Hindle Wakes

Nineteen twenty-seven was a landmark year for silent cinema, and Maurice Elvey's Hindle Wakes--now impeccably restored by the British Film Institute--was part of it. Stanley Houghton's 1912 play, a once-scandalous drama seconding the progressive politics of Ibsen and Shaw, had been brought to the screen before; Elvey himself had had a shot at it in 1918. But in this version, for long, purely visual stretches, he points his camera at things that could never have figured in any stage production. And when Elvey does film scenes from the play, often as not he withholds dialogue cards, so that we "read" the drama from the actors' faces and stances, and details selected by the camera's eye. Hindle is a Lancashire milltown, and although the "Wakes" in the title hints at consciousness-raising, it's also the name given to the custom of shutting down the textile factories one week a year while the workforce goes on holiday. For Fanny Hawthorn (Estelle Brody) and her next-door girlfriend Mary (Peggy Carlisle), this means Blackpool, Britain's Coney Island, with its giddy-making amusement rides and yet-headier swirl of pavilion dancing in which proletarian types used to having the earth firmly under their feet may get carried away. Fanny falls into more or less accidental company with the factory owner's son (John Stuart)--the owner and her father are lifelong friends--and they embark on a clandestine holiday of their own. How the town, their families, and the lovers themselves handle the ensuing crisis is the stuff of drama much less black-and-white than you'd expect, with a feminist upshot that is matter-of-factly revolutionary. Two things more: Elvey's location footage of Blackpool--the camera soaring with the Ferris wheel, then hurtling along on the rollercoaster--and the sea of dancers churning under a moving spotlight is a window into another time, another world. And there is a wordless scene between the two young women--after one has spent the night with a man and the other has not--that is a small miracle of shared trust and apprehension. --Richard T. Jameson

Factory girl Mary Hollins decide to take a vacation and becomes entangled with the son of a factory owner, with shocking results.