The Hippodrome Silent Film Festival

Hippsters guest essay: Matthew Gray writing on Dawn (1928)

Image credit: Lisa Evans. Dr Lawrence Napper during his HippFest 2022 talk Wartime Propaganda and Peacetime Diplomacy: Edith Cavell on film.

As part of our Hippsters initiative, this year we partnered with the University of St Andrews to bring a group of students on the MA (Hons) English & Film Studies programme to HippFest. The visiting students attended a selection of screenings, took part in a masterclass with writer, critic, film historian and editor of Silent London Pamela Hutchinson, and then were challenged to write about their experience at the Festival.

Hippster participant Matthew Gray has written a detailed critical reflection on their experience at HippFest, focussing on Dr Lawrence Napper’s presentation ‘Wartime Propaganda and Peacetime Diplomacy’ and the feature film Dawn (1928). As Matthew notes, the Festival presented a print of Dawn loaned from CINEMATEK: Cinémathèque royale de Belgique.  Matthew was not able to attend our screening and so caught up by watching a different version on the BFI Player (the Belgian version is not available online). We’re delighted to present this as a guest essay below.

For those in the Twittersphere, you can find Matthew here. Enjoy!

Dawn at the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival

NOTE: This review contains spoilers for those not familiar with the story of Edith Cavell.


The story of Edith Cavell proved a popular subject for the silent screen. The British nurse, who aided the escape of an estimated 210 derelict Allied soldiers from German-occupied Belgium during the first year of The Great War, was the focus of no less than five films produced in the thirteen years immediately following her death. The most (in)famous of these was undoubtedly Herbert Wilcox’s Dawn (1928) which, as the title foreshadows, recreates Cavell’s execution by German rifles at sunrise. While these earlier iterations had been produced whilst the war was still ongoing, Wilcox’s feature was contentious for returning to the subject matter almost a decade after the Armistice, prompting heated debates both domestically in Britain and internationally.

The compelling history surrounding Cavell and Dawn’s controversy was recounted for audiences at this year’s Hippodrome Silent Film Festival. Dr Lawrence Napper, a lecturer in British and Silent Cinema at King’s College London, prefaced the Friday afternoon screening of Wilcox’s film with his lecture “Wartime Propaganda and Peacetime Diplomacy: Edith Cavell on Film.” Always accessible, engaging, and dynamic, Napper’s particular interest in British Instructional and New Era Films helped situate Dawn in a lineage of domestic cinema which recreated and remembered important episodes from the war to end all wars. Illustrating the currency of Cavell’s image and associated iconography in wartime Allied propaganda, Napper presented prints, postcards and other ephemera which raised Cavell to the level of the hagiographic and helped keep the memory of her “martyrdom” alive, providing fascinating insight into the propagandistic motivations for telling her story.

Fig 1: A British stamp from 1916 depicting a German soldier over the corpse of Edith Cavell with the instruction to: “REMEMBER”.1

The seismic influence of Cavell’s death was indeed astounding. Within five years of her death, the impressive 40-foot Edith Cavell Memorial had been erected in Trafalgar Square; a tribute to her astonishing legacy. It is hard to imagine a present-day figure who would inspire such a monument so soon after their death.

Perhaps even more fascinating was the controversy which surrounded the production and release of Dawn. Although the 1925 Locarno Treaties had marked a new chapter in European relations which hoped to put an end to war resentments, hindsight shows that these agreements were, in fact, precarious. Following soon in the wake of these settlements, Dawn’s announcement aroused anxieties that its distribution would reignite xenophobia across both Allied and Central Powers. As the London publication Close-Up recounts: ‘for a moment, a motion picture actually started a battle’.2

Napper sated the audience’s appetite for scandal with further anecdotes, including a notably incredulous all-night session held by the London Council to debate the film’s distribution; and the protest of Cavell’s accomplice (and one of the film’s stars) Anne Bodart, who returned her OBE to protest the government’s attempts at censorship.

Napper appealed to the audience of silent buffs with a mid-lecture screening of remaining footage from an earlier British production, Percy Moran’s Nurse and Martyr (1915). What the film lacks in footage it makes up for with a transfixing central performance by Cora Lee: an enigmatic figure whose career does not seem to extend far beyond this film, Lee plays Cavell with a possessed magnetism. Using the tremendous whites of her eyes to great effect, her spectral performance transcends any crude intertitles which otherwise identify the film as propaganda fodder (“Bah! She’s English! She must die!”).

