This Week in History: A. D. Kean and “Policing the Plains”

One hundred years ago this week, the opening scene of a Canadian feature film was shot on Georgia Street in downtown Vancouver.

CHEK-TV/Royal BC Museum news story about Kean and his film.

Vancouver filmmaker A. D. “Cowboy” Kean (1882-1961) was the first British Columbian to make a feature film.  One hundred years ago, on May 7, 1924, he shot the opening scene in downtown Vancouver, in front of the old Courthouse (now the Vancouver Art Gallery).  His historical epic Policing the Plains would depict the first fifty years of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. Three and a half years in the making, the production was plagued by financial and technical difficulties.  Sequences were shot in Vancouver, Victoria, Ladner, and the Cariboo, and at several locations in southern Alberta.  The film finally had its Toronto premiere in December 1927—but it never went into general distribution, and is now considered lost.

NOTE: This story continues a thread with these blog posts:

• Vancouver 1914: A. D. Kean and “Range Days”
• Dominion Day Sports in Lillooet (1914 or 1915)
• March 1924: Cameras Roll in the South Cariboo.

The RCMP’s “E” Division, grouped in front of the Vancouver Courthouse for the opening scene of Policing the Plains, 7 May 1924 (BC Archives H-01266)

Margaret Lougheed as the symbolic figure “Britannia” (BC Archives H-01225)

In what would be the film’s opening scene, a squad of mounted RCMP, having received a benediction from “Britannia,” rides out from the Courthouse steps and onto Georgia Street. (BC Archives H-01267)

More details about Kean and his film can be found in John Mackie’s recent Vancouver Sun article.

“The Home Town Paper” (NFB, 1948)

View The Home Town Paper at the NFB.ca site

This thoughtful and interesting vintage documentary examines the role of a weekly newspaper in a small town, and its relationship with the community that it serves. The paper in question is The Vernon News, and the town depicted is Vernon, in BC’s Okanagan Valley. The film shows how the newspaper’s contents are fashioned from the atmosphere, daily life, incidents, and concerns of a small town. 22 minutes.

“Following the weekly editor of one such hometown paper for a day, the film tracks the local events that will be news tomorrow. In town, we meet the people whose names are scattered through the pages: the mayor and his hope of a new city hall, the local angler who breaks a record, and even the lacrosse team, sharing spectators with the band concert in the park.” (from the NFB’s online catalogue description)

“Still Gold in Them Thar Hills” (NFB, 1951)

View Eye Witness No. 30 at the NFB.ca site

This 1951 NFB newsreel is entitled Eye Witness No. 30.  The first item on the reel, “Still Gold in Them Thar Hills,” shows how—90 years after the Cariboo Gold Rush—the precious metal is still being extracted from historic gold fields in and around Williams Creek, B.C.  The item highlights the tools and techniques of mechanized and hydraulic placer mining. (Duration: 2:17.)

Here’s the NFB description of the complete newsreel:  “These vignettes from 1951 covered various aspects of life in Canada and were shown in theatres across the country. Subjects included here are British Columbia’s Cariboo Trail, once the scene of a great gold rush and which still pays off for the placer miner and occasional prospector; Canada’s new state residence at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa, a redesigned old stone mansion destined to become Canada’s No. 10 Downing Street; a unique ceremony in remote Chesterfield Inlet as an Inuit girl receives the veil of the Grey Nuns; Great Lakes conservationists outsmart the eel-like bloodsucker that preys on fish; and the new blue model uniforms designed for the Women’s Division of the Air Force.”

“Eye Witness No. 54” (NFB, 1953)

View Eye Witness No. 54 at the NFB.ca site

This newsreel contains three vignettes covering various aspects of Canadian life.  The first and third items are about British Columbia, and here are the NFB descriptions:

“Ball Stars Start Young [first item in the above clip]: In Vancouver’s Little League, baseball players, diamond and equipment are junior size, but not the boys’ coaches or the eagerness of teams and fans.”

“A Railroad Goes to Sea [starting at 6:56 in the above clip]: Swapping steel rails for ocean waves is routine for British Columbia’s Pacific Great Eastern Railway, travelling the forty-mile leg between Vancouver and Squamish by railway barge.”

