Rob Roy: Britain’s First Feature Film
What was the potential for the development of a Scottish film industry? Current histories largely ignore the contribution of Scotland to British film production, focusing on a few amateur attempts at narrative film-making. In this chapter, Caroline Merz offers a richer and more complex view of Scotland’s incursion into film production,. Using a case-study approach, it details a production history of Rob Roy, produced by a Scottish company, United Films, in 1911, indicating the experience on which it drew, placing it in the context of other successful British feature films such as Beerbohm’s Henry VIII, and noting both its success in Australia and New Zealand and its relative failure on the home market faced with competition from other English-language production companies.