OTD in early British television: 1 April 1939
John Wyver writes: After an hour or so’s coverage of the Boat Race on the morning of Saturday 1 April 1939, that afternoon Alexandra Palace offered the television premiere of Michael Powell’s 1937 feature film The Edge of the World. Made as a passion project with independent finance by Powell, the film was the sole recent British feature to be screened by the pre-war service.
Filmed across four arduous months on and around the Shetland island of Foula, The Edge of the World had achieved only a very limited theatrical release in Britain and its marginal status in relation to the industry at the time meant that it was available for showing on television. As the copy for the BFI DVD release of the 1990 restoration recounts,
The Edge of the World tells the moving story of a remote island and its inhabitants, whose traditions and way of life are threatened by a rapidly industrialising world. To settle an argument over whether the islanders should give up their livelihood and move to the mainland, two childhood friends follow an ancient tradition and climb the island’s highest cliff face. The outcome shatters the island’s peace and splits the two clans apart.
Director of television Gerald Cock was unable to persuade any of the major film companies to licence their films for television, and the only other British films broadcast between 1936 and 1939 were two older Gaumont-British films starring show business couple Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge, Jack Ahoy (1934) and Aunt Sally (1933), shown during Radiolympia 1938.
In the first year the only feature film to be screened was the low-budget American Western The Last of the Clintons (1935), starring ageing cowboy Harry Carey. The service was also able to secure a small number of mostly European titles.
Denning Films, a distributor specialising in titles from abroad, provided television’s next feature, The Student of Prague (1935), produced in Nazi Germany and starring Anton Walbrook and Dorothea Wieck. Screened twice in August and early September 1938, the film’s subtitles proved extremely hard to read on domestic receivers, and AP’s twin-reel telecine projector required an interval to handle the 77-minute running time.
Three days after The Student of Prague, another Carey Western from Exclusive, Aces Wild (1933) was bought in at the last minute to replace an abandoned studio show. Three further Westerns from Exclusive featured in the 1939 schedules, The Fighting Texan, Whistling Bullets and Galloping Dynamite, all starring the now-long-forgotten cowboy Kermit Maynard.
Otherwise, the remaining pre-war feature transmissions were of French and German films: Julien Duvivier’s musical Man of the Moment (L’homme du jour, 1937) and Jacques Feyder’s arthouse hit La kermesse héroïque (1935), both of which were supplied by distributor Unity; the Napoleonic-era drama So Ended a Great Love (So endete eine Liebe, 1934), and the French spy story Deuxième Bureau (1935), both via distributor Denning; and Le patriote (1938), a historical tale directed by Maurice Tourneur, less than a month before the service closed down.
The first extensive survey of viewers’ preferences in early 1939 revealed that 77% of the four thousand-plus responses expressed a dislike for European films, but the impossibility of securing British productions forced the service to persevere.
For more on feature films on television, the essential source is Sheldon Hall’s excellent Armchair Cinema: A History of Feature Films on British Television, 1929-1981, the e-book version of which, available direct from Edinburgh University Press, is a snip at £29.99.
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