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The Age of Commercialism

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This is an anti-war film as so many were of this particular period. England lost a generation of young men in WWI, and in the end nothing seemed to be really accomplished and thus their films reflected the attitudes of the times. The year is 1950 and the world has been divided into large continental and in some cases multi-continental federations. Problems begin during a card game gone bad between guards of the United States of Europe and the Empire States of the Atlantic along the border. The dispute enlarges as prohibition has apparently continued in the land controlled by the United States and a couple smuggling liquor is killed at the same border where the guards are fighting when they are discovered and try to make a run for it. The guards then begin to shoot each other.Munitions companies take advantage of the unrest and perform acts of sabotage, blaming it on the other federation. Meanwhile, in London, the Federation of Peace - I guess this is a take on the failed League of Nations - tries to stop war. At the center of this is pacifist Dr. Seymour and his daughter Evelyn (Benita Hume), who is also a pacifist and in love with Michael Deane, a commander of European forces. The President of Europe orders a mobilization, which includes the women. However, apparently women are not drafted into combat but manufacturing of armaments.Evelyn limits her efforts first at trying to convince Michael, and when that fails, she then mobilizes the women against cooperating with the war effort. Her dad, however, is more ambitious, when the president refuses to not declare war, Evelyn's pacifist dad shoots him! Dr. Seymour goes on trial for "high treason" - and the dead president doesn't help matters. Seymour refuses to speak in his own defense with the sun casting a shadow of a cross near Dr. Seymour in the courtroom. Excuse me, but if the film is trying to equate Seymour with Christ, let me remind folks that as far as I know, Jesus never killed anybody when he didn't get his way. I'll let you watch and see how this all turns out.It is always fun to see how folks from the distant past picture the world of the more recent past. They usually get things so wrong. They get television right, but they get the fact that prohibition has lasted 17 years longer than it did wrong, and they certainly get wrong that you could ever hold together a federation made of Europe, India, the Middle East, Canada, Africa and Australia. There would be any number of civil wars among these peoples alone. These futuristic people have machines that dress them and machines that play musical instruments for them in the night clubs, but nobody ever thought of simulating the musical instruments themselves? I'd give this one a try if it ever comes your way. The assumptions about the future, the naiveté, the camp symbolism, and most of all those marvelous miniature models of flying machines are worth your time even if the whole thing is a hoot.

The landmark British sci fi film made in 1936 by Korda had many prophecies about a world war which would commence in 1940.This film,made in 1929 was forecasting a war between Europe and the USA based,somewhat oddly on a border incident.Itforecast war in 1950 and mass destruction by bombers.so I wonder if either H.G.Wells or Korda saw this film and were influenced by it.The sets and the costumes are very stylish and also very art deco.In reality in 1950 it would be austerity.This film was made on the cusp of sound.The version I saw was silent so I wonder if a sound version exists.The fact that there are a lot of explanatory sub titles indicates that it was probably filmed as a talkie with silent copies issued to cinemas who had not installed sound equipment.In any event by 1930 the silent film was to all intents and purposes dead.This is therefore a real curiosity.

I have not seen HIGH TREASON - it has not been shown on American television in recent years if ever. Therefore I will not review the film's acting or directing. I will though talk about the background a little bit.Are any of the readers of these reviews fans of 1) British Aviation History; or 2) British Fascist leaders of the Great War period? Probably (unless you are in these two groups) you will not have heard of Mr. Noel Pemberton-Billing. Who he? Who he indeed. An early fan of aviation, he was the publisher of the first aviation magazine in Great Britain, and an early pusher for British military aviation. He was also a racist and a hater of foreigners (mostly Germans and Jews), and a hater of...what he would term "sexual deviants". Yet, he was an above-average man in intelligence when he put his inventive skills to work in aviation and other fields. He was also deeply into politics.During the Great War Pemberton-Billing was a persistent critic of the ineptitude of the British war effort from 1914-1918. In particular it burned him that the Germans managed to have the advantage in the skies over Western Europe, and even (via their zeppelin campaigns) over England. He got elected to Parliament, and became even more outspoken in his contempt for the government (to be fair, many of his specific critiques on military preparedness and aviation development were on target - but his other bugaboos kept getting in the way). In 1918 he was one of several right wingers who got upset due to a production that reached the West End. Oscar Wilde had been ruined in 1895 in his two trials. Wilde died in obscurity in Paris in 1900. But his drama, "Salome" was going to be produced on the West End in 1918. The star was the international dancing sensation Maude Allan. Pemberton-Billing and other right wingers (including Wilde's old boyfriend, now anti-Gay activist Lord Alfred Douglas) saw this production of "Salome" as part of the German plot to undermine the morale of England and that huge numbers of upper crust aristocrats and politicians and writers and social figures were all gay or lesbians who were being blackmailed by the Germans into losing the war. Pemberton-Billing wrote articles attacking Ms Allan. These resulted in one of the weirdest libel actions in history, as Ms Allan was forced to sue Pemberton-Billing and his friends for slandering her. She did, but the public was treated to a farce of a trial, with the defendants accusing everyone under the sun of being perverted. In the end Ms Allan was humiliated in court (her brother had been hanged for murder in San Francisco in 1898, and this was brought out) and the jury found for the defendants!This was the highpoint of Fascist politics in Britain in that period - but Prime Minister Lloyd George accumulated information against Pemberton-Billing and his friends which was slowly disseminated to the public (that Pemberton-Billing, the hater of foreigners, had a foreign born mistress was one of these). In the end he was defeated for reelection.But he remained a constant critic, and being wealthy had ways of getting his views across. HIGH TREASON was his pet project in the 1920s. Originally a somewhat successful stage play, he turned it into this movie. It's most novel elements today are his views of 1950 aviation - some of which are quite interesting (and again show him at his most useful - as a creative engineer and inventor). But his plot had to do with stopping the machinations of international (read Jewish) arm manufacturers who were trying to begin a new World War. His saintly peace advocate ends up committing a great act of violence seen by the whole country that lands that advocate on trial for "HIGH TREASON". The issue is whether such actions really are treasonable if they are meant to save lives. Having just done a review of SEVEN DAYS TO NOON, the actions of Professor Willingdon there mirror what the protagonist is forced to do here. However the authors of that screenplay did not blacken the character of whole races in the course to telling their story or making their point. Pemberton-Billing never cared if he trod on toes - he felt he should say what he felt.To be fair again, in that period similar theories abounded all over. In the U.S. Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota became famous in the 1930s with his "Merchants of Death" committee investigation, blaming banks and munition manufacturers for pulling the U.S. into World War I. And (as mentioned in an earlier review) when the original novel by Graham Greene for THIS GUN FOR HIRE was written, the real villain was not Raven the killer for hire, but the Jewish munitions manufacturer Sir Marcus (who wants another European War for profit reasons). HIGH TREASON was not a great film success - the public did not know what to make of it. Pemberton-Billing did not make any further films, but did resume his aviation work, and actually was useful in preparing England in facing the Nazis in World War II.

Ther actor Basil Gill was famous in his time for his fine voice. He was an accomplished stage actor before starting work in the early cinema. There were numerous press reviews of his performances that commented on his voice, and those that accompanied the release of this film, the talking version, in 1928, were no exception. "Basil Gill as President Stephen Deane has far and away the best recording voice we have heard, a lesson to everyone in clearness and beautiful quality." What a shame that the sound is no longer audible. However, his voice can still be heard in such films as "Knight without Armour", "Rembrandt", "St Martin's Lane" and "Wings of the Morning".