''Diving Lucy'' is a 1903 British silent comedy film produced by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon.

Plot

A policeman is alerted to a pair of female legs protruding from the surface of a pond. He attempts to rescue the woman, but discovers that the legs are fake, with a sign saying "RATS" at the bottom. He then falls in the lake himself.

Production

''Diving Lucy'' was filmed at the boating lake in Queen's Park,

Blackburn Blackburn () is an industrial town and the administrative centre of the Blackburn with Darwen borough in Lancashire, England. The town is north of the West Pennine Moors on the southern edge of the River Ribble, Ribble Valley, east of Preston ...

Reception

The film was the most successful Mitchell & Kenyon film. A reviewer in '' The Talking Machine News'' described it as a "decided novelty", concluding "we do not remember seeing anything similar before". It was also released in America in February 1904, where the

Biograph Company The Biograph Company, also known as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, was a motion picture company founded in 1895 and active until 1916. It was the first company in the United States devoted entirely to Filmmaking, film production an ...

advertised it as "the biggest English comedy hit of the year". Alongside Bio-graph, the film was also distributed by the

Edison Manufacturing Company The Edison Manufacturing Company, originally registered as under the name of the United Edison Manufacturing Company and often known as simply the Edison Company, was organized by scientist / inventor and entrepreneur, Thomas A. Edison (1847–1 ...

Legacy

The popularity of ''Diving Lucy'' prompted director

Frank Mottershaw Frank Mottershaw (1850–1932) (often confused with his second son, Frank Storm Mottershaw) was an early English film, cinema director based in Sheffield, Yorkshire. His films, ''A Daring Daylight Burglary'' and ''The Robbery of the Mail Coach'' ...

to copy the film's premise in a 1907 production entitled ''Sold Again''. In this version, the policeman is not explicitly portrayed as the victim of a practical joke, and the film ends with him being hit by

snowball A snowball is a sphere, spherical object made from snow, usually created by scooping snow with the hands and pressing the snow together to compact it into a ball. Snowballs are often used in games such as snowball fights. A snowball may also be ...

s, rather than falling into the water himself. A copy of the film survives in the Cinema Museum in London, along with 64 other Mitchell & Kenyon fiction films. It is included as a bonus feature on the American version of the DVD collection ''Electric Edwardians: The Lost Films of Mitchell & Kenyon'', released in 2006 by

Milestone Films Milestone Film and Video is an independent film distribution company, founded in 1990 in the United States by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller. The company researches and distributes cinematographic material from around the world, including silent film, ...

References

;Bibliography * * *

External links

* 1903 films Silent British comedy short films Films directed by Mitchell & Kenyon 1903 comedy films British black-and-white films {{UK-silent-comedy-film-stub