Castleton Knight/ 1929/ UK/ 50 min
Castleton Knight’s 1929 locomotive thriller, The Flying Scotsman, is revisited as part of the GFF’s Out of the Past season, making a welcome return to the silver screen and features the real express passenger train on its journey from London to Edinburgh.
When Engine Driver Old Bob (Moore Marriott) begins his final day working on-board The Flying Scotsman, he’s unaware that his old foe, Crow (Alec Hurley), who Bob reported for drinking on duty, is on the train and out for revenge. But as the train leaves London, Bob discovers that his new fireman (Ray Milland) has been secretly seeing his daughter Joan (Pauline Johnson) and so begins a series of events that could stop the strain from arriving in Edinburgh on time, if at all.
Preceded by The Right Choice, a short promotional film for North British Locomotive Co, and featuring a young Milland in his first film role, The Flying Scotsman is well known for being one of the first British films to use sound, which is highlighted by the first half of the film being a traditional ‘silent film’ with musical accompaniment and speech captions, before unexpectedly launching into character dialogue much later in the film. While historians are divided on whether The Flying Scotsman or Hitchcock’s Blackmail were the first British made films to use sound, this film remains somewhat revolutionary because of the actor’s seemingly real, and very dangerous stunts, which included climbing along the side of a train moving at high speed, a feat that Johnson achieved whilst wearing high heels. Although understandably dated now, The Flying Scotsman is both an influential and a remarkable example of early British cinema that celebrates the golden age of locomotives while still managing to have a lasting impact on the audience.