Two Minutes Silence is a 1933 Australian melodrama set during World War I based on Les Haylen's anti-war play.
[4] On Armistice Day, some years after World War I has ended, four people gather in General Gresham's London drawing room.
The general's butler, James (Leonard Stephens), recollects living as a beggar on the Thames embankment after the war and seeing the suicide of an ex-soldier.
It was logistically difficult because of the difficulty sourcing sound recording equipment and two of the cast, Leo Franklyn and Frank Leighton, had to juggle shooting with their theatre commitments for J. C. Williamson Ltd.
[15] Initial critical reception was generally positive,[16] The Canberra Times praising it as "a welcome... in the subjects adopted by Australian film producers.
[18] The critic from The Sydney Morning Herald was less enthusiastic than his earlier colleagues, calling it: A production in which the skill of the acting far exceeds the value of the dramatic material on which it has been bestowed... even when allowance is made for the cramped studio conditions under which the film has been prepared... Apart from the scenes from war-time newsreels which have been interpolated, there are only five or six settings; and these are of the most limited nature.
The weakness of Mr. Haylen's play is that it revives all that is dreary and horrible in wartime memories without developing any significant leading idea... Mrs. Gabriel... represents a cockney charwoman with a realism and a persistent sympathy which almost triumphs over the emptiness of the dramatic situation... Mr. Franklyn... has succeeded in toning down his exuberant stage methods into the greater restraint demanded by the camera.
Mr Campbell Copelin and Miss Marie Lorraine both show the same weakness – a colourless, monotonous method of delivering their lines.
And to make a really successful film much more action and movement is required to break up the rather lengthy conversational passages between characters grouped in the same small scene.