Tom Brown's Schooldays

Royal Command Performances had from Elizabethan times been an important method of royal patronage (and royal surveillance) of the public theatre. They never entirely fell into abeyance (as the Wikipedia article claims) but a certain moral disapproval of the theatre had rendered them less common and less significant by the early nineteenth century. Although revived by Queen Victoria in 1848 (Charles Kean in The Merchant of Venice), had fallen rather into desuetude during her long gloomy widowhood but were revived towards the end of her life under her son's influence and then with a certain gusto by Edward VII himself whose taste for the popular theatre and its embellishments was notorious.

The first command performance for a film took place in Victoria's lifetime as early as 1896 when Birt Acres (assisted by Cecil Hepworth) showed his film of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra visiting the Cardiff Exhibition (not known to survive) along with a programme of other short films (including Tom Merry the Lightning Artist drawing Mr Gladstone and Lord Salisbury, the Derby Races of 1895 and 1896, Henley Regatta and scenes showing a boxing kangaroo, a great Northern Railway express train and the pursuit of a pickpocket) before an invited audience of forty in a specially constructed marquee. This took place on the 21st July, just five months after Acres had mounted the first ever public film show in Britain (10 January 1896) for the Lyonsdown Photographic Society at the Lytton Road Assembly Rooms in New Barnet.

A selection of Diamond Jubilee films taken by the Lumières operators were presented to the Queen in 1897 presented by H. J. Hitchins and accompanied by a full orchestra under the baton of Leopold Wenzel.

The royal family had no aversion to popular culture. Queen Victoria had enjoyed magic shows and George V and Queen Mary attended a performance at the Palace Theatre on 1st July 1912 that included acts by male impersonator Vesta Tilly (Queen Mary apparently covered her face at this point), George Chrwgwin, the white-eyed kaffir, Little Tich, Harry Tate, the "prime Miniser of Mirth", dancer Anna Pavloova, magician David Devant, Australian comedienne Florrie Forde, Lupino Lane, George Robey and Harry Lauder. The organiser described it as the night when the Cinderella of the arts (music hall) finally went to the ball. Only Marie Lloyd was left out (considered too vulgar).

This and other command performances 1912-1919 were organised by the Australian-born impresario Oswald Stoll (founder in April 1918 of the Stoll Picture Company, knighted 1919) who transformed them into charity fund-raising events (renamed Royal Variety Performances in 1919).

The first feature film to shown by command, Cecil Hepworth's Coming Through the Rye, was shown before Queen Alexandra in the State Dining Room of Marlborough House on 4 August 1916. The King and Queen also commanded a private viewing of the pioneering propaganda film The Battle of the Somme at Windsor Castle The King and Queen had commanded a private viewing of the propaganda film The Battle of the Somme on 2 September 1916. Nothing surprising then that this film too should have been the subject of a Command Performance at Buckingham Palace on February 24, 1917, the first fiction film to be shown by command to the King himself and, as one contemporary critic has it, "an excellent exammple of British character-building at its best" (Cinema 6 April 1916).

And it is an immaculate little film of its kind, if a little too episodic in its narration, attractively shot on location, authentically decorated and costumed, showing how very early the British mastered the technique of turning out costume-drama classics more or less to order. The great stand-by then snd now was Dickens (even if the prospect sickens, as Tom Lehrer has it). The very first British features had unsurprisingly been of this kind - Thomas Bentley's Oliver Twist (1912), David Copperfield and The Old Curiosity Shop (1913), The Chimes and Barnaby Rudge (1914) and Hard Times (1915), all for Hepworth.

The cast of the film is a trifle inexperienced because the producers wanted to be able to assure audiences that no one appears in it who "ought to have been in our fighting forces". They proudly announced that Jack Hobbs, the young actor who plays the adolescent version of Tom, was "now in the army".

No mention, one notices, of the boy who plays Flashman.....Laurie Leslie, already in fact in his mid-twenties, had, rather splendidly, been born out of wedlock in the Channel Islands and fraudulently christened Lord Dashwood Leslie De Vine and was the son of an unscrupulous much-married adventurer named Charles Leslie De Vine aka Carlos Leslie Roman and his Armenian step-daughter Sophia (whom he did subsequently marry and eventually desert). Macdonald Fraser would have appreciated.....

Oh, your sister? Only in a nineteenth-century British story of the upstart rich, the patrons of the new "public" schools,could the keepsake turn out to be...a fox's tail. True gentlefolk, need one point out, did not dress up in red coats and chase after vermin.

This is the first of half a dozen adaptations for the big and little screens of Thomas Hughes fictionalized memoirs of Rugby school. It certainly covers more of the story than the 1940 RKO version; it includes the subplot of Tom's sister who marries without his father's consent. It is well performed by its cast in the style of the period, with all the boys -- most of whom are considerably older than their characters -- trying to be manly.

The weakness in this feature, however, is one common to many early screen adaptations: it presupposes the audience's familiarity with the book, reducing the movie to a series of incidents, highlighted by the occasional battle, first with 27-year-old Laurie Leslie as Flashman, whose face appears to have been scarred in a knife fight, then with Mr. Canielli as Slogger Williams. The only linkage that provides a clear plot is the story of Tom's sister, which reappears regularly for a total of four references.

The camerawork under Silvano Balboni is handsome, if static. Although that may be a result of the print, it appears to be done in the "Lasky Lighting" style. The net result is a decent if slightly old-fashioned movie for 1916, more interesting for its place in history than as a movie in its own right.