The Magic Box **** (1951, Robert Donat, Margaret Johnston, Laurence Olivier, Maria Schell, Renée Asherson, Robert Beatty, Richard Attenborough) – Classic Movie Review 5139

Robert Donat stars as William Friese-Greene, the overlooked British cinema trailblazer, who races against world competitors to invent moving pictures in director John Boulting’s magical British 1951 all-star celebration for the Festival of Britain. Written by the talented Eric Ambler, and based on Ray Allister’s biography Friese-Greene, Close Up of an Inventor, it is a lovely film, splendidly entertaining, informative and engrossing. However, Allister’s biography is romantic and unreliable biography and Ambler’s script is even more misleading. Nevertheless, it’s only a movie, and an enchanting one.

More than 60 British stars are advertised as the main attraction, and Donat holds the centre strong and firm. And there are some lovely little star cameos in this extremely pleasing piece of understandable postwar self congratulation and flag-waving.

The best of these comes from Laurence Olivier as Police Constable 94-B, a British bobby whom Donat drags in to see his new film camera invention — this moving scene is virtually worth the whole film.

Shot by Jack Cardiff, this Technicolor extravaganza is now restored to its former glory by Britain’s National Film Archive.

Here is the glorious cast in alphabetical order: Renée Asherson, Richard Attenborough, Robert Beatty as Lord Beaverbrook, Johnny Briggs, Edward Chapman, John Howard Davies, Michael Denison, Robert Flemyng, Marius Goring, Joyce Grenfell, Kathleen Harrison, William Hartnell, Joan Hickson, Thora Hird, Stanley Holloway, Patrick Holt, Michael Hordern, Jack Hulbert, Sidney James, Glynis Johns, Mervyn Johns, Margaret Johnston as Edith Friese-Greene, Barry Jones, Peter Jones, James Kenney, Ann Lancaster, Herbert Lomas, John Longden, Bessie Love, Miles Malleson, Muir Mathieson as Sir Arthur Sullivan, A E Matthews, Bernard Miles, Richard Murdoch, John McCallum, Laurence Olivier, Cecil Parker, Frank Pettingell, Norman Pierce, Eric Portman, Dennis Price, Michael Redgrave, Margaret Rutherford, Maria Schell as Helena Friese-Greene, Janette Scott, Ronald Shiner, Sheila Sim, John Stuart, Marianne Stone, Basil Sydney, Ernest Thesiger, Sybil Thorndike, David Tomlinson, Cecil Trouncer, Michael Trubshawe, Peter Ustinov, Frederick Valk, Amy Veness, Charles Victor, Kay Walsh, Emlyn Williams, Harcourt Williams, Googie Withers and Joan Young.

Martin Scorsese recalls: ‘One of my primal film experiences. It’s no wonder Friese-Greene was so driven, just as, I am sure, Edison, Lumiere and Meliès were. They were in awe of their own creation. They had found the key to another level of human experience.’

William Friese-Greene (7 September 1855 – 5 May 1921) was an English portrait photographer and prolific inventor, known as a pioneer in motion pictures, though not the inventor of cinematography as he is sometimes credited. Despite the inscription on his monument in Highgate Cemetery as ‘The Inventor of Kinematography’, his work follows that of Louis Le Prince, who shot the world’s first moving pictures in Leeds in 1888.

Friese-Greene built a camera to take a series of photographs on a roll of perforated film moving intermittently behind a shutter, the principle of a motion-picture camera, but it was incapable of taking pictures at a sufficient rate for animation, and he gave no successful presentation of moving pictures. Credit for a successful cinematographic device goes to Thomas Edison.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5139

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