Jewelled Nights

Jewelled Nights is a 1925 Australian silent film directed by the film star Louise Lovely in collaboration with her husband Wilton Welch. Only part of the film survives today.

Jewelled Nights
Directed byLouise Lovely
Wilton Welch
Written byLouise Lovely
Wilton Welch
Based onnovel by Marie Bjelke-Petersen
Produced byWilton Welch
StarringLouise Lovely
Gordon Collingridge
Godfrey Cass
CinematographyWalter Sully
Tasman Higgins
Edited byLouise Lovely
Wilton Welch
Production
company
Louise Lovely Productions
Distributed byHellmrich and Conrad
Release date
  • 24 October 1925 (1925-10-24) (Melbourne)
Running time
10,000 feet
CountryAustralia
LanguagesSilent film
English intertitles
Budget£8,016[1]
Box office£5,000[1]

Synopsis

After her father's death, socialite Elaine Fleetwood promises to marry a man she does not love. However, she leaves him at the altar during a wedding ceremony, cuts her hair and decides to disguise herself as a boy and go prospecting in northwest Tasmania. She meets a handsome miner who figures out she is a woman, saves her from a villain and marries her.

Cast
  • Louise Lovely as Elaine Fleetwood
  • Gordon Collingridge as Larry Salarno
  • Godfrey Cass as Tiger Sam
  • Arthur Styan as Crank Ned
  • Grafton Williams as Red Roof
  • John Dobbie as Tiny Tim
  • Charles Brown as Gus
  • Harry Halley as wowser
  • Leslie Woods as Robert Milton
  • Robert Morgan as Sir John Fleetwood
  • Clifford Miller as Richard Fleetwood
  • George Bryant as Dr Mason
  • Reg Leslie as Frank Reid
  • Frank Dunn as Dr Hughes
  • Katrina Barry as Lady Fleetwood
  • Lucille de Rago as Netta
  • Joy Law as Nora Foster
  • Jean Foulis as Yvette

Production

The film was made by Lovely after her return from Hollywood in 1924. She and her husband helped set up a company, Louise Lovely Productions, worth £30,000. Among her backers were several businessmen who worked with Arthur Shirley's Pyramid Pictures.[2]

They constructed an elaborate £3,000 studio containing several large sets, and shot on location at Flemington Racecourse and in Tasmania. This caused to budget to spiral. The sets were used to film a storm in the Tasmanian rain forest.[3][4][5]

Reception

Jewelled Nights premiered in Tasmania at The Strand, which was attended by Marie Bjelke Petersen, who wrote the original novel, and future-Prime Minister Joseph Lyons (then-Premier of Tasmania), who commended her writing achievements for promoting Tasmania abroad.[6] The film was well attended at first, being seen by an estimated 350,000 people in Melbourne and 9,000 in Hobart.[7] However it was unable to recover its costs. Lovely partly attributed this to the amount of money taken by distributors and exhibitors – she claimed that in one week in Melbourne the film took £1,565 out of which the producers received £382.[8]

Lovely subsequently retired from filming and divorced Welch.[3][9]

Reconstruction

Only two minutes of the film were thought to have survived, along with stills taken during shooting. However using photographic reconstruction, newly found footage, animation and a copy of the original novel annotated by Lovely, archivists have manage to reconstruct 20 minutes of the film. This plays daily at the Gaiety Theatre in Zeehan (part of the West Coast Heritage Centre), near where the movie was shot.[10][11]

References
  1. "£100,000 SPENT." Advocate (Burnie, Tas) 5 Jan 1928: 6 accessed 6 December 2011
  2. "Advertising". The Advocate. Burnie, Tas.: National Library of Australia. 31 March 1925. p. 2. Retrieved 24 March 2012.
  3. Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998, 129.
  4. "Jewelled Nights". The Advocate. Burnie, Tas.: National Library of Australia. 5 March 1925. p. 2. Retrieved 29 September 2013.
  5. "Cinema Notes". The Mercury. Hobart, Tas.: National Library of Australia. 24 July 1925. p. 3. Retrieved 29 September 2013.
  6. "Jewelled Nights Premiere at The Strand". The Mercury. Hobart. 5 January 1926. p. 4. Retrieved 14 May 2022 – via Trove.
  7. "FILM PRODUCTION". The Advocate. Burnie, Tas.: National Library of Australia. 29 January 1926. p. 2. Retrieved 30 January 2012.
  8. "AUSTRALIAN FILMS". The Argus. Melbourne: National Library of Australia. 11 June 1927. p. 17. Retrieved 30 January 2012.
  9. 'Louise Lovely', Department of Premier and Cabinet, Tasmanian Government Archived 25 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  10. Selina Bryan, 'Silent movie finds new voice', ABC News 30 January 2012
  11. Browyn Purvis, Gaiety theatre grand gala', ABC Northern Tasmania, 19 April 2011
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