While Brunel navigated the fraught production of Blighty with relative success, the film's positive reception did not improve his situation at Gainsborough. His next two films were assigned to him by the studio under conditions even less favourable than the first, since both were adaptations of valuable properties rather than original stories. The reliance of producers on existing works brought several issues that further complicated a director's struggle for control. Censorship was a problem and canny authors could wield considerable power over the adaptation and production process; these issues were to affect Brunel's two subsequent productions for Gainsborough.

Adaptation and Silent Cinema

Up to and including Blighty, all Brunel's directorial projects had been based on original screen stories, though this was contrary to the general trend in British silent cinema. For producers, the attraction of successful novels and plays as source material was obvious; a popular title possessed inherent marketing value as well as, hopefully, a well-crafted narrative on which to base their films. Stoll Picture Productions had so much faith in the strategy that it launched its filmmaking activities by acquiring the rights to a raft of literary works, branding its output the ‘Eminent British Authors series’ and promoting its films on the back of the success of the books. According to Jon Burrows, 118 of the 128 titles Stoll made between 1919 and 1928 were based on contemporary English novels, and the approach served the company well for several years (2009: 157). The Ideal Film Company, a distributor which branched out into production in 1915, had rarely strayed from tried-and-tested sources, while British & Colonial's 1923 series ‘Gems of Literature’ reduced works by Shakespeare, Dickens and Sheridan to one reel for easy digestion. Even a young, innovative producer like Michael Balcon failed to buck this trend: of the twenty-two features he produced between 1923 and 1929, only six were from original screen stories.

Rachael Low complained that ‘every possible or impossible play and novel, historical, classical, pot-boiling and contemporary, was wrung into service’ by the film industry, only to be ‘changed about and made uniform by the script department’ (1971: 240–1). Producers were often more interested in such titles for their inbuilt publicity value than their intrinsic quality as material for the screen.