The Magic Box

Robert Donat - William Friese-Greene
Margaret Johnston - Edith Friese-Greene
Maria Schell - Helena Friese-Greene
Renée Asherson - Miss Tagg
Richard Attenborough - Jack Carter
Robert Beatty - Lord Beaverbrook
Edward Chapman - Father in Family Group
Ronald Culver - 1st Company Promoter
Michael Denison - Reporter
Marjorie Fielding - Viscountess
Leo Genn - MaidaVale Doctor
Marius Goring - House Agent
Joyce Grenfell - Mrs. Claire
William Hartnell - Recruiting Sergeant
Joan Hickson - Mrs. Stukely
Thora Hird - Doctor's Housekeeper
Stanley Holloway - Broker's Man
Michael Hordern - Official Receiver
Jack Hulbert - 1st Holborn Policeman
Sid James - Sergeant in Storeroom
Glynis Johns - May Jones
Mervyn Johns - Goitz
Miles Malleson - Orchestra Conductor
Garry Marsh - 2nd Company Promoter
Muir Mathieson - Sir Arthur Sullivan
A.E. Matthews - Old Gentleman, Bond St. Studio
Laurence Olivier - Police Constable 94-B
Cecil Parker - Forst Platform Man
Eric Portman - Arthur Collings
Dennis Price - Harold
Michael Redgrave - Mr. Lege
Margaret Rutherford - Lady Pond
Sheila Sim - Nursemaid
Basil Sydney - William Fox-Talbot
Ernest Thesiger - Man
Sybil Thorndike - Sitter in Bath Studio
David Tomlinson - Assistant in Laboratory
Peter Ustinov - Industry Man
Kay Walsh - Hotel Receptionist
Googie Withers - Sitter in Bath Studio
Bernard Miles - Cousin Alfred

The Magic Box is now remembered largely as the Festival of Britain film: the British film industry's principal contribution to the national celebrations that ran throughout the summer of 1951. The film was the Boultings' representation of British cinema pioneer William Friese-Greene (1855-1921). However, although seemingly innocuous in its worthy intent and strait-laced presentation, the film, like the broader Festival, attracted notable controversy, with national rivalries flaring up around what was felt to be the production's bogus claim for inventor Friese-Greene.

Eric Ambler's script was a faithful treatment of the biography, and adapts the major incidents of Friese-Greene's life largely as recounted by Ray Allister. Ambler's principal contribution was to rearrange the story order, and he introduced two major flashback sequences whose orientation has considerable influence on the overall impression given of the 'inventor's attributes, motives and achievements. Typical of the genre, the film commences late in the story, in 1921, with Friese-Greene (Robert Donat) advanced in life and undertaking, a visit to his second wife Edith, from whom he has separated. The first flashback is narrated by Edith, and covers the period of Friese-Greene's second marriage. It commences in 1897 with the celebrations of the Golden Jubilee at the Crystal Palace. A young man, Jack Carter (Richard Attenborough), is treating two young ladies, Edith (Margaret Johnston) and May (Glynis Johns), to the spectacle, and escorts them into an early film show where they enjoy a French Cinematographe programme of Lumiere films - including the apocryphal reaction of the audience which ducks for cover in the presence of an approaching train.

The sentiment is underscored in the preceding scene when Jack invites the two women to see the laboratory where he works alongside the "inventor" of moving pictures, William Friese-Greene. They are surprised to find the inventor still at work, in this case perfecting X-rays, and the scene reproduces the cliché of the scientist as a dedicated obsessive outside of society. The overall trajectory of this first flashback sequence is that of disillusionment, and Friese-Greene's obsession now focuses on colour cinematography, and the filmmakers delineate his labours of invention through a conventional montage sequence.

The second and final flashback belongs to William Friese-Greene, and is initiated by Lord Beaverbrook (Robert Beatty), who, chairing a British film industry conference, urges the representatives to "forget the past", on which the film segues to the circumstances of Friese-Greene as a young man. The budding inventor is shown to be naive, and a young Swiss lady, Helena (Maria Schell), who later becomes his first wife, eventually draws him out. Friese-Greene's tremendous enthusiasm for representing movement is made apparent in a simple scene with Helena when she shows him a flick book she has doodled in an idle moment.

His early experimentation is conducted with a fellow gentleman, John Rudge (Cecil Trouncer), who introduces him to the independently wealthy Fox-Talbot (Basil Sydney) who resides on a country estate. At this first meeting with the "great man", Friese-Greene talks excitedly of his ideas for moving pictures, and John Boulting shoots the animated young inventor through a roaring log fire, indicative of his burning inspiration and passion. Importantly, Fox Talbot presents a treatise on innovators and original thinkers - such men will seem strange and a little foolish to conventional society, and failure is unimportant as long as the individual remains true to himself.

The contrast is provided by Arthur Collings, a business partner in Friese-Greene's London studio, and endowed with the broadest Yorkshire brogue that Eric Portman could muster. The stereotypical bluff northern industrialist is motivated by the lure of profits. The ideals of the two partners are proved to be irreconcilable when the photography business begins to lose money through Friese-Greene's absorption in his experiments. Constantly pressured by Collings to attend to his studio work, the inventor angrily explodes into a diatribe against businessmen and the narrow self-interest of commercial activity: The outburst dissolves the partnership, and Friese-Greene withdraws from his professional role as a society photographer to concentrate on his experiments with moving pictures. And so begins the inventor's descent into social disgrace, family breakup and poverty.

The narrative, however, has to reveal the moment of apparent triumph: the basis on which Friese-Greene's claim to fame will rest. The actual demonstration of the moving picture apparatus is preceded by an intense period of experimentation classically presented in montage fashion. In a more conventional manner than the earlier example, the sequence culminates in the eventual and dramatic moment of discovery. Friese-Greene's demonstration of motion pictures to a passing policeman (Laurence Olivier) is, quite understandably, the most well known scene in the film. John Boulting invested it with a tremendous dramatic tension; most apparent in the transformation of the policeman's weariness towards the overexcited gentleman who has interrupted his late-night beat into a dumbstruck wonderment at the revelation of moving images of Hyde Park upon a white cloth sheet.

The legitimacy of the claims for Friese-Greene became a central issue in the criticism of the film. British reviewers were generally favourable towards the film, and treated it in a respectful manner as befitting a national prestige production on the occasion of the Festival of Britain.