Finally Picture Perfect: Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema before 1930 has arrived. It's been a long time since the first drafts were submitted, due to a problem with the publisher, but it's here at last, thanks so much to Laraine and Bryony. The front cover has a lovely picture of Alma Taylor in Comin' thro' the Rye (1923). My article '"The Plucky Girl" and the "Pigeon to Pluck"' is on past entertainment in London and how that was presented in a film by W.G. Barker Rogues of London (1915).
Here are some pictures of entertainments from ye olde London town, taken from Barker's film
- the Turkish Baths where the villain Ralph Munt (played by the wonderful Fred Paul) finds his pigeon to pluck
- the Rat Pit, one of the immoral sports through which Ralph attempts to lure our hero Dick into London's underworld
