Diving Lucy is a 1903 British silent comedy film produced by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon.
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.
Diving Lucy was filmed at the boating lake in Queen's Park, Blackburn. [1]
The film was the most successful Mitchell & Kenyon film. [2] A reviewer in The Talking Machine News described it as a "decided novelty", concluding "we do not remember seeing anything similar before". [3] It was also released in America in February 1904, where the Biograph Company advertised it as "the biggest English comedy hit of the year". [4] Alongside Bio-graph, the film was also distributed by the Edison Manufacturing Company. [5]
The popularity of Diving Lucy prompted director Frank Mottershaw to copy the film's premise in a 1907 production entitled Sold Again. [6] 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 snowballs, rather than falling into the water himself. [7]
A copy of the film survives in the Cinema Museum in London, along with 64 other Mitchell & Kenyon fiction films. [8] 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. [9]
Diving Lucy is a 1903 British silent comedy film produced by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon.
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.
Diving Lucy was filmed at the boating lake in Queen's Park, Blackburn. [1]
The film was the most successful Mitchell & Kenyon film. [2] A reviewer in The Talking Machine News described it as a "decided novelty", concluding "we do not remember seeing anything similar before". [3] It was also released in America in February 1904, where the Biograph Company advertised it as "the biggest English comedy hit of the year". [4] Alongside Bio-graph, the film was also distributed by the Edison Manufacturing Company. [5]
The popularity of Diving Lucy prompted director Frank Mottershaw to copy the film's premise in a 1907 production entitled Sold Again. [6] 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 snowballs, rather than falling into the water himself. [7]
A copy of the film survives in the Cinema Museum in London, along with 64 other Mitchell & Kenyon fiction films. [8] 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. [9]