ABSTRACT
George Pearson, formerly a schoolmaster, entered the film industry in 1913 at an unpropitious moment when ‘British films’, he declared, ‘had reached a final twilight of surrender to their foreign competitors’. In 1914 he left Pathe to join G. B. (Bertie) Samuelson, a bright young man in his twenties who was soon to make his mark in the production field. ‘Samuelson’s hey-day’, says Harold Dunham, who has made a study of the period, ‘was probably just after the First World War. Like Samuelson’s, it was an extraordinary end to the career of a man who had such a record of success, who was one of the great figures of the silent film, and was a founder of the London Film Society. In the meantime the burden of production is carried on, among others, by Maurice Elvey, whose career of forty-four years takes from the silent era into sound.
