Friday 10 March
Trade show of Three Live Ghosts at the New Gallery.
This comedy about three soldiers wrongly designated dead and returning to London, set on the day of the Armistice, was the best-received of the British FP-L films. ‘The outstanding figure is Claire Greet [sic] as Mrs. Gubbins’, wrote the Kinematograph Weekly’s reviewer. ‘She achieves an almost perfect piece of characterisation, and gets over every time, scoring something in the nature of a personal triumph.’ It was given a release date of 16 March 1923. Most of the British FP-L films, in common with most British films of the 1920s, are lost, but Three Live Ghosts survives in a version that was shown in the USSR, much changed from the original but showing off the film’s extensive location work, including in Limehouse, where Hitchcock spent part of his youth.