Diving Lucy

1903 British silent comedy film

Diving Lucy

Production
company

Mitchell & Kenyon

Release date

* 1903 (1903)

Country| United Kingdom
Language| Silent

Diving Lucy is a 1903 British silent comedy film produced by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon.

## Plot

[edit]

A policeman is alerted to a pair of female legs protruding from the surface of a pond. He attempts to rescue the woman, but discovers that the legs are fake, with a sign saying "RATS" at the bottom. He then falls in the lake himself.

## Production

[edit]

Diving Lucy was filmed at the boating lake in Queen's Park, Blackburn.[1]

## Reception

[edit]

The film was the most successful Mitchell & Kenyon film.[2] A reviewer in The Talking Machine News described it as a "decided novelty", concluding "we do not remember seeing anything similar before".[3] It was also released in America in February 1904, where the Biograph Company advertised it as "the biggest English comedy hit of the year".[4] Alongside Bio-graph, the film was also distributed by the Edison Manufacturing Company.[5]

## Legacy

[edit]

The popularity of Diving Lucy prompted director Frank Mottershaw to copy the film's premise in a 1907 production entitled Sold Again.[6] In this version, the policeman is not explicitly portrayed as the victim of a practical joke, and the film ends with him being hit by snowballs, rather than falling into the water himself.[7]

A copy of the film survives in the Cinema Museum in London, along with 64 other Mitchell & Kenyon fiction films.[8] It is included as a bonus feature on the American version of the DVD collection Electric Edwardians: The Lost Films of Mitchell & Kenyon, released in 2006 by Milestone Films.[9]

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Whalley & Worden 1998, p. 48.
2. ^ Toulmin 2006, p. 46.
3. ^ Whalley & Worden 1998, p. 40.
4. ^ Toulmin, Popple & Russell 2004, p. 10.
5. ^ Whalley & Worden 1998, p. 41.
6. ^ Toulmin 2006, p. 47.
7. ^ Toulmin 2006, p. 50.
8. ^ Toulmin, Vanessa (2005). "Mitchell & Kenyon". In Richard Abel (ed.). Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Taylor & Francis. p. 438\. ISBN 978-0-415-23440-5.
9. ^ "Electric Edwardians: The Lost Films of Mitchell & Kenyon (1900-1906) Review". SilentEra.com. Retrieved 8 January 2014.

Bibliography

* Toulmin, Vanessa (2006), Electric Edwardians: the story of the Mitchell & Kenyon collection, British Film Institute, ISBN 978-1-84457-145-1
* Toulmin, Vanessa; Popple, Simon; Russell, Patrick (2004), The lost world of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on film, British Film Institute, ISBN 978-1-84457-047-8
* Whalley, Robin; Worden, Peter (1998), "Forgotten Firm: A Short Chronological Account of Mitchell and Kenyon, Cinematographers", Film History, 10 (1): 35–51, JSTOR 3815400

## External links

[edit]

* Diving Lucy at IMDb

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