The story of Maurice Elvey's THE LIFE OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE is amazing. Elvey considered it his best work but, at the point where he was about to send the camera materials and edited work print for duplication, it was siezed by the British Liberal party who felt it might taint war time Prime Minister Lloyd George in the coming election.
The film was believed lost till the nineties, when rusty cans discovered in the Lloyd George family attic were opened. Beautifully restored by the new Welsh film Archive, it had a world wide success, spawning a small Elvey retrospective at the Silent Film Festival at Pordenone in Italy.
Not only is the movie's appearance eighty years after its production and twenty years after the death of it's director, an amazing story but the work itself is exceptional, accepted as the best British film of it's day.
A mixture of newsreel like reconstruction - mill girls dance on the edge of the crowd as Lloyd George inspects a factory, helmet wearing bobbies hold back a rioting crowd in a frame masked to wide screen, debates with Randolph Churchill in the Chamber - and visionary tableaux - the spectre of past Prime ministers super-imposed on the entry into the office, an atrocity frozen as spike hat huns march in the background and we can forgive Elvey for the future as waves breaking viewed through a figure eight mask.
Performances, settings and the film's unfamiliar structure (compare the Thomas Ince CIVILIZATION) support the authoritative handling which still registers in the Twenty First Century. What impact would it have had at it's time of production?
