Hindle Wakes

Estelle Brody - Fanny Hawthorne
John Stuart - Allan Jeffcoate
Norman McKinnell - Nathaniel Jeffcoate
Humberston Wright - Chris Hawthorne
Gladys Jennings - Beatrice Farrar
Irene Rooke - Mrs. Jeffcoate
Arthur Chesney - Sir Timothy Farrar

Hindle Wakes (1927) was based on the 1912 stage play by Stanley Houghton, a tale of class intrigue at a Lancashire mill town. The director Maurice Elvey, shot the film on location in Lancashire and Blackpool, and his style is fluid and airy, free from the shackles that accompanied early talkies.

Controversial in its day, the plot offers standard melodrama with a proto-feminist twist. During the town's annual Wakes Week holiday, the working-class Fanny (Estelle Brody) darts off on an illicit vacation with the mill-owner's playboy son, Allan (John Stuart). Cue burlesque eye-rolling from her scandalised mother and a rash of inter-titles. The wedding is all arranged. The trouble is that Fanny - a liberated woman before her time - won't play ball.
Review© Xan Brooks.