Sight&Sound - 11.2019

18 | Sight&Sound | November 2019

By Bryony Dixon

When you are restoring a silent film, you have to

watch scenes over and over and assess the speed

at which the film was shot, so you tend to notice

things like the rate at which people move. Betty

Balfour, star of this year’s BFI archive restoration, is

a firefly; a Tinkerbell. She moves faster than other

actors and uses this restless physicality to underpin

the youthful, bubbly characters she is called upon

to play. Those rapid body movements suggest a

dancer’s training and are slightly reminiscent, to

me anyway, of Chaplin and Mary Pickford, with

whom she is sometimes compared. Her facial

expressions, by contrast, are paced precisely to

be read and understood with complete clarity –

happy, sad, mischievous, furious, compassionate

• a one-woman emoji generator and, of course,
  a film director’s dream. With a bright open face,
  big eyes and blonde curls she is a perfect package,
  thoroughly English, utterly modern. She was
  consistently voted favourite female British film star
  in press polls in the 1920s; the public adored her.
  So did the early film pioneer George Pearson, who
  became obsessed with her, proposing multiple
  times and directing her in her signature role of
  cockney flower girl Squibs. He spotted her in her
  first small stage roles and saw to it that she got a
  part in Nothing Else Matters (1920); she’s not on
  screen for long, but she practically burns a hole in
  the celluloid with her wide-eyed gamine stare.

Only a fragment of that performance

remains and many of her subsequent films

are also sadly incomplete, including Love, Life

and Laughter (1923). Long one of the BFI’s most

sought-after lost films, a print was finally found

in the Netherlands in 2014. Dutch cinema-

goers, big fans of Balfour’s character Squibs,

couldn’t quite let her go of her and retained

the character name for the film, rather than

the ‘Tip-Toes’ used in the English version. Love,

Life and Laughter was intended by Pearson

to be edgier than the Squibs series and has a

complicated story-within-a-story structure

for the audience to puzzle out, but after four

outings for the delightful Squibs, the film

followed in much the same vein. Betty plays

a happy-go-lucky working-class chorus girl,

who charms everyone she meets and is in love

with a serious young writer of tragic prose that

no one wants to publish. He lives in the garret

above hers in a slum tenement ruled over by

a sharp-tongued landlady and the hen-pecked

landlord, a balloon seller who is also a bit of a

homespun philosopher: “The ’opes of young

people is like the air in balloons. The more ’ope,

the ’igher you goes. Too much ’ope – bust!”

In one of Pearson’s favourite scenes, as he

explained in a television interview decades

later, a balloon escapes to float up the tall

staircase of the tenement building – an

obvious metaphor for her spirit of optimism

and happiness drifting up to brighten the

writer’s sad existence and a warning to her not

to rise too high. The balloon metaphor was

used extensively in the publicity provided to

exhibitors to promote the film. A sketch of

Tip-Toes in the press book sums up the themes

of the film well, showing her stretched as if

on the surface of a balloon, with ludicrously

long cartoon legs, striding comically across

her home-made music hall stage, practising

for stardom with homemade bunting and

candles in bottles acting as footlights.

From the glimpses we get of her

performances – a kind of Vesta Tilley or Lily

Morris who can entertain equally the nobs

in the stalls and the humbler folk up in the

gods – Tip-Toes is destined for success as a great

music hall star. The writer, meanwhile, unable

to sell his great novel, descends into the hell

of the dosshouse. Much of the more sombre

trajectory of the writer is missing from the

film, so it is difficult to judge its quality, and

we only get fragmentary scenes showing Tip-

Toes earning her success. The missing material

from the Dutch nitrate print discovered by

the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam adds

up to a little over 20 minutes, and has been

filleted in segments from throughout the film

rather than taken as a single reel. It’s difficult

to account for the multiple cuts, although

scenes like the big dance numbers (there

must have been one with Betty) may have

been excised as stock footage or souvenirs,

or may have been damaged in projection.

Happily, there is just enough remaining to get

an idea of the flow of the narrative, including a

few truly captivating scenes, such as Tip-Toes

entertaining her boarding-house chums in a

round-the-piano sing-song with a sprightly

rendition of ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’. This

replaced ‘Oh! My Sweet Hortense’ (1921)

from the English version (you can lip-read

them singing it, as Antoinette Fawcett, who

translated the titles has pointed out). ‘Yes,

We Have No Bananas!’ was the hit of 1923

when the film came out, so presumably the

film’s distributor in the Netherlands thought

it would boost box-office receipts. With

Betty Balfour as star it hardly needed it.

The mesmerising allure of Betty

Balfour in Love, Life and Laughter,

lost for almost a century, can now be

enjoyed in a sparkling restoration

Taking the stage: Betty Balfour in George Pearson’s Love, Life and Laughter

Love, Life and Laughter (1923)

Betty Balfour is a firefly; a

Tinkerbell. She uses her restless

physicality to underpin the

bubbly characters she plays

THOROUGHLY MODERN BETTY

WIDE ANGLE PRIMAL SCREEN

ILLUSTRATION BY MICK BROWNFIELD WWW.MICKBROWNFIELD.COM

A RT

PRODUCTION

CLIENT

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REPRO OP

VERSION Wide Angle, 3