NOTE:  The rail barge journey shown in the third item was replaced by a train trip in 1956, when the PGE completed its rail line from North Vancouver to Squamish.

“The Water Dwellers” (NFB, 1963)

Still image from The Water Dwellers. (NFB photo)

View The Water Dwellers on the NFB.ca site

The Water Dwellers is another National Film Board documentary that I recall somewhat fondly from my childhood. I remember that it played as the short subject when my parents took my brothers and me to a show at the Kelowna Drive-in Theatre. (We were in the back seat, in our pyjamas, with blankets and pillows, just in case the movie was too long for us.) I think the feature presentation was either How the West Was Won (with Jimmy Stewart and Debbie Reynolds) or Billy Rose’s Jumbo (with Jimmy Durante). In any case, I remember this NFB short more clearly than that night’s feature.

Directed by pioneer Canadian filmmaker Gordon Sparling, Dwellers is a profile of the floating community in and around Simoom Sound on Gilford Island in the Central Coast region of British Columbia. Most of the local homes and businesses in this resource community are built on floats, so that they can be moved easily from one moorage to another, following the needs of the local forest industry. The film shows children traveling to school by motorboat; the arrival of the mail plane and the weekly freightboat (the M.V. Alaska Prince); and sawmill and logging operations, run by one or two people, respectively. The longest sequence follows a forest ranger on the BC Forest Service vessel Nesika as it patrols the area, and shows the critical work of forest fire prevention and control.

As a child, I was fascinated to learn that people lived and worked in a floating village, and that boats were their cars and trucks. The Water Dwellers is one in a fascinating group of NFB shorts from the mid-20th-century. These productions moved away from the depiction of cities to explore small towns, rural communities, and isolated settlements all over BC–especially on the coast and in the North. These films are valuable today because they record a way of life that was (and is) gradually disappearing.

April 24, 1954: “Arrow Lakes, B.C.: Veteran Steamer Ends Record Service”: The sternwheeler S.S. Minto

View Eye Witness No. 63 on the NFB.ca site

Eye Witness No. 63 (National Film Board of Canada, 1954):  This newsreel begins with a four-minute story on the final voyage of the Arrow Lakes sternwheeler Minto, seventy years ago this month.  The Minto had served the Arrow Lakes communities for 56 years before she was tied up for good. In this news story, she is shown stopping at Robson West, Renata, and Halcyon Hot Springs. Despite various efforts to preserve and restore the vessel for historic interest, the cost was deemed too high. The Minto was towed out onto the Arrow Lakes one last time and deliberately burned on August 1, 1968.

Dominion Day Sports in Lillooet (1914 or 1915)

NOTE: This is a sequel to my blog post Vancouver 1914: A. D. Kean and “Range Days”.

On July 3, 1914, the Prospector newspaper of Lillooet, BC, described the two-day local celebrations marking Dominion Day, which had ended the day before. Among its reports on the various races and special events, the paper took particular note of an unusual visitor.

One feature that caused not a little favorable comment was the arrival in our midst of the first moving picture camera ever seen in these parts. The machine was operated by A. D. Kean, the well known Cowboy Photographer of BC, who is operating for the Capital Film Company of Victoria. This company is backed by millionaires, who are British Columbians, and is the first company to be formed for the manufacture of motion pictures of British Columbia’s many attractions.

Kean is highly pleased with the films he has obtained, among which is the first Kloochmans’ race ever secured on the American continent. The bucking contest was also a great success, one rider being “thrown” quite close to the camera, the horse continuing to buck. The films will be exhibited at all the local and provincial Industrial Exhibitions and Fairs.[1]

In the summers of 1914 and 1915, A. D. Kean travelled through the BC Interior to recruit riders and livestock for “Range Days,” the cowboy sports event he organized for the Vancouver Exhibition. He visited the Dominion Day celebrations at LIllooet both years, shooting footage for the Capital Feature Film and BC Weekly Company, an early newsreel outfit based in Victoria.

Unlike much of Kean’s work (which has been lost), footage from one of his Lillooet visits has survived, and the film is preserved at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. I’ve edited the above clip from the extant footage.

