This movie stars Robert Donat as William Friese Greene who more or less invented the movie camera and thus made available those things being commented on at IMDb.com.
It's received splendid reviews over the years and on this site as well, and it's easy to understand why. The story has Friese Greene and his family suffering for his obsession with the camera. He sacrifices everything for it and his wife and friends chip into the pit. In the end, he dies at a public meeting in 1921 while trying to speak to the audience about developing art, preserving history, and putting money-making on the back burner. The audience must examine his body to find out who he is because he's an old man, long forgotten.
For lagniappe, we have brief appearances by just about every well-known name in the British film industry at the time, from Lawrence Olivier as a wary police constable to Muir Mathieson as a conductor.
So I hate to say that I found the biography a familiar one. Man persists in his pursuit of the invention. Sells everything. Suffers multiple tragedies. Wife gets sick and dies. Friends desert him. But he carries on until his goal is achieved. A cinematic biography wouldn't be a cinematic biography without these formulaic elements. What would you prefer -- a five-minute movie in which a man is inspired by an idea, goes down to the basement, puts some device together, sells franchises at an immense profit, marries some suitable mate like Paris Hilton, and settles down to happily raise five chubby children and a dozen thoroughbred horses? It's well acted and nicely directed by John Boulting, but similar stories have been better told. The Warner Brothers' biopics of the 30s -- starring people like Edward G. Robinson as Dr. Ehrlich -- were equally well done if more crudely presented. "Lust for Life" was more gripping. If William Friese Greene was really like Robert Donat in temperament, he was comparatively dull, although mighty lucky to have a wife who looked like Maria Schell. She has a dazzling smile that, when it appears, seems to cause all the features of her face to light up at once.
For what it's worth, towards late middle age, Friese Greene bemoans the fact that the contemporary encyclopedia entry doesn't even mention his name. (Wikipedia does now.) There were a number of people working on the idea around the same time and, the human mind being what it is, a single "inventor" is called for. Today that name is Edison. I wish Friese Green had won the gold medal because Edison was something of a rat. He patented everything he could get his hands on, including the inventions of people working in his own laboratory, not in pursuit of a dream but in order to make money. He fought it out with Westinghouse over who had the rights to the juice in the electric chair. The depths of Edison's avarice were plumbless.
It's received splendid reviews over the years and on this site as well, and it's easy to understand why. The story has Friese Greene and his family suffering for his obsession with the camera. He sacrifices everything for it and his wife and friends chip into the pit. In the end, he dies at a public meeting in 1921 while trying to speak to the audience about developing art, preserving history, and putting money-making on the back burner. The audience must examine his body to find out who he is because he's an old man, long forgotten.
For lagniappe, we have brief appearances by just about every well-known name in the British film industry at the time, from Lawrence Olivier as a wary police constable to Muir Mathieson as a conductor.
So I hate to say that I found the biography a familiar one. Man persists in his pursuit of the invention. Sells everything. Suffers multiple tragedies. Wife gets sick and dies. Friends desert him. But he carries on until his goal is achieved. A cinematic biography wouldn't be a cinematic biography without these formulaic elements. What would you prefer -- a five-minute movie in which a man is inspired by an idea, goes down to the basement, puts some device together, sells franchises at an immense profit, marries some suitable mate like Paris Hilton, and settles down to happily raise five chubby children and a dozen thoroughbred horses? It's well acted and nicely directed by John Boulting, but similar stories have been better told. The Warner Brothers' biopics of the 30s -- starring people like Edward G. Robinson as Dr. Ehrlich -- were equally well done if more crudely presented. "Lust for Life" was more gripping. If William Friese Greene was really like Robert Donat in temperament, he was comparatively dull, although mighty lucky to have a wife who looked like Maria Schell. She has a dazzling smile that, when it appears, seems to cause all the features of her face to light up at once.
For what it's worth, towards late middle age, Friese Greene bemoans the fact that the contemporary encyclopedia entry doesn't even mention his name. (Wikipedia does now.) There were a number of people working on the idea around the same time and, the human mind being what it is, a single "inventor" is called for. Today that name is Edison. I wish Friese Green had won the gold medal because Edison was something of a rat. He patented everything he could get his hands on, including the inventions of people working in his own laboratory, not in pursuit of a dream but in order to make money. He fought it out with Westinghouse over who had the rights to the juice in the electric chair. The depths of Edison's avarice were plumbless.