Description

GOLD, VIOLET, BLACK, CRIMSON, WHITE
A book about a silent film that outraged half of Britain

Paperback Book by David Hewitt

Paperback book. 439 pages. Dimensions: 138mm W x 212mm H x 32mm D.

A book about a silent film that outraged half of Britain, even as the other half was queueing around the block to see it.

Five Nights, as the film was called, came out in the second summer of the Great War. The work of the country’s first great producer, it was shot in the very place where the Ealing comedies would later be made, and it portrayed the shenanigans of a young artist with too much money and too much time on his hands. The film has long been considered lost, but, using a wealth of forgotten sources, David Hewitt has managed to reconstruct it here in all its seamy glory. He has also revisited the notorious legal case to which the film gave rise, in which a small fortune and more than one career was at stake. GOLD, VIOLET, BLACK, CRIMSON, WHITE holds up a kaleidoscope from a different world. There are suffragettes here, Zeppelins as well, Pimple ensconced in his studio on Eel Pie Island, roller-skaters, dubious pianists and countless men who would have you believe they are Charlie Chaplin.  And while you might think it a familiar world,  it has surely never seemed so strange!

“… a fascinating history of silent cinema in its early days and the novel legal complications with which it was confronted.”
The Law Society Gazette