If I asked you to think of a crime-and-chase film, you would probably think of Steve McQueen barrelling down a San Francisco highway, or John Wayne rounding up bandits on the American frontier. But what if I told you the origin of such helter-skelter storytelling lies closer to home, far from the glitz and glamour of Tinsel Town? What if I told you a film so influential in the development of world cinema – one that helped bring police pursuits, revenge and action-packed drama to our screens – was made in Sheffield? Well, A Daring Daylight Burglary survives as an enthralling testament to this fact.
Making movies: 1903 style
Celebrating its 121st anniversary this July, Sheffield’s own four-minute thrill ride – filled to the brim with cops, robbers and hard-fought justice – might seem elementary to an audience accustomed to Jason Bourne or Dirty Harry. But in 1903, A Daring Daylight Burglary helped turn the cogs of cinema history, influencing the transition of films from one, maybe two, shot ‘actualities’ – short motion pictures filmed from a fixed angle showing life as it happened, such as Louis Lumière’s Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory – into imaginary, open-world narratives flowing from one scene to the next with logical connection.
Of course, fiction films did exist at the time: Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune took amazed cinema goers to the moon and back, a full 66 years before Neil Armstrong would do it for real. However, the few fiction pictures that were produced were mainly theatrically disposed, shot in the tableau style and seen, as Lewis Jacobs put it in The Rise of American Film, through the eyes of the “gentlemen in the orchestra”. It’s little wonder films often accompanied Vaudeville performances shown in a bill of supporting acts, or were exhibited by travelling showmen as a spectacle of wonderment.
But what these showmen demonstrated, like those of the Sheffield Photo Company, was a pioneering enthusiasm to extend the world of cinema from the stage to greater expanses – to further explore the commercial and creative possibilities of this new exciting medium and follow it into more daring territory.
The road to a most daring burglary
Founded in 1882 by Frank Mottershaw, the Sheffield Photo Company began life as a still photography business when film had yet to take form. It was only after the success of the business’s touring exhibitions, around the turn of the century – when the family would travel around the country with projection equipment screening short films of topical events – that the Mottershaws would form a sideline in motion pictures.
However, there was a hitch: the Mottershaws were photographers, not filmmakers. How would they succeed in this strange, burgeoning industry?
Mottershaw’s eldest son, Frank Storm, led the charge by mastering his craft, uprooting to London and spending a year with the great artisans of the day, such as fellow pioneer, RW Paul. Following his return to Sheffield, Storm headed the company’s filmmaking concerns, converting the new Hanover Street premises for all their cinematographic needs: rooms for developing film, an open-air stage, the works.
In total, Storm would make 42 pictures for the company, before it abandoned production in 1908. But it was the young director’s first and most famous fiction film that would leave an enduring influence on the world: a four-minute heart-stopper caught the heat of a daylight burglary, shot at break-neck pace over half a dozen scenes.
The premise is simple: a burglar climbs over a wall and enters through a window; a boy watches the burglar and alerts a police station; two police officers chase the burglar over the wall and onto the roof; the burglar throws one officer to his serious injury, possibly death; an ambulance fetches the injured man, while two officers pursue the burglar across a river; finally, the burglar attempts to catch a country train before being apprehended by the police at the next station. So what’s the big deal?
Sheffield makes a movie
Shot over the course of three days, A Daring Daylight Burglary was a marvel of scale that traversed an entire city in under four minutes. While this is not the first picture to be filmed outdoors – even stage-based tableau films often used the open air – it takes advantage of Sheffield’s vast geography to provide an exhilarating chase littered with rocks, rivers and obstacles galore. From a drama standpoint, the stakes are raised – the danger has never been higher!
But what is especially impressive here is these locations are widely dispersed across the city but the editing, in itself a rare tool at the time, juxtaposes these sequences so seamlessly that all of this action-packed excitement takes place in a coherent world of its own. By filling in the links between these individual locations, audiences were witnessing the development of a new form of cinematic vocabulary, quite unlike anything the world had seen before.
The drama we see in this film is not too far removed from the hot-footed action we are used to seeing on screen today. And it’s little wonder why: A Daring Daylight Burglary – with its consecutive scenes unfolding a tale of crime, vengeance and, inevitably, justice – influenced the model for filmic storytelling that has been expanded on countless times over a dozen decades. But it’s the film’s galloping pace that holds these themes together, achieving a constant, flowing urgency from one scene to the next.
Take the police station scene, for instance: Mottershaw sets his camera up with an intelligent depth-of-field so that our hero sprints towards us and exits right, before climbing over the wall and away from the camera. It’s a compression of time and injection of pace that brings action to the forefront of our attention, leaving mere seconds between the police officer’s alert and his grappling with a dangerous criminal. Real drama can take days to unfold, but this pioneering film proved it could be done in a matter of minutes.
Copycats and enduring influences
A Daring Daylight Burglary would prove its high value on the market, as well as in its creativity. The Mottershaws approached a significant British distributor, the Charles Urban Trading Company, selling the picture for a sum that was double the cost of its considerable £25 budget. This positioned the company as one of the leading producers in the country at the time. Despite over 500 copies being sold worldwide, the picture was plagued with piracy with film labs illegally ‘duping’ the original beyond control.
However, this piracy would only increase the picture’s influence and cement its place in history. One Edwin S Porter, an emerging American talent, viewed this little Yorkshire production and saw cinema crafting a longer, more ambitious take on Mottershaw’s model to produce one of the most famous silents of all time, A Great Train Robbery. And from there, well, the rest is history.
All things must pass: the Sheffield Photo Company dissolved in 1982; silent cinema dissipated into colour and sound. But when the cameras begin to roll, A Daring Daylight Burglary lives on.
