George Clark (producer)
Together they founded Lucky Cat Films and later George Clark Productions, securing a distribution arrangement with the larger Stoll Pictures.
[2] Clark joined the Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA), operating anti-aircraft guns as part of Britain's air defences against bombing raids by German aircraft and Zeppelin airships.
[3] It was during his service in the RGA, on military duty at a defence station at Dover, that Clark met Guy Newall, who was also serving as an anti-aircraft gunner, beginning an association which led to the foundation of a film company after the war.
As Clark described the meeting: "In solemn conclave assembled we carefully considered ways and means, and soon a definite plan of campaign was mapped out".
[4][6] In July 1919 it was reported that Lucky Cat Films aimed to produce "good comedies" for the screen, "without extravagance in scenery or situation... with an English background".
[7] Lucky Cat Films completed four comedies in quick succession, released from June to September 1919, working from cramped studios in Ebury Street in Central London.
[10][11] George Clark Productions completed a series of films from December 1919 to mid-year 1923, in the process of which Newall extended his skills and experience as a writer and director.
All but a couple of the films produced by George Clark Productions in the period up until July 1923 featured Guy Newall and Ivy Duke in lead acting roles.
[9] In about January 1921, while the studios were under construction, Newall took the film-making personnel to Nice, on the French Riviera, where he directed The Bigamist and The Persistent Lovers over a seven month period, films for which he also wrote the screenplays and acted in the leading male roles.
[4][14] After returning from France Newall took his actors and production company to the New Forest and Salisbury Plain to film Boy Woodburn and Fox Farm (released in May and July 1922).
The most successful of the company's films was The Bigamist, released in August 1921, which was one of only a few English productions at that time to enjoy a run at an established London theatre (the Alhambra).
He based himself at the offices of Stoll Film Corporation at 130 West Forty-sixth Street, intending to "look over the American field with a view to becoming better acquainted with conditions and to start a campaign for his two stars, Ivy Duke and Guy Newall".
His films ("a series of stylish fantasies, laced with wry humour") depicted "his outsider heroes" as they confronted realities of post-war Britain such as a corrupted and declining aristocracy and changing class and gender relations.
[4][21] In December 1920, on the occasion of the release of Squandered Lives (the film Duke's Son, featuring Newall and Ivy Duke in the lead roles, renamed for the American market), an article in Moving Picture World observed: "The partisans of Mr. Newall with large justification insist he is one of the screen's most natural actors as well as one of its most skillful character delineators".
[22] Although Newall's more nuanced and serious performances in the George Clark Productions films of the early 1920s differed considerably from the earlier Lucky Cat comedies, reviews in the British press and audiences "responded positively to this new direction", even to the extent of him being named at that time as "Britain's finest actor".
[23] In a November 1922 review of A Maid of the Silver Sea the writer for an American film-trade magazine was critical of the film's plot, stating that "the story value is, in our opinion, a very negligible quantity".
The reviewer categorised George Clark Productions' general approach to film-making as privileging the novelty of location over the value of the story, adding: "The more the George Clark productions change, the more they appear to remain the same thing – an attractive enought thing in its way, but apt to become a trifle wearisome when it is merely a matter of transferring Guy Newall and Ivy Duke to fresh woods and pastures new and then giving us the mixture as before".
