ABSTRACT
Among directors of the 1920s and 1930s Victor Saville holds an important place. These years represent only the first half of his career. Like other British directors, Saville is surprisingly neglected in the textbooks, yet he produced or directed more than fifty major films, twenty-nine of them in England. Saville came from Birmingham where he was born in 1897. In 1916, after serving in the war and being wounded at the Battle of Loos, he entered the film industry in the distributing branch. Saville turned out an extraordinary assortment of films—musicals, histories, dramas, farces, nearly always as director, sometimes as producer. In 1940 Victor Saville went to America and his films there do not concern us except to note that he produced some characteristic Hollywood cinema with Hollywood stars. The Queen Victoria film did so well that Wilcox followed it in 1938 with Sixty Glorious Years, a kind of Victoria the Greater, again with Anna Neagle.
