Trooper Campbell

Trooper Campbell
Directed byRaymond Longford
Written byRaymond Longford
Based onpoem by Henry Lawson
StarringLottie Lyell
CinematographyHiggins brothers
Edited byHiggins brothers
Production
company
Higgins-Longford Company[1]
Release date
  • 1914 (1914)
Running time
one reel (12 minutes)
CountryAustralia
LanguagesSilent film
English intertitles

Trooper Campbell is a 1914 film from director Raymond Longford based on a poem by Henry Lawson.[2][3]

The movie is one of Longford's more obscure works. There is some reference to it being made but none of it being released in cinemas.[4]

The movie consisted of visual images to accompany an in-person recital of the poem.[5]

It was considered a lost film[6] but was discovered in the 1980s. Film writers Graham Shirley and Brian Adams stated that the film:

Shows an advance on The Romantic Story of Margaret Catchpole, not so much in performance, which is still haunted by melodrama, as in the use of depth of field and positioning within the frame... [It] appears to have been hurriedly made (it was never listed among Longford's major achievements) and displays nowhere near the polish of Alfred Rolfe's The Hero of the Dardanelles, completed halfway through the next year.[7]

References

  1. ^ "Raymond Longford", Cinema Papers, January 1974 p. 51
  2. ^ "Poverty Point", The Bulletin, 49 (2547), 5 December 1928, nla.obj-601877135, retrieved 6 January 2024 – via Trove
  3. ^ "Story of g Lost Industry Australia Once Made Films", The Bulletin, 79 (4096), 13 August 1958, nla.obj-702805906, retrieved 6 January 2024 – via Trove
  4. ^ Trooper Campbell at AustLit
  5. ^ Trooper Campbell (1914) (extensively revised and rewritten from a lecture delivered originally at the Australian Centre for theMoving Image on February 3, 2003.)William D. Rout
  6. ^ Eric Reade, History and heartburn: the saga of Australian film, 1896–1978, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1979 p. 13
  7. ^ Graham Shirley and Brian Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, Currency Press 1989 pp. 35–36