High Treason

Year: 1929

Production: Gaumont

Director: Maurice Elvey

Starring: Benita Hume, Jameson Thomas, Basil Gill, James Carew

Screenwriter: L'Estrange Fawcett

Based on a play by Noel Pemberton-Billing

95 minutes, cut to 69 minues; B/W


This forgotten curiosity, one of the earliest UK sound movies, was quite a big film in its day, when it was seen as a kind of English Metropolis (1926) - a comparison that does not for an instant hold water. Set in the world of 1940 (a Channel tunnel, tv, aeroplanes landing on London skyscrapers), it envisages a tense political situation between United Europe, to which England belongs, and a United America. The Peace League saves the world from war by assassinating the leader of United Europe. The production design is singularly unstriking and the story absurb.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

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