Policeman Beaten

A woman beating out a carpet; a frisky policeman; a husband’s return… whatever will happen next?

This comic film by Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, a St Albans-born filmmaker later considered a pioneer of stop-motion animation, is very much in the music hall tradition. Contemporary audiences would have been very familiar with the figure of the policeman with the puffed-out chest, appreciating this film less for its narrative suspense than its ribald embrace of a popular trope. Many early films share a great deal with contemporary genre filmmaking, balancing the innovative with the familiar.