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The Living Paintings series was included in Eve and Everybody's Review, a delightfully varied Pathé Cine magazine that ran from 1921 to 1933, directed by Fred Watts. The central visual conceit was to place the action

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inside an artistic frame. In doing so, the series drew on a way of conceptualising cinema that had its roots in the very earliest days of the medium, cinema as a means of creating animated paintings

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or moving pictures, we might say. And so it is that we see John Gielgud in his first appearance on film, and Gwen Ffrangeon-Davies in the iconic balcony scene from Barry Jackson's stage

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production of Romeo and Juliet at London's Regent Theatre. Ffrangeon-Davies was really the star here, and it is she being principally showcased in this clip, doubly framed within her arched balcony window

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and within the inserted picture frame. Gielgud, by contrast, was disappointed with his own performance as Romeo. "I had neither the looks, the dash nor the virility to make

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a real success of it, however well I spoke the verse," he wrote. The irony is, of course, that here, we see Gielgud, shorn of his famous verse

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speaking, just a little teasing hint of the extraordinary career to come, an earnest of future success.