Dominion Day event on Lillooet Main Street [between 1912 and 1916] (Item 2020.08.38, Northern BC Archives and Special Collections, UNBC)

[1]       “Lillooet Loyally Celebrates Natal Day,” Prospector [Lillooet], July 3, 1914, 1. The phrase “Klootchmans’ race” refers to a horse race ridden by Indigenous women. This race appears at 0:55-1:14 in the video. The word “klootchman,” from the Chinook trading jargon, denotes an Aboriginal woman or wife. Some sources indicate that it is now considered an offensive or derogatory term.

From Creston to Kaslo (1960-61)

This clip follows the highway north from Creston, along Kootenay Lake to Kaslo. It highlights the Creston farming district, water sports, the “Bottle House” near Boswell, the ferry service across the lake, and the retired sternweeler “Moyie” at Kaslo. The clip comprises excerpts from Kootenay Lake Holiday, a BC government travelogue produced in 1960-61. The source film is BC Archives AAAA4335 at the Royal BC Museum.

“Banshees Over Canada” (NFB, 1945)

Sirens wail to signal an air raid drill in Vancouver.

View BANSHEES OVER CANADA (NFB, 1945)

The most interesting part of this wartime NFB documentary starts at 11:52 in the above clip, and deals with air-raid and civil defence preparations in Canada, focusing on the example of Vancouver.  The Vancouver segment (about 6 minutes long) includes footage of blackout precautions, the local ARP headquarters, the role of air raid wardens, emergency planning, first aid classes, warning sirens, air raid and gas drills, fire-fighting exercises, and RCAF defence aircraft.

Here’s the NFB’s on-line catalogue description of Banshees: “This newsreel documentary made during WWII was used to illustrate Britain’s preparations for an air attack. Scenes depict destruction wrought by enemy planes, the efficiency of retaliation by the Royal Air Force and the precautions taken in Canada against possible air attack.”

The B.C. footage was filmed by Vancouver Motion Pictures, a locally-owned production company that shot or produced a number of NFB titles during the 1940s. The Vancouver crew included director Ed Taylor and cinematographer Oscar Burritt (1908-1974).  Keen enthusiasts for the art of cinema, Oscar and his wife Dorothy (Fowler) Burritt were very active in the Vancouver Film Society, and also made some creative and interesting amateur movies.  Oscar later worked for CBC Television in Toronto. The BC Archives at the Royal BC Museum has three collections that contain films by the Burritts.

Read more about Dorothy and Oscar Burritt and their films.

Vancouver fire-fighting drill scene from “Banshees Over Canada”.

“Herring Hunt” (NFB, 1953)

National Film Board of Canada

Directed by Julian Biggs from a script by Leslie McFarlane, Herring Hunt is a tight little documentary vignette about the daily routine of the BC herring fishery in the early 1950s.  It’s also notable as the moving image debut of Vancouver actor Bruno Gerussi; he plays Matt Johnson, an impetuous crewman on the herring boat at the story’s centre.  As most viewers will remember, Gerussi would later pursue another sea-going livelihood on television — as Nick Adonidas, skipper of the Persephone, in the long-running series The Beachcombers (CBC Vancouver, 1972-1990).

Gerussi apparently earned his role in Herring Hunt after being “discovered” by Leslie McFarlane in a 1952 production of A Streetcar Named Desire, staged by Vancouver’s Totem Theatre; he starred as Stanley Kowalski.  In his film debut, Gerussi seems to be recalling some of Stanley’s confrontational mannerisms.

Here’s the NFB description:  “This short sea-faring documentary follows the operations of a herring boat and her crew in the coastal waters of British Columbia. The Western Girl trawler, her skipper, and his men race to get their catch before the quota is taken and the fishing area closed. Teamwork is paramount in an enterprise that has a great element of risk; competition is keen and one man’s mistake may mean severe loss, so that a year of plenty may be followed by a year of famine.”

In the 26th Academy Awards, Herring Hunt was honoured with an Oscar® nomination in the category “Best Live Action Short Film, One-Reel”.

Bruno Gerussi (seated, left) as crewman Matt Johnson in Herring Hunt. (Frame enlargement from a 16 mm film print. BC Archives, 911410-0004, file 5.)