The short screening was adeptly accompanied by pianist Mike Nolan who, in the brief runtime, demonstrated a wide palette which invoked the tender and the tragic, with some welcome modern inflections. As Napper acknowledged in the introductory lecture, two prints survive of Dawn: an Anglo-pleasing cut as held by the BFI, and a more Central-sympathetic edit housed by the Belgian Cinematek. The remainder of this review will focus on the more readily available British version, available to stream for free on BFI Player.

Dawn’s approach to Cavell’s life gestures towards impartiality with an initial forty-minutes dedicated not to her efforts as the figurehead of an underground organisation, but instead her time in Brussels during the earliest days of the war. A chance encounter with an escaped POW – the casting of a cherubic, sixteen-year-old Mickey Brantford underpinning their innocence – proves to be the inciting motivation for Cavell’s later operations.

A significant effort is made to show a greater side of Cavell’s character, making her death all the more impactful. We are introduced to the nurse as she hides a timid child from a bully in the paediatric ward of her nursing school. The childless Cavell is not a divine Madonna, but a warm, maternal figure, sneaking the young patients sugar cubes and later comforting the injured aviator with a kiss on the forehead.

We also witness Cavell’s ingenuity, as demonstrated by a particularly nifty contraption which enables her to send warning signals to harboured fugitives in the basement below via a pedal concealed under her seat at the breakfast table.

While it remains clear that Cavell is in charge, significant attention is also afforded to other strong women in the organisation. In one particularly memorable scene, four women discuss their action plan whilst sat knitting around a table. It is a powerful symbolic image, these matriarchs stitching as they somewhat mend the wrongs of war, which also draws attention to the busy, labour-intensive lives of these working women, making their efforts all the more valiant.

Understandably so, much discussion has revolved around Dawn’s controversial subject matter. Even at the time of its release, it appeared to be the film’s greatest selling point, with news of the scandal piquing audiences across the Atlantic. As noted in The Film Daily, Dawn set the then-record for the largest price paid for American distribution rights.3 Consequently, little discussion has been had about the aesthetic or diverting merits of the film, and one might even be forgiven for dismissing the work as a weak. Iris Barry, a contemporary critic for The Daily Mail, wrote: ‘there is evident here a desire not to entertain those who see it but to plead the cause of peace’.4

Even the excited Richard Watts Jr. in Close-Up conceded that despite ‘a theme still full of dynamite […] no one could say it was really important as a piece of cinema-making’.5 Yet, when actually watching the film today, one cannot help but feel that this verdict was unfairly adopted by critics who knew the surrounding discourse would intrigue cinema-goers regardless.

Wilcox’s announced in the mid-20s an ambition to produce ‘escape entertainment’, which the scholar Roy Armes marks as characteristic of the filmmaker’s long and highly successful career.6 In keeping with this mission, the overall effect of Dawn is not overt polemics (even in the guise of its British edit), but that of an entertaining thriller in its own right. Omnipresent soldiers conjure persistent threat as they linger in the background of shots and haunt the corners of the frame. Dimly lit exterior shots are proto-Noirish in their atmosphere, particularly as the young fugitive of the earlier scenes evades a meticulous search party. Wilcox also masterfully understands how to utilise depth-of-frame to arouse suspense, and fans of Marnie (1964) will no doubt observe similarities between Cavell silently tiptoeing in the background as soldiers threaten to spy her at any moment and the guilty Tippi Hedren miraculously avoiding capture in the earlier robbery sequence of Hitchcock’s thriller.

It is little wonder that set designer Clifford Pember was invited to be art director of Hitchcock’s dark romantic thriller Easy Virtue (1928) shortly after completing work on Dawn, while cinematographer Bernard Knowles would go on to work on such atmospheric pieces as The Hounds of the Baskervilles (1932), The 39 Steps (1935), Jamaica Inn (1939) and Gaslight (1940).

