It’s entirely fitting, poetic even, that the final scene in the closing night gala of this year’s Hippodrome Silent Film Festival in Bo’ness (#HippFest) shows a man taking the lead in asking a female co-worker on a date to the pictures. To which she replies, teasingly, that she might.

For strong women of independent mind have featured in many of the 26 events over five days and venues, such as Thursday’s five-star screening of the Norwegian drama Laila in which the eponymous lead defied her father to wed outside her tribe. A course of action considered by the central character in Hindle Wakes, whose director Maurice Elvey is the most prolific filmmaker in British history with almost 200 movies to his name.

At first glance, you might think the title refers to a sleepwalker by the name of Hindle who awakens from her slumber to pursue a path of her own choosing. And though you’d be wrong in your interpretation (Hindle’s actually a fictional town in Lancashire and Wakes a short week of freedom from a long year of drudgery) you’d be correct in your conclusion.

The sleepwalker being Fanny (Estelle Brody) whose secret fling with her boss’s son Allan (John Stuart) causes trouble up mill, literally, when tragic events reveal their tryst. Which is a shock to Allan’s fiance Beatrice (Gladys Jennings) and her mayoral father Timothy (Arthur Chesney) who along with Allan’s controlling father Nathaniel (Norman McKinnel) viewed the upcoming marriage as an ideal opportunity to merge their businesses.

But Fanny doesn’t take kindly to being traded like a commodity and “given away with a pound of tea”. And she challenges Allan’s presumption that it’s acceptable for a man to have a holiday romance – encouraged and expected, even – but when a woman entertains a “little fancy” that makes her in the words of her mother (Marie Ault in a cross between Les Dawson’s Ada and Tam O’Shanter’s wrath-nursing wife) a “wench”.

With yet another terrific live score by Stephen Horne – primarily on piano, though gingerly tooting his flute when Fanny returns to her lodgings the morning after the night before and ominously squeezing his organ when she faces the music back home – Hindle Wakes is an excellent choice to close this year’s festival.

A view, however, not shared by an anonymous correspondent writing in the Pall Mall Gazette who according to Bryony Dixon, Curator of Silent Film at the BFI National Archive, described the original play as having “produced the sensation as if someone had spat in my face”.

Director: Maurice Elvey
Writers: Stanley Houghton (play), Victor Saville
Stars: Estelle Brody, John Stuart, Norman McKinnel
Peter Callaghan
Latest posts by Peter Callaghan (see all)