Lily of the Alley

BFI Most Wanted: the hunt for Britain's missing films

Directed by Henry Edwards, 1924

An experiment in film form that may be the first silent fiction feature ever made without intertitles.

An emotional moment for Lily (Chrissie White) and Bill (Henry Edwards)

Credits

Director Production Company Screenplay	Henry Edwards Hepworth Picture Plays Henry Edwards
Cast: Chrissie White (Lily); Henry Edwards (Bill); Mary Brough (The Coy Widow); Frank Stanmore (Alf); Campbell Gullan (Snarkey).
6,590 feet, silent, black & white.

Why are we so keen to find it?

It's a landmark experiment in film form: the first British attempt to make a feature film entirely without titles (there were other examples but none that director Henry Edwards could have seen), as well as being the work of one of our most talented directors.

What's it about?

It's a story that shares some themes with Edwards' earlier film East is East (1916), about a Cockney couple who are ground down by life. Edwards' character is initially light-hearted but gives up drinking when he marries. Overwork and impending blindness causing his anxious wife (Chrissie White), to dream that he he goes blind and is robbed and murdered. The reality turns out somewhat better and his sight is restored.

Last seen?

Presumably the negatives and prints were with all the other Hepworth material that was seized when the company went bust in 1924. We know that the bailiffs had most of these destroyed.

What else do we know about it?

We know that the experiment to make a feature-length picture without the interruption of intertitles was a deliberate one, and that Edwards believed it to be the first of its kind. In fact several filmmakers were making the attempt - the most famous examples being the two German films Warning Shadows (Schatten, 1923) and The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann, 1924), both issued a while after Lily of the Alley, which was completed in 1922. Film historian Rachael Low (in 'History of the British Film 1918-1929') comments on the Bioscope review, which praised the film for its finely drawn East End characters but thought that the self-imposed restriction led to some clumsy solutions in the storytelling that could have been more elegantly covered by an intertitle. From what we know of the film, it sounds as if Edwards just picked the wrong story for his experiment. The story of a relationship necesarily implies some dialogue, whereas Warning Shadows or Last Laugh are more impressionistic and from a single perspective.

Nevertheless, it's clear that Henry Edwards was consciously working within the context of an international cinema. The ability to produce films with few, or no, titles was seen then as the pinnacle of the filmmakers' art, and had clear commercial advantages when it came to selling the film overseas without the need for translation. The film's release was held up by the crisis in the British film trade in 1923 and 1924, during which time a British Film Week was organised (February 1924) to promote films from Britain's smaller producers. It may not have been the most propitious time to release a film for a more sophisticated audience.

Does anything survive?

There are a few stills and a Bioscope review in February 1923. Several references to the film appear in Henry Edwards' diaries, which are held in the BFI Special Collections.

Reviews

In addition to The Bioscope (quoted above), The Times' reviewer (4 July 1923) headlined his article 'a good British production' and called it the most interesting film released that week due to its lack of intertitles, a novel feature that had clearly attracted the attention of the critics. He says" This is believed to be the first full length film ever to be made without a single word or sub-titling to explain the action. Apart from his important distinction it is intrisically and absorbing drama , coherently presented; and so it is gratifying that the film is British. It represents a personal triumph for Mr. Henry Edwards, who was the author, producer and leading male actor."

Bryony Dixon, Curator (Silent Film), BFI National Archive

You can find more about British films of the 1920s, including entries on surviving films and video clips for users in UK schools, colleges, universities and public libraries, at BFI Screenonline. You can also view similar titles at the BFI Mediatheques.