The Child Stealers

''The Child Stealers '' also known as The Kidnapped Child or Child Stealing is a 1904 British silent crime film about kidnapping, directed by William Barker and produced by the Warwick Trading Company.Review and link to watch the film:

Plot

As a mother enters a store, she leaves her child outside in a perambulator. Another woman standing nearby quickly snatches the child out of the carriage. Soon afterwards, another mother is playing with two children in the park, and when she leaves one of them unattended, her child is also seized by the same woman. These are only two of a number of children that an unscrupulous couple has captured for their own purposes.The Child Stealers (1904) :

Production and distribution

This is the first film directed by William Barker, who was then working for the Warwick Trading Company. The film has been distributed in the United Kingdom by the same company. It has been distributed in the United States by the Edison Manufacturing Company and by the American Mutoscope and Biograph CompanyJohn Mercer, ''Kemp R. Niver and the History of Cinema'', Journal of the University Film Association, University of Illinois Press on behalf of the University Film & Video Association, 1971, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1971), pp. 71-73. who has registered it for copyright on June 9, 1904.

Analysis

The film is composed of 6 scenes, all of them including only one shot with the exception of the last one which includes two shots showing the continuation of the action from two different angles. Five shots were filmed on location, while the other two were filmed on constructed sets. The five first shots are wide shots filmed with a static camera, but the movements of the actors sometimes lead to full or medium shots. In the last shot, the camera pans to follow the actors running towards it.

# A street with a shop front. A lady enters from the right pushing a pram. She leaves the pram in front of the shop and while she is inside another woman, dressed as a gipsy steals the child.
# A bench in a park. A lady plays with two children. As she leaves the youngest one sitting on the bench unattended, the same woman steals him.
# A staircase in front of a house with the same woman sitting on the steps. Two women enter with a young boy. As they start arguing, they pay no attention to the boy who is lured away by the same woman.
# The inside of a slum with a man and several children. The woman enter with the little boy and undresses him.
# The inside of a second-hand shop. The woman comes to sell the child's clothes.
# The two gypsies are standing up with the barefooted boy in a street, the woman holding a sign where the word "Blind" is written. Passers-by give them alms until a woman recognises the little boys and the gypsies try to escape.
# Wider shot of the same street from a different angle. The two criminals are arrested by a policeman assisted by passers-by.

''Child stealers'' has been identified as having made popular in America films about kidnapping, other noticeable example of this new genre being in 1905 ''Rescued by Rover'' and in 1908 the first film directed by D.W. Griffith, ''The Adventures of Dollie''.Charles Musser, ''Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company'', The UCLA Film and Television Archives: Studies in History, Criticism, and Theory, 1991, p. 314. It has also been mentioned as one of the first films where a scene was filmed from two different angles.Ben Brewster, ''A Bunch of Violets'', in ''A Companion to Early Cinema'', edited by André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac and Santiago Hidalgo, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2012, p. 251. and as an example of the "preponderance of sordid reality" present in early British drama films.

References

External links

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Child Stealers (1904)''
a
A Cinema History

{{DEFAULTSORT:Child Stealers, The
1904 films
British crime films
British silent short films
British black-and-white films
Films about kidnapping in the United Kingdom
1904 short films
1900s crime films