Clown and Police (1900)

A Victorian vaudeville routine is given the big screen treatment with camera tricks galore.Three characters straight off the vaudeville stage - the mischievous tramp, the anarchic clown and the hapless bobby - duke it out here in a sketch involving an exploding gunpowder barrel. Plenty of camera tricks help the characters appear and disappear at just the right moments. Made by Hepworth & Co., this film was presumably a welcome relief to audiences tiring of bad news from the Boer War; Hepworth’s own catalogue for 1900 contained a great deal of footage from South Africa.