Diving Lucy

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Diving Lucy is a 1903 British silent comedy film produced by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon.

Contents

Plot

A policeman is alerted to a pair of female legs protruding from the surface of a pond. He attempts to rescue the woman, but discovers that the legs are fake, with a sign saying "RATS" at the bottom. He then falls in the lake himself.

Production

Diving Lucy was filmed at the boating lake in Queen's Park, Blackburn. [1]

Reception

The film was the most successful Mitchell & Kenyon film. [2] A reviewer in The Talking Machine News described it as a "decided novelty", concluding "we do not remember seeing anything similar before". [3] It was also released in America in February 1904, where the Biograph Company advertised it as "the biggest English comedy hit of the year". [4] Alongside Bio-graph, the film was also distributed by the Edison Manufacturing Company. [5]

Legacy

The popularity of Diving Lucy prompted director Frank Mottershaw to copy the film's premise in a 1907 production entitled Sold Again. [6] In this version, the policeman is not explicitly portrayed as the victim of a practical joke, and the film ends with him being hit by snowballs, rather than falling into the water himself. [7]

A copy of the film survives in the Cinema Museum in London, along with 64 other Mitchell & Kenyon fiction films. [8] It is included as a bonus feature on the American version of the DVD collection Electric Edwardians: The Lost Films of Mitchell & Kenyon, released in 2006 by Milestone Films. [9]

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References

  1. ↑ Whalley & Worden 1998, p. 48.
  2. ↑ Toulmin 2006, p. 46.
  3. ↑ Whalley & Worden 1998, p. 40.
  4. ↑ Toulmin, Popple & Russell 2004, p. 10.
  5. ↑ Whalley & Worden 1998, p. 41.
  6. ↑ Toulmin 2006, p. 47.
  7. ↑ Toulmin 2006, p. 50.
  8. ↑ Toulmin, Vanessa (2005). "Mitchell & Kenyon". In Richard Abel (ed.). Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Taylor & Francis. p. 438. ISBN   978-0-415-23440-5.
  9. ↑ "Electric Edwardians: The Lost Films of Mitchell & Kenyon (1900-1906) Review". SilentEra.com. Retrieved 8 January 2014.
Bibliography


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