It makes sense that movies should be like laws and sausages – it’s better not to see how they’re made. If the green screen doesn’t ruin the magic of the CGI, the box the leading man stands on for the love scenes might undermine the romance. And yet film-makers don’t seem to be able to resist showing us what goes on, on-set. In 1928, with his very first film, British director Anthony Asquith turned his already familiar knowledge of the film industry into a sharp-edged satire of the movie business. Shooting Stars (1928, directed by Asquith along with AV Bramble) is a takedown of the film world as cheap and unoriginal, with overprivileged stars whose misbehaviour makes a mockery of their fans’ devotion. Even the obsequious journalist from Flicker magazine, ushered into the studio to write puff pieces about the cast, can’t hide her disappointment, saying: “This slapstick stuff looks ridiculous in the making.”

Shooting Stars, which has been newly restored by the BFI and screens as the Archive Gala at this year’s London film festival, is all about the cavernous gap between what appears on screen and what goes on in the studio. It’s a great film: witty at first, always gorgeous and nailbitingly tense towards the end. One reason that it makes such compelling viewing is the opportunity it gives us to see what a film set really looked like in the silent era. The first shot of the film tracks back from a cloyingly composed romantic scene to reveal the workings of the studio around the loving couple. As the scene progresses, an elegant crane shot takes in the full chaos of the stages, where several films are being shot back-to-back.

This is undeniably interesting for its own sake. The chalkboards waved at the camera before each take precede the clapperboards we would recognise as a film-set essential – before the arrival of synch sound, there was no need for the clack. The comedians work out their next moves on the fly, unburdened by a dialogue script. And although this is a silent film, you can tell it is a noisy set. There is a live band for each film, directors use megaphones and bystanders come and go around the stages, raising their voices or making eyes at the performers.

That stunning crane shot also reveals the disparity between Shooting Stars itself and the genre movies being shot at the fictional Zenith studios. The films we see being made are classic genre quickies: a western and a Mack Sennett-style knockabout comedy. These films were popular in Britain but were almost exclusively made in America – either Zenith is a confused film studio, or Asquith is having a pop at the kind of films that were shot over the pond. A founder member of the London Film Society and a devotee of art cinema, Asquith intended to be a European art film-maker rather than ape the work of Hollywood studios. Shooting Stars is not filmed à la Mack Sennett – more like Marcel l’Herbier or FW Murnau. When Asquith uses his box of tricks to shoot his actors on set at the Zenith studio, the result is a thrilling mashup of cinematic styles. At one crucial moment a very Soviet-style montage sequence is inserted into the cowboy flick, and most successfully of all, in the film’s climactic scene, Shooting Stars brilliantly invents a terrifying new genre you could call expressionist slapstick. A coda to the film reveals that perhaps, after all, one of our leading characters had higher aspirations – and directorial ambitions of their own – all along.

Anthony Asquith filming A Cottage on Dartmoor, 1929 Photograph: Popperfoto

As in Asquith’s two other silent features (Underground and A Cottage on Dartmoor), the leading characters of Shooting Stars form a love triangle. Julian Gordon (Brian Aherne) and Mae Feather (Annette Benson) play a hunky cowboy and his cooing damsel in distress on screen and are married in “real life”. Just out of shot, Gordon’s western hero rides a wooden hobby horse, the winsome Feather is really a tetchy narcissist, and their marriage is threatened by her feelings for another man. Her secret beau is a rival star, but not a leading man type like her hubby – he’s Andy Wilks (Donald Calthrop), a sub-sub-Chaplin slapstick clown, who performs his act in a chequered jacket and a sprouting, bushy moustache. Off-set, Wilks is a debonair sort, and his affair with Feather is shown to be rather steamy, with post-coital cigarettes and a shared key to her marital home. When their romance is revealed, casting Feather’s new Hollywood contract and its morality clause in doubt, she embarks on a plan that will turn the name of the film into a murderous double entendre.

