The City of Beautiful Nonsense (1919 film)

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City of Beautiful Nonsense
Directed by Henry Edwards
Written by E. Temple Thurston
Produced by Cecil Hepworth
Starring Chrissie White
Henry Edwards
Production
company
Release date
  • 1919 (1919)
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguagesSilent film
English intertitles

City of Beautiful Nonsense is a 1919 British silent film drama directed by Henry Edwards, who also starred in the film with Chrissie White. The film is based on the best-selling 1909 novel of the same name by E. Temple Thurston, and is a tale of a woman intending to marry for financial gain and security, who realises at the last minute that to be true to herself and to have the prospect of a happy future she must instead marry for love. A sound version of the same story was made in 1935 by Adrian Brunel.

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The film appears to have been well received and popular with audiences, and has been described as "the most talked about British film of 1919" and "technically on a par with the current Hollywood imports". [1] A contemporary review in The Bioscope admired Edwards' "poetic embellishments" and "symbolistic touches". [2]

Cast

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Broken in the Wars is a 1919 British silent drama film directed by Cecil Hepworth and starring Henry Edwards, Chrissie White and Alma Taylor. The Pensions Minister John Hodge appeared in the film to promote the King's Fund, which supported recently demobilised ex-servicemen. The fund had been criticized by veterans' organisations on the grounds that it was a government backed charity providing relief that should have been provided by the state. The film attempts to assure audiences that the King's Fund is not a charity. A cobbler returning from the First World War is persuaded by his aristocratic former employer and the Pensions Minister to receive a grant that will enable him to open his own shop. It was made by Hepworth Picture Plays. The film is available to view online in the UK via the BFI Player

Hepworth Picture Plays was a British film production company active during the silent era. Founded in 1897 by the cinema pioneer Cecil Hepworth, it was based at Walton Studios west of London.

The City of Beautiful Nonsense was a best-selling novel written by Ernest Temple Thurston. It became the inspiration for two films. It was originally published by Chapman and Hall in 1909, but because the copyright has expired, the text of the book is now in the public domain. There was a "new and illustrated" edition, with illustrations by Emile Verpilleux, published a year later in 1910. It may fairly be described as a sentimental novel: Temple Thurston himself wrote that "To many, from the first page to the last, it had not the faintest conception of reality, and indeed has earned for me the classification of sentimentalist". This was in the Author's Note to the sequel, entitled The World of Wonderful Reality, published a decade later in 1919. His obituary in The Times stated that "there were those who might suggest that sentimentalism was too evident in Temple Thurston's work". As well as being a vehicle for Edwardian romanticism, the novel shares the Roman Catholic faith of its author with its main characters. It is a tale of two cities: mainly Edwardian London, but also Venice.

References

  1. City of Beautiful Nonsense New York Times Movies. Retrieved 05-10-2010
  2. Henry Edwards BFI Screen Online. Retrieved 05-10-2010