One Family (1930)

Director:

Walter Creighton

Release Date:

8 July 1930 (UK)

Genre:

Adventure | Fantasy

Plot:

A young boy dreams he's on a guided tour of Buckingham Palace and various countries in the British Empire. |

Plot Keywords:

Child | Family | British Empire | Buckingham Palace | Dream

Cast

Douglas Beaumont	...	The Boy
Sam Livesey	...	The Policeman
Michael Hogan	...	The Father
Joan Maude	...	The Mother
Phyllis Neilson-Terry	...	Australia
Lady Keble	...	Canada
Lady Ravensdale	...	New Zealand
Lady Carlisle	...	South Africa
Lady Lavery	...	Irish Free State
Miss Dadabhoy	...	India

Runtime:

70 min

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.20 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

British Instructional Films (BIF)

Trivia:

As the production companies indicate, this is really a promotional film for the British Empire, a sort of semi-travelogue that is notable for marking the first time that filming was permitted inside Buckingham Palace.

Baffling

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Knowing nothing of "One Family" beyond the title and the fact that it was apparently the first picture to be filmed by permission within Buckingham Palace, I'd somehow got the impression that this was an early propaganda piece about the home lives of the Royal Family. As it turns out, it isn't anything of the sort. "One Family" is a rather bizarre quasi-educational documentary about the produce of the various dominions of the British Empire (and Irish Free State); on many levels it is also one of the worst-made moving pictures I've seen. What saves it from being an entirely excruciating experience is a general air of naive harmlessness: it may be badly acted, badly scripted, primitively recorded, jerkily shot and tedious in subject matter and style, but at least it isn't setting out deliberately to shock or to be funny and then dismally failing.

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about this film is that -- given, say, the Dr Seuss touch of "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T" -- it might even have been really good. Surreal moments, such as the London bobby's palace dress-uniform (complete with ermine traffic-cuffs) or the honour guard of Boy Scouts who appear, unacknowledged, for no particular reason at the bottom of a coal mine, are both funny and effective.

And some of its problems can be set down to technical factors; the preserved version contains jumps in continuity and on the soundtrack that appear to be the result of missing elements. The dialogue was evidently recorded afterwards and dubbed on -- the BFI holds the final reel of a silent version of the film, complete with intertitles (the removal of which might account for a disjointed feel in the middle of scenes).

The silent version also apparently contains a completely different -- and far more logical -- ending, in which the boy's dream concludes with his waking up back in the classroom. In the preserved sound version, the film appears to have forgotten about the framing dream-device altogether and taken off on an extra reel or so of unrelated footage illustrating the nursery rhyme "Tinker, Tailor": the sole link with the preceding story is the presence of the same actor as the policeman, and it is frankly tempting to wonder if somebody, at some point in the film's history, spliced two separate subjects together!

The main part of the film, however, is essentially a live-action version of a contemporary children's geography textbook, using the conceit of ingredients for the King's Christmas pudding to illustrate the principal products of the Empire, from English coal to Australian grapes. (It is never explained why the South African grapes from which the Royal brandy is earlier provided cannot also furnish the King's raisins...) The script talks down to its viewers, and the voice acting is at times dreadful, not aided by the choice to use a child in the leading role. But I'm not sure that even release as a silent could have salvaged such wooden acting as the boy's resistance to having his face washed, or his attempt to wake up the Irish children -- and just why on earth are they asleep?

On its initial release "One Family" rapidly disappeared into well-deserved oblivion. Resurrected today, it's hard to meet this amateurish, heavy-handed production with anything other than bewilderment, even making all due allowances for the technology and circumstances of the period.