One of the funniest characters in the film, far funnier than Wilks’s kicks and pratfalls, is Asphodel Smythe (Ella Daincourt), the aforementioned journalist from Flicker magazine. But as she dutifully transcribes Mae Feather’s platitudes (“adores all furry and feathery things …”) in a dressing-room interview, it’s unclear at first what the target of the joke is: Smythe, her magazine, the fans who lap up these lines, or Feather, who spouts them so unconvincingly. The answer is all of them, of course. By and large, while Shooting Stars reveals the entertainment business to be a sham, it revels in the artistry of the cinema, and explores the potential of the form as much as it denigrates the business. Shooting Stars thrives on the gaps between art and reality, between art and commerce, and Asquith shows this up with a story that is founded on, and resolves itself, via a deceit.

There’s a pretty gruesome postscript to Shooting Stars, involving one of its leading players, Donald Calthrop – a true example of a studio tragedy. In 1930, in an incident that the papers called the “Film Studio Horror”, a young dancer burned to death in Calthrop’s dressing room. She was Nita Foy (real name Annie Foy Tipping), a member of a West End troupe that was making an appearance in Spanish Eyes, the musical that Calthrop was shooting at Twickenham Film Studios. Strictly against studio rules, Calthrop invited Foy to his room for a brandy and soda. It was very late at night and the shoot was still going on, so Foy was in her costume, an elaborate crinoline dress. When Calthrop remarked that her eyes were pale with powder, she asked if she could borrow his “wet black” or mascara. As Foy reached for the tin on a high shelf, her skirt caught alight on Calthrop’s unguarded electric fire. “I turned round to see Miss Tipping a sheet of flame,” said Calthrop. He stayed with her until the ambulance came, but she was in terrible pain and died later in hospital. The subsequent inquiry cleared Calthrop of all blame in the death, but according to his friends and family, he was never the same again. His marriage imploded along with his finances and he began to drink heavily, running foul of the law and losing his once-promising career.

The intense publicity surrounding the affair, and its lasting effect on Calthrop, show up two things: first, that many of us cinema punters are desperate to know more about what goes on behind the facade, and second, that while show business may be a decadent sham, it’s dangerous. Even a star can have his heart and his spirit broken.

With that in mind, here are three more silent films about film-making, ranging from the merry to the magnificent.

Behind the Screen (Charlie Chaplin, 1916)

This was not the only film Charlie Chaplin made about the movies, nor the only one in which he played a props man, but it is the most joyously balletic. Chaplin is the hapless assistant to Eric Campbell’s looming but lazy property manager. Edna Purviance is his love interest, an aspiring actress who sneaks on to the set dressed as a man, posing as a stagehand. Here the slapstick intrudes on the serious drama, rather than vice versa, with pies flung in the faces of actors in period costume. It all ends with a kiss, but not before Chaplin has poked a little fun at his old days with Mack Sennett at the Keystone studio.

Show People (King Vidor, 1928)

This featherlight comedy skates a little close to the edge at times. Marion Davies, the superlative comedy actor unfortunately now best known as the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, plays Peggy Pepper or “Patricia Pepoire”, a young girl up from the sticks trying to make her name in Hollywood. While Hearst pushed Davies into serious roles rather than comedy, which was her natural element, here she plays an actor who despises slapstick and aspires to the highest drama. Davies is excellent and this is a genuinely exuberant movie, enlivened by cameos from Hollywood royalty, including Chaplin himself, whom Pepper fails to recognise but the audience surely wouldn’t miss.

The Last Command (Josef von Sternberg, 1928)

This is another masterpiece, but with a very different tone. The plot hinges on coincidences, but the devastating lead performance and Sternberg’s cinematography create an unforgettable film. Emil Jannings plays Sergius Alexander, a Russian army commander in exile who washes up in Hollywood looking for work as an extra. Inevitably, and in revenge for his past crimes on the battlefield, he is cast as a Russian general – by a former Bolshevik who is now a movie director. The process of re-enacting his own experiences in front of studio lights and in a shoddy imitation of his once-beloved uniform proves too much for him. His final breakdown, and the director’s last line, make for an emotionally draining climax.

The restored version of Shooting Stars screens as part of the London film festival on 16 October, at the Odeon Leicester Square, with a newly commissioned live score by John Altman.



