Walter R. Booth's Motorist Comedies

Much like Georges Méliès, the conjurer-turned-filmmaker from across the Chanel, Walter R. Booth began his cinema career on the theatrical stage performing magic tricks. While employed at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, he made the acquaintance of early English film pioneer Robert W. Paul. Booth began working for Paul after 1896, employed to come up with fanciful screen effects. The culmination of their partnership came in 1906 with The '?' Motorist.

This short film humorously exploits the ongoing controversies over the use of the horseless carriage. Automobiles only entered mass production around the turn of the century, to mixed reviews. Western painter Charlie Russell nicknamed them "skunkwagons" and rendered numerous portraits of innocent cowboys and wagon trains being driven off the road by them. George Foss of Quebec drove around a vehicle of his own design, despite threats of arrest. Benz, Ford, Renault, Olds, and others were making names for themselves. Their pace of technological innovation was so fast that a year-old car was practically useless (if it hadn't broken down already). Ford's Model T would enter production in 1908, the same year as an historic New York to Paris auto race via San Francisco, Yokohama, Irkutsk, and Moscow. Sir William Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, endorsed the idea of allowing pedestrians to carry a shotgun and be given free reign to take potshots at "all motorists who may appear to them to be driving to the common danger," citing automobiles as "the enemies of mankind."

In this The '?' Motorist, Booth plays directly into that, by allowing his motorist to create havoc on Earth and beyond.

A few years later, Booth revisited the same basic premise with The Automatic Motorist. A common thread in trick photography of the time was to treat science as a form of magic. What might once have been a haunted house comedy became a mechanical house comedy. What might have once been a sorcerer making himself objectionable became a mad scientist. In The Automatic Motorist, the automobile goes on a haywire journey through space thanks to a mechanical chauffeur. Several gags from The '?' Motorist are reused, with the increased skill that the intervening five years between 1906 and 1911 could provide. 

Walter R. Booth's "Airship" Trilogy

By 1909, Scientific Romances were well established in film. The "Romance" part often overshadowed the "Scientific" part, however. Georges Méliès, one of the most innovative minds in movies in the first decade of the 20th century, was most interested fantasies with a Vernian gloss rather than a straight attempt at serious speculative storytelling. In many cases, science was merely a just-so explanation for phenomena that would otherwise be attributed to magic or ghosts. For example, The Electric Hotel (1905) by Segundo de Chomón is an otherwise typical haunted house trick film, only this time it's electric conveniences gone awry.

Walter R. Booth was a magician turned trick filmmaker, like Georges Méliès in many respects. with the same preoccupations. 1901's The Magic Sword, for instance, is a straightforward fantasy story. An Over-Incubated Baby from the same year is more of a trick film with a mad science premise. But come 1909, Booth was interested in a much different project. Rather than a humourous trick film, The Airship Destroyer is a remarkably serious and prescient attempt at Scientific Romances in the vein of H.G. Wells' War in the Air, published the preceding year.        

This film is a remarkably prophetic one-reel opening chapter to a trio of conceptually similar films that includes The Aerial Submarine and The Aerial Anarchists. In it, a thinly-veiled Germany descends on the British coast with a fleet of invincible dirigibles which can only be brought down by the genius of an inventor and his guided aerial torpedo. More authentically like Verne and Wells, Booth's prognostications were based on solid projections of existing technology, as both Zeppelin's and the Wright Brothers' crafts had debuted and entered into commuter and military service by 1909. A scant few years thereafter, Europe would descend into violent mechanized warfare and The Airship Destroyer would become horrifying reality. It was even re-released in 1915 to boost morale. 

Extract from The Airship Destroyer.

A year later, Booth released The Aerial Submarine, in which a pair of children are kidnapped by high-tech pirates inspired loosely by Jules Verne's Robur. From beneath the waves they strike out at passing cruise ships, looting their cargoes. When the submarines of the Royal Navy catch their scent, the pirates take to the air and drop shells on their hapless pursuers. It is only when a careless engineer causes disaster that the world has a hope of salvation from the aero-pirates. It is much less serious than The Airship Destroyer, returning to the cinematic genre's more fanciful trends.

Extract from The Aerial Submarine.

Unfortunately, the third film in the series, The Aerial Anarchists (1911), is a lost film. No footage is known to exist, and all that is known is a vague synopsis that mentions a bombing of St. Paul's Cathedral and the destruction of a railway over a chasm.

Both The Airship Destroyer and The Aerial Submarine can be viewed from British ISPs on the BFI Player website.