Adventures in Early Movies: A Kiss in the Tunnel

Still from A Kiss in the Tunnel: Director/star George Albert Smith, the most important of the “Brighton School” filmmakers, with his wife and lead actress Laura Bayley.

A lot of my favorite early silent movies were made by the pioneering British director George Albert Smith (no relation to yours truly). Along with Let Me Dream Again and As Seen Through a Telescope, both of which I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog, one of his most important works is the 1899 comedy A Kiss in the Tunnel. The film is a good example of early continuity editing and consists of three short, cleverly edited shots. In the first shot, a train enters a dark tunnel, which the audience sees from the point-of-view of the front of the train. (Such “train P.O.V.” films, popularly known as “phantom rides,” were common around the turn of the 20th century; the point was to create a thrilling “you-are-there” effect.) The second shot features a man and a woman in Victorian garb, played by Smith and his wife Laura Bayley, sitting opposite one another inside of a train car and reading. The man stands up, doffs his top hat and leans in to kiss the woman three times in quick succession, twice on the lips and once on the cheek. She looks embarrassed after the first kiss, holding her book in front of her face, but is much more participatory in the second, after which she can be seen smiling broadly. After the third and final kiss, the man and the woman abruptly return to reading. Smith then cuts to the third and final shot, another P.O.V. shot from the front of the train as it leaves the tunnel.

According to film historian Charles Musser, George Albert Smith felt that phantom ride films had become “overly familiar” by 1899 and he conceived of A Kiss in the Tunnel as a means of reviving interest in the genre: “The Warwick Trading company catalog instructed exhibitors to buy this studio-made shot of a couple kissing in a railway car and cut it into a phantom ride at a point in which the locomotive is in the darkened tunnel (as shown in this print).” What’s open to debate is whether the point of showing the train entering the tunnel merely provided a convenient cover of darkness for the man to steal his kisses or whether such a shot had more deliberate Freudian undertones. Shots of trains entering tunnels would, after all, eventually become the crudest and most obvious sexual metaphor in all of cinema (as seen in The Lady Eve, North By Northwest, The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear and countless other movies). Watch the film via the YouTube clip I’ve embedded below and decide for yourself. I also highly recommend scrolling through and reading all of the YouTube user comments beneath it, many of which express mock-outrage at this scandalous work of Victorian proto-pornography. Many of them are, quite frankly, hilarious:

Sources Cited
1. Musser, Charles. A Kiss in the Tunnel. The Movies Begin Vol. 2 Text. Kino DVD, 2002.