Released to commemorate the Festival of Britain, this is a fairly entertaining, if heavily fictionalised and romanticised, account of the British cinematography pioneer William Friese-Greene, who is nowhere near as well remembered as his more successful contemporaries Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers and the true inventor of cinematography Louis Le Prince. Rather appropriately given the subject, the film has beautiful colour cinematography and it is well directed by John Boulting but the script is not as strong as it could be as it is not very well paced. I did not really see the point in telling the film out of chronological order. It begins with his second wife Edith recounting their troubled marriage before the elderly Friese-Greene recollects his early career and his life with his more supportive first wife Helena.
The always effortlessly charming and charismatic Robert Donat is excellent in the role of Friese-Greene, a good and well-meaning man whose obsession with perfecting moving pictures leads him to neglect his family though not out of any malice. His performance is without a doubt the highlight of the film. After him, the strongest cast member is Maria Schell as Helena. Margaret Johnston is quite good as Edith in her more sedate scenes but goes badly over the top during the character's emotional breakdown. The film is notable for featuring many great British actors in cameo roles: Richard Attenborough, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, Michael Hordern, Michael Denison, Michael Redgrave, Thora Hird, William Hartnell, Sid James, Joyce Grenfell, Marius Goring, Stanley Holloway, Kay Walsh, Joan Hickson, Glynis Johns, Miles Malleson, etc. I was very glad to finally see Attenborough's wife Sheila Sim in a film, having seen her husband and her brother Gerald in so many recently! Many of the actors in the film later turned up in films that Attenborough directed, incidentally.
The best scene in the film is the very funny one in which Friese-Greene tells a policeman, played by Olivier in probably the most normal, down-to-earth role of his very long and impressive career, that he has invented the motion picture but the way that he phrases it makes it sound as if he had committed a murder! The final scene in which Friese-Greene dies unrecognised and forgotten at a film conference is quite moving.
Overall, this is a decent film but not a great one. If you want to watch a film about the 19th Century pioneer of a technology which we now take for granted, I would recommend the considerably better (and more historically accurate but still fictionalised) "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell" starring Don Ameche.
The always effortlessly charming and charismatic Robert Donat is excellent in the role of Friese-Greene, a good and well-meaning man whose obsession with perfecting moving pictures leads him to neglect his family though not out of any malice. His performance is without a doubt the highlight of the film. After him, the strongest cast member is Maria Schell as Helena. Margaret Johnston is quite good as Edith in her more sedate scenes but goes badly over the top during the character's emotional breakdown. The film is notable for featuring many great British actors in cameo roles: Richard Attenborough, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, Michael Hordern, Michael Denison, Michael Redgrave, Thora Hird, William Hartnell, Sid James, Joyce Grenfell, Marius Goring, Stanley Holloway, Kay Walsh, Joan Hickson, Glynis Johns, Miles Malleson, etc. I was very glad to finally see Attenborough's wife Sheila Sim in a film, having seen her husband and her brother Gerald in so many recently! Many of the actors in the film later turned up in films that Attenborough directed, incidentally.
The best scene in the film is the very funny one in which Friese-Greene tells a policeman, played by Olivier in probably the most normal, down-to-earth role of his very long and impressive career, that he has invented the motion picture but the way that he phrases it makes it sound as if he had committed a murder! The final scene in which Friese-Greene dies unrecognised and forgotten at a film conference is quite moving.
Overall, this is a decent film but not a great one. If you want to watch a film about the 19th Century pioneer of a technology which we now take for granted, I would recommend the considerably better (and more historically accurate but still fictionalised) "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell" starring Don Ameche.