Tag: Hale’s Tours

Hitchcock on Style

Source: Extract from ‘Hitchcock on Style: An Interview with Alfred Hitchcock’, Cinema, vol. 5 issue 1 (August & September 1963), p. 8

Text: H: You know the young film director always says, oh, let’s do a scene where the audience is the camera. That’s the prime cliché of all clichés. Bob Montgomery did one called Lady in the Lake. It’s quite unnecessary. You might just as well do a close-up of who it is. You know, it’s a trick and there’s nothing to it. You’d much better have a close-up and then what they see. Move with them — do anything you like — make them go through any experience — anything.

I: But Chabrol and Truffaut have in a sense imitated this style of yours, or learned from it.

H: Yes, they have. But after all, the greatest example of that which has been traditional, I think, in movies is the experience of a person on a roller coaster. You know when they brought that out with Cinerama, people said “Oh, my God, isn’t Cinerama wonderful? Nothing, of course, nothing like it at all!” That old roller coaster angle has been shot ever since silent films — way, way, back. I remember when they made a film years ago called A Ride on a Runaway Train and they put the camera up front and looked the world in the face. I can go back as far as 1912, maybe earlier, maybe 1910, when they used to have a thing in London called “Hale’s Tours.” And the audience paid their money and they went into a long car, like a pullman car, with rows of seats and a screen at the end. So you sat there, and all they did, they back-projected a film taken on the front of a train in Switzerland. Going through the Alps and so forth, and you sat there, and you were taken for a ride on a train. This is the same thing. This is purely subjective treatment.

Comments: Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was a British film director. He was brought up in London and was a regular cinemagoer from an early age, including experiencing Hale’s Tours of the World, an entertainment in which films were projected from the front of a mocked-up train carriage. There was a Hale’s Tours in London’s Oxford Street, as well as other locations. It opened in May 1906 and was still being exhibited in 1909-1910. A Ride on a Runaway Train was made in 1921 by American travelogue producer Lyman Howe.

Links: Copy at The Hitchcock Wiki

Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918

Source: Extract from interview with Florence Kate Johnson, Thompson, P. and Lummis, T., Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918, 1870-1973 [computer file]. 7th Edition. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], May 2009. SN: 2000, http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-2000-1

Text: Q: Did you go to any cinemas?

A: There weren’t any. No. There was a thing called the Bioscope but I didn’t go to it, but I did go to Kensington and – you – sat in a coach – and thought you were tearing around, and seeing the scenery. I don’t know what – what it was. Paid about fourpence I think. That was before cinema anyway. The first cinema I think I went to was when – a King died. Now when was that? Oh I can’t remember when the cinema came, perhaps it was a bit earlier than I thought. Might have been. But of course we didn’t go much anyway.

Comments: Florence Kate Johnson was born in Battersea in 1892. The entertainment she half-remembers was Hale’s Tours of the World, in which motion pictures taken from the front of a train were projected inside a mock railway carriage which rocked to and fro as the audience inside viewed the films. The first Hale’s Tours in the UK opened in London’s Oxford Street in May 1906 and there was a Hale’s Tours located in Kensington High Street. The king dying was Edward VII, who died in 1910. She was one of 444 people interviewed by Paul Thompson and his team as part of a study of the Edwardian era which resulted in Thompson’s book The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975).

Hale’s Tours of the World

Source: untitled, The Rinking World & Picture Theatre News, 25 December 1909, p. 14

Text: ‘Hale’s Tours of the World,’ in Oxford Street, hard by Messrs. Gilbey & Co.’s Pantheon, are at once the oldest-established and the most educative of all London’s picture shows. Nothing approaching them has in our day been designed or so effectively carried out. Time was when Hamilton’s Diarama’s were all the rage; these have no worthily supplanted them. Seated in a veritable Pullman car, which appears to be travelling on the ever-present metals through mountainous scenery, over bridges, across vast prairie lands, or Eastern deserts, as the case may be, the illusion is perfect. Not the slightest suspicion of cinematograph lantern rays have the quasi-travellers, for the reason that the views are thrown on the screen from a great distance behind … The conductor of the Pullman Car, who snips the tickets, lectures pleasantly all the time, though in the darkness he remains unseen. Moreover, throughout the imaginary journey, the travellers are treated to pervading sounds as well as sights. The shrill whistle of locomotive and steamboat, the fearsome syren [sic] of an ocean greyhound, the roar of falling waters or tossing sea waves, the pattering of rain, the rolling of thunder, and the shouts of people add a keen zest to the excursion. From a chat with Mr S.B. French, the Secretary, we learned that his company have a contract with the New South Wales Government for the regular supply of films, and also that their operating representatives enjoy a free run on the great American railroads, and on certain British railway systems.

Comments: Hale’s Tours of the World was an entertainment which placed the audience in a replica of a railway carriage, with a film taken from the front of a moving train projected onto a screen at the front of the carriage. The carriage rocked to and fro, there were sound effects, and the conductor served a lecturer to explain the films and the experience. It was invented by the American George Consider Hale and the first Hale’s Tours in Britain opened in London’s Oxford Street in May 1906. It was arguably the first cinema in London (the Daily Bioscope near Liverpool Street station opened the same month), hence the reference to it being the ‘oldest-established’ of London’s picture shows.

Hale’s Tours of the World

Source: untitled, The Rinking World & Picture Theatre News, 25 December 1909, p. 14

Text: ‘Hale’s Tours of the World,’ in Oxford Street, hard by Messrs. Gilbey & Co.’s Pantheon, are at once the oldest-established and the most educative of all London’s picture shows. Nothing approaching them has in our day been designed or so effectively carried out. Time was when Hamilton’s Diarama’s were all the rage; these have no worthily supplanted them. Seated in a veritable Pullman car, which appears to be travelling on the ever-present metals through mountainous scenery, over bridges, across vast prairie lands, or Eastern deserts, as the case may be, the illusion is perfect. Not the slightest suspicion of cinematograph lantern rays have the quasi-travellers, for the reason that the views are thrown on the screen from a great distance behind … The conductor of the Pullman Car, who snips the tickets, lectures pleasantly all the time, though in the darkness he remains unseen. Moreover, throughout the imaginary journey, the travellers are treated to pervading sounds as well as sights. The shrill whistle of locomotive and steamboat, the fearsome syren [sic] of an ocean greyhound, the roar of falling waters or tossing sea waves, the pattering of rain, the rolling of thunder, and the shouts of people add a keen zest to the excursion. From a chat with Mr S.B. French, the Secretary, we learned that his company have a contract with the New South Wales Government for the regular supply of films, and also that their operating representatives enjoy a free run on the great American railroads, and on certain British railway systems.

Comments: Hale’s Tours of the World was an entertainment which placed the audience in a replica of a railway carriage, with a film taken from the front of a moving train projected onto a screen at the front of the carriage. The carriage rocked to and fro, there were sound effects, and the conductor served a lecturer to explain the films and the experience. It was invented by the American George Consider Hale and the first Hale’s Tours in Britain opened in London’s Oxford Street in May 1906. It was arguably the first cinema in London (the Daily Bioscope near Liverpool Street station opened the same month), hence the reference to it being the ‘oldest-established’ of London’s picture shows.