However, the headline of Dawn is ultimately the compelling central performance from Sybil Thorndike, hailed in the twenty-first century by BFI Curator Josephine Botting as ‘one of the greatest actors Britain has ever known’.7 Already internationally famous for her turn in Bernard Shaw’s bespoke stage vehicle, Saint Joan (1923), when she signed on to replace American actress Pauline Frederick in the role of Cavell, Thorndike was at the ‘unchallenged climax of her career’.8

In purely practical terms, Thorndike was already more convincing than both Frederick and Cora Lee in terms of her age and resemblance to her subject. However, her commanding performance dominates Dawn with both its expression and economy, earning the attention of international critics with recognition at the top of the list in Photoplay’s Best Performers of the Month.

It is little wonder that the titular character of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie cites Thorndike as ‘a woman of notable mien’: her strikingly angular face is at turns imposing, then tender, then stoic, while her rigid posture recalls the expressive performances of her contemporary Conrad Veidt in its impressive, stiff verticality.10 Indeed, for all its gestural communication, one might be accused of stating the obvious in praising Thorndike for delivering a powerfully silent performance. Rarely moving her lips, Thorndike presents Cavell as a virtuously prudent and modest woman, a modesty amplified by the bare interiors of her cell and means of execution.

Wilcox is careful to keep Cavell in her costume, always spotless and bright in contrast with the consistently darker clothes of those around her. The incandescence of her nurse’s cap seems to be consciously invoking the saint-like iconography which Napper highlighted, consistently glowing white like a halo. It is only removed for one sequence following Cavell’s arrest, before being triumphantly reinstated for her final martyrdom.

As mentioned earlier, the narrative takes intelligent pains not to present Cavell as morethan-human, and Thorndike injects the mythic figure with a surprisingly poignant vulnerability in sparse, well-judged moments. Although the script never affords time to explore Cavell’s past, Thorndike brings a lingering sense of weighty memories. One particularly bittersweet example occurs as Cavell awaits her Last Rites. “Life has always been hurried and full of difficulties”, the intertitles proclaim, and Thorndike’s glance into an invisible middle distance is profound and evocative.

Like Moran and Lee before them, Wilcox and Thorndike know how to make the most of the actress’s eyes. The austere final march to the firing range demonstrates this best, as Thorndike’s glazed, unflinching eyes gaze directly down the camera lens. Her stare is held in a single prolonged dolly shot, with the equidistant camera forcing the audience to confront a glare that will be burned into their minds long after viewing.

Despite her age of forty-five at the time of shooting, Thorndike showed little signs of slowing down following Dawn and continued to bounce from success to success, consistently returning to her beloved interpretation of the other martyr, Joan of Arc. Thorndike remained one of Britain’s most enduring performers, and likely would have achieved her ambition to be going strong at one-hundred if not for her death at the age of ninety-three.11 The historic grandeur of the century-plus-old Hippodrome proved a fitting tribute to an indomitable star of a bygone era.

Thanks to the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival for programming Dawn and for their tangible commitment to accessibility. It was wonderful not only to see Napper’s talk accompanied by a BSL-English interpreter, but also to have it simultaneously broadcast digitally to those who could not be there in-person.

References:

  1. n.a.,“1916 Edith Cavell Propaganda Stamp”, Wikimedia Commons, accessed 24 March 2022
  2. Richard Watts Jr., “As Is…”, Close-Up. Vol. III, No.2, August 1928, 14.
  3. n.a., “Record Price for U.S. Rights.” The Film Daily (New York), Vol. XLIII, No. 42, 19 Feb 1928, 2.
  4. Iris Barry quoted in Amy Sargeant, British Cinema: A Critical History, (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 72.
  5. Watts Jr., “As Is…”, 13.
  6. Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema, (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1978), 70.
  7. Josephine Botting, “Now and Then: Dame Sybil Thorndike (1967)”, BFI Screenonline, published 26 January 2000, accessed 24 March 2022
  8. Sheridan Morley, “Thorndike [married name Casson], Dame (Agnes) Sybil”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published 6 January 2011, accessed 24 March 2022
  9. n.a., “The Shadow Stage: A Review of the New Pictures” Photoplay, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, August1928, 57.
  10. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Modern Classics), (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 23.
  11. Botting, “Now and Then: Dame Sybil Thorndike (1967)”

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