I’ve watched quite a number of these early Westinghouse films made by Biograph in 1904, and writing reviews about them all puts me in mind of the presenters on those shopping channels that populate the TV airwaves like germs under a toilet rim. They can talk for twenty minutes about anything they are asked to sell. It doesn’t matter what it is, they can talk about it for twenty minutes without repeating themselves. Someone once told me that at an interview they might be handed a pencil and instructed to talk about it for X number of minutes without pausing, stuttering or repeating themselves. It can’t be easy – and neither is trying to find something different to write about these films. This one is as boring as most of the others: overlong, dull and filmed without imagination. One of the workers in this film actually appears more interested in the camera than the camera is in him, and that just has to be wrong…

(Reviewed 2nd August 2009)