My movie night with Queen Elizabeth II

When the Queen visited the British Film Institute in her Diamond Jubilee year, Robin Baker faced a daunting question. With more than 120 years of cinema to choose from, what would a monarch most like to watch? As the head curator of the BFI National Archive, it fell to Baker to pull together a programme for the occasion, which ten years later he recalls was an onerous task.

“She was coming to mark the 60th anniversary of the BFI Southbank, which had opened as the National Film Theatre in October 1952, just eight months into her reign,” he remembers. “But what she’d enjoy watching felt impossible to know. Was she a Sean Connery fan? Did she like Idris Elba? I didn’t want to second guess her taste.”

Like many of her personal views, the Queen didn’t publicise her taste in film, though a few intriguing details have emerged over the years. She once told Brian Blessed that Flash Gordon was a favourite – she even asked the actor to repeat his catchphrase, “Gordon’s alive!” – while biographer Adam Helliker reported she was also a fan of Shirley Valentine, the 1989 romantic comedy about a bored housewife who finds romantic excitement in Greece.

The James Bond series was also held in high esteem, according to Gyles Brandreth, who noted last year that she’d seen them all, though preferred the earlier entries, “before they got so loud”. (Just don’t tell her co-star in the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, Daniel Craig.) She was apparently also apparently a fan of David Lynch: Paul McCartney once reminisced that she’d skipped one of his concerts in the early 1990s in order to watch the latest episode of Twin Peaks.

Rather than plumping for a particular genre or theme, Baker instead spent the next two weeks picking out a range of British films all made before or around the Queen’s birth in 1926. One problem: there were more than 15,000 such works from 1925 and earlier in the archive’s vaults. How to narrow them down?

Baker needed a hobby or area of interest to spring from – “And I knew I was probably onto a safe thing with horses,” he laughs. His first selection was The Derby, a 31-second-long shot of the end of the 1895 Epsom Derby, which counts among the very oldest surviving British films. Directed by the American-born Birt Acres, it was shown to the Queen’s great-grandfather, the future King Edward VII, at the very first Royal Command Film Performance at Marlborough House in 1896.

“Right at its birth, this innovation was considered so exciting that members of the Royal family had films taken directly to them to watch,” says Baker. It was only five months earlier that the first dedicated cinema had opened in Britain, in a former theatre on London’s Regent Street.

“The fact that the birth of British film aligned so closely with the Queen’s own interests made it feel like a perfect choice.”

Next was another first: Scenes at Balmoral, the earliest film to depict a British monarch. Shot in 1896, the monarch in question was Queen Victoria, who is shown in the castle grounds riding in a pony-drawn carriage, with her beloved Pomeranian, Turi, sitting on her lap: there’s also a cameo appearance from Tsar Nicholas II. Victoria, then 77, was so taken by the experience of being filmed that she wrote about it in her diary, and one month later described watching the footage.

“I can’t imagine how it would feel to see my relatives moving around in the late 19th century,” Baker says. “Outside of film historians, people broadly aren’t aware the technology even existed at that point in time. So I thought it would be fun for her to have that experience.”

Evidently it was. At the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh’s reception for film industry figures at Windsor Castle the following year, Scenes at Balmoral was screened to attendees including Kenneth Branagh, Carey Mulligan and Eddie Redmayne.

Next, from 1899, came a short by the magician Walter Booth – a pioneering maker of ‘trick’ films at the turn of the century. Upside Down, or The Human Flies takes place in a drawing room: a magician makes a top hat drift up to the ceiling, then sends himself and his three companions soaring up there with it. Booth achieved the effect by cutting the shot halfway through then turning his backdrop and camera upside down: “Not a million miles away from what Kubrick was doing in the anti-gravity scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Baker adds.

Another trend-setting short followed, this one from 1908. At that time, filmmakers in the UK had been among the first to cotton on to the appeal of stories in which dogs save small children: where we led, Hollywood would only later scamper after, with the likes of Lassie and Rin Tin Tin. Lewin Fitzhamon’s The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper was in fact a sequel to his 1905 hit Rescued by Rover, which had proven so popular that he had to reshoot it twice. The demand for prints meant the original negatives kept wearing out.

In the original, a handsome collie called Rover (whose offscreen name was Blair) tracks down his master’s abducted baby; the second, which runs just over six minutes, ups the stakes by having Rover not merely chase down the child-snatchers’ car but then commandeer the vehicle, before driving the infant home with two steady paws on the steering wheel.

Baker found the film “completely irresistible. I mean, the dog drives the car. Who’s not going to love that?” After the screening, he heard from members of the audience that the Queen had laughed heartily during this one – “as I think anyone would.”

Next came two early examples from Britain’s still world-leading tradition of wildlife filmmaking – carried on today by David Attenborough and the Natural History Unit at BBC Studios. Percy Smith’s The Birth of a Flower was a 1910 short featuring sped-up images of opening blooms, while Oliver Pike’s 1912 Wild Birds at Home featured footage of grebes, pheasants, coots and sedge warblers, all hand-coloured at a dedicated facility in Paris.

This was followed by an early colour travelogue: Claude Friese-Greene’s The Open Road, shot on a Land’s End to John o’Groats road trip the filmmaker undertook in 1926. Friese-Greene’s father, the Bristol-born inventor William Friese-Greene, created one of the earliest motion picture cameras, but went bankrupt while refining the technology, and had to sell the patent in 1889 for £500. After William’s death in 1921, the 23-year-old Claude took on his father’s life’s work and developed an early form of colour film in the 1920s: The Open Road, bright with post-war optimism, was conceived as a way to show it off.

Baker screened the final, London-set section, with its vibrant shots of Petticoat Lane (“where London’s husbands amuse themselves while London’s wives cook the Sunday dinner”) and the Changing of the Guard at St James’s Palace (“one of London’s famous side-shows”).

For the Queen, who was born around a year after Friese-Greene’s excursion, the latter would virtually count as a home movie. But next came the real thing: some highlights culled from the Royal Collection, a cache of personal film and video looked after by the BFI National Archive since the 1960s.

“I presumed she had VHS copies, but didn’t think she'd seen her own family movies on the big screen,” Baker laughs. He describes one clip which begins with King Charles III – then a three or four-year-old prince – riding on the back of a pony. “Then we see the Queen bending down, almost in close up. The cameras’s suddenly wobbling a lot, so we assumed Charles was holding the camera, filming his mummy. We can’t hear what the Queen was saying, but she’s talking in a way a mother would talk to her child. It’s a delightful moment.”

Last came a few sharp jabs of Alfred Hitchcock: selected highlights from the master’s nine surviving silent films, all of which had just been restored by the Archive as part of the Cultural Olympiad tied to the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

In early commercial and critical hits such as The Lodger and Blackmail, the director’s signature style was rapidly taking shape. Today, those titles have long been eclipsed by his later work. But even then, he was the most popular British filmmaker of his day, “phenomenally successful and breaking new ground,” Baker says.

Together, the films told of the intrepidity and ingenuity of our national cinema’s earliest days. “It’s a story that should be much better known,” Baker says. “And what an honour – and how satisfying – to be able to share it with someone whose reign stretched over half of cinema’s existence.”

Most of the above films can be found in the free section of BFI Player or on the BFI’s YouTube channel. The Royal Collection footage is included in the BBC documentary Elizabeth: The Unseen Queen, available on iPlayer