks, none seem to have been mounted to take specific advantage of the new medium — except this one. It's often described as the first known fictional film and the first known comedy film to be exhibited theatrically.

The gag is simple and now seems well worn, but it's no doubt still capable of making children laugh when they encounter it for the first time. A gardener, played by the director's own gardener, is watering with a hose. A mischievous youth stands on the hose to block it, releasing his foot just as the gardener peers down the hose to investigate, with, as they say, hilarious consequences. As with much comedy, part of the pleasure is in observing the discomfort of others — the victim's drenching, the mischief maker's subsequent corporal punishment.

Like all the early Lumière films the action is presented as a single long shot and it's interesting to compare how the scenario might be treated today — perhaps an establishing shot, a cut to the miscreant approaching, a cut back to confirm the gardener's lack of awareness, and closeups of the foot on the hose so the audience is clear what is going on, and of the gardener's face as it's hosed for maximum Schadenfreude.

It's doubtful that contemporary audiences appreciated the film's distinctiveness and of course they would have had no idea how much it presaged what was to come. Given that the film appeared alongside single shot depictions of homebound factory workers, photography conference delegates disembarking from a boat trip and passers-by on a Lyon square, they might well have assumed that the camera fortuitously happened to be rolling as the incident played out spontaneously

Seven years before the Lumières' historic first cinématographe show in Paris, the earliest known moving images were shot by another Frenchman in, of all places, West Yorkshire. Leeds Bridge is the most substantial and arguably the most appealing of the surviving fragments of Louis Le Prince's work as the location is still recognisable. It's also the first ever high angle shot, from an upper window of a shop on the south side of the bridge, which crosses the river Aire on the southern edge of the city centre — a plaque now marks the spot.

This glimpse of Leodians of 125 years ago making their everyday journeys on a route that's still notably as busy and bustling today is surely worth two seconds of anyone's time. Its maker disappeared mysteriously without trace on a train from Bourges to Dijon two years later.

A totally preposterous but fast-moving and quite enjoyable potboiler that doesn't outstay its welcome, this film also boasts additional interest for its audacious train crash sequences and its status as almost the first British sound film.

It's based on what had been a very successful West End play, co-written by Arnold Ridley, later better known as Dad's Army's Private Godfrey. The characters are all stereotypes of the day: the hero (Joseph Striker) is a good chap, the sort who puts up his fists when some cad threatens him with a firearm, who has retired from being rather good at cricket to help his uncle run a railway, while his plucky girlfriend (Benita Hume) ends up saving the day. There's an annoyingly dense private detective (Leonard Thompson) for comic relief, an oily villain (Carlyle Blackwell, who got star billing) and his moll (Pauline Johnson) who comes good in the end. The villain, the owner of a bus company who also masquerades as a railway general manager, has a cunning plan to promote road transport by organising the wrecking of trains. He should have just waited a few decades for the British government to wreck the railways and then franchise them out to the bus companies.

It's the sort of film where characters turn amateur detective rather than doing the obvious and going to the police, and even a series of horrendous rail disasters and a murder can't shift the impression that this is all a rather jolly jape.

The film claims to feature the most spectacular staged rail crash in British film history, and with some justification. The "money shot" shows a loco hauling a full rake of six coaches down an incline at 65km/h smashing into a steam lorry at Salters Ash level crossing on the since-closed Basingtoke to Alton Light Railway (later the location for the better-known Oh, Mr Porter!). The lorry is simply pulverised; the train jumps from the track and crashes onto its side, belching huge gouts of steam. There's lots of other authentic railway detail if you're interested in that kind of thing: the Southern Railway cooperated with the film makers to provide authentic locations. The railway is brilliantly and innovatively filmed, including one remarkable shot where the camera appears to track sideways from the exterior of a moving train to the interior of the coach.

The soundtrack was never intended to have full dialogue, just sound effects and musical score, with a few snatches from a radio announcer – in fact a plot point revolves around a phonograph recording of the villain instructing a henchman. It's now lost and the current DVD release features a decent new score by veteran silent film accompanist Neil Brand.