GK Chesterton & George Bernard Shaw in the Movies

 

I'm just putting this up for posterity sake. I found a halfway decent, if small, photo of Chesterton and Shaw on the outdoor set of a test film by J.M. Barrie (of Peter Pan fame). They made two short films with Barrie in 1914, but this still photo is all that is known to have survived from either. It was western called How Men Love. (The other film short was called Rosy Rapture, the Pride of the Beauty Chorus.) Below is what Chesterton wrote in his autobiography of the event:

"We went down to the waste land in Essex and found our Wild West equipment. But considerable indignation was felt against William Archer; who, with true Scottish foresight, arrived there first and put on the best pair of trousers … We … were rolled in barrels, roped over fake precipices and eventually turned loose in a field to lasso wild ponies, which were so tame that they ran after us instead of our running after them, and nosed in our pockets for pieces of sugar. Whatever may be the strain on credulity, it is also a fact that we all got on the same motor-bicycle; the wheels of which were spun round under us to produce the illusion of hurtling like a thunderbolt down the mountain-pass. When the rest finally vanished over the cliffs, clinging to the rope, they left me behind as a necessary weight to secure it; and Granville-Barker kept on calling out to me to Register Self-Sacrifice and Register Resignation, which I did with such wild and sweeping gestures as occurred to me; not, I am proud to say, without general applause. And all this time Barrie, with his little figure behind his large pipe, was standing about in an impenetrable manner; and nothing could extract from him the faintest indication of why we were being put through these ordeals."