Captain Midnight, the Bush King

Captain Midnight, the Bush King (1911)

As an escaped convict, Captain Midnight is welcomed into the Hellville band of bushrangers.

Date of release
1911-02-09
Genres
Western
Director
Alfred Rolfe

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Australia

Captain Midnight, the Bush King is a 1911 Australian silent Western film about the fictitious bushranger Captain Midnight. It was the directorial debut of actor Alfred Rolfe. The film is based on the play of same name by W. J. Lincoln and Alfred Dampier. Captain Midnight, the Bush King is now considered lost.

Production

Lottie Lyell and Raymond Longford appeared in the movie as second leads. According to contemporary reports, the actors researched their roles for seven months – this may be a reference to the amount of time they had played the parts on stage.

Cosens Spencer hired Englishman Alan J. Williamson to oversee production. Williamson later said that the script only came to half a dozen pages and was carefully written to not have any interior scenes as there were no studio facilities at the time. Shooting took place in the Sydney suburbs of Narrabeen and Frenchs Forest, as well as in the Blue Mountains, with an average of five or six scenes being filmed a day.

Williamson said that Raymond Longford also worked as his assistant and was a "tower of strength" throughout the shoot.

The scene of Captain Midnight leaping off a cliff on horseback into a river and swimming away admit a hail of bullets was well received and "soon became obligatory for bushrangers in Australian cinema folklore." It has been suggested this scene was inspired by a similar moment in Alfred Dampier's 1891 Wild West drama The Scout.

Some lines of verse by Joseph L Goodman appeared on screen.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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