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The first version ofComin' Thro9 the Rye, made in 191 6, had been a great favourite with the public, but I had long felt that such a popular story was worthy of more generous treatment than it received in those comparatively primitive days. The rights then had been acquired for a limited period only, but now we bought them for all time, that is, of course, till the copyright runs out fifty years after the author's death. I set about to make the film as worthily as I possibly could.
The first thing was to find a rye-field — that is to say, a field which was intended to be sown with rye. I couldn't find one within many miles and as I wanted it close at hand I rented a field just opposite the studios and had it sown. It had a beautiful old oak tree just in the right place to make a conspicuous feature in my picture. Before it was sown it had to be ploughed and that ploughing made a good opening shot for the film. Then there was the sowing which was also photographed, and the real story begins when the young crop is half a dozen inches high. It ends when it is harvested by an old man who looks something like Father Time.
Most of the exteriors were taken at Moreton Old Hall in Cheshire, a magnificent timbered building which made lovely backgrounds from a dozen different angles. We had a great stroke of luck here when we discovered a real rye-field right up against the rear of the old house. This keyed in excellently with our own rye-field back at Walton. Our interior scenes were built up exactly to match the real rooms in the old house and everything was perfectly in keeping.
But luck didn't hold throughout. We were about three quarters of the way through the film, that is to say well on in the summer, for the picture took most of the year to complete, when the leading man, Shayle Gardner, playing the principal part of Paul Vasher, contracted typhoid fever and was out of the cast for months. I did all I could with the remaining scenes in which Vasher does not appear, but there is no need to point out how very awkward it was.
When it came to providing a worthy film for the British Film Week at the Scala Theatre I had nothing to offer.
But it happened, rather curiously, for things rarely turned out that way, that the 'Rye' film was complete up to a certain point, because the order of its taking had been to a great extent conditioned by the growing up of the rye. So with much misgiving I
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