Squibs Wins the Calcutta Sweep

Not from the film: a Betty Balfour star postcard from the blog of Ivo Blom.

SQUIBS WINS THE CALCUTTA SWEEP (Welsh-Pearson, GB 1922)
    Dir: George Pearson; sc: Hugh E. Wright, George Pearson; ph: Emile Lauste; cast: Betty Balfour, Hugh E. Wright, Fred Groves, Annette Benson, Bertram Burleigh, Mary Brough, Hal Martin; trade show: 9.1922; 35 mm, 5231 ft, 77’ (18 fps), BFI / National Film and Television Archive.
    Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
    Grand piano: Stephen Horne.
    15 minutes from the beginning viewed at Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM) / Asquith e gli altri, 13 Oct 2020

Bryony Dixon (GCM): "The Squibs series of films made Betty Balfour’s career. She had been discovered by George Pearson in his previous film, Nothing Else Matters ­ even in the bit part of a maid, her personality leapt off the screen. An experienced director by this time, Pearson spotted her potential, and developed her persona via a series of films featuring her as a “gamine” Cockney flower-girl, Squibs, aspiring to marriage with her respectable policeman boyfriend (Fred Groves) but beset by a father (Hugh E. Wright) who is a bookie’s runner forever bordering on the wrong side of the law, and a sister (Annette Benson) whose husband, “The Weasel”, is an out-and-out crook."

"In this, the second of the four Squibs films, Squibs wins a sweepstake ticket for the Derby, an annual fixture in the English horse-racing world, and the occasion for a public holiday especially beloved by Cockneys (the event appears in almost all “Cockney” films). Winning a great amount of money should make her dreams come true, but, as always, wealth bring its own problems. The situation is played for laughs, as Squibs and her father exhibit their lack of taste in flaunting their new-found riches, but the film is not a comedy, and includes almost as much pathos as humour. Squibs always remains true to her family background, with tragic implications ­ as with Ivor Novello’s “Rat” character, social mobility comes at a price. The final scene, in a Parisian garret, is heart-rending."

"Pearson’s direction creates a composite real and fictional London which was popular with audiences and critics alike. A contemporary reviewer wrote that Pearson was said to have “found as much beauty in the flare of a street light, the ill-lit door of a garret, or the reflection of candlelight in a cracked window pane, as all the poets before have found in honeysuckle and a moon”." – Bryony Dixon (GCM)