IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022550
Submitted by Charles O'Brien on 2008-08-08
Charles O'Brien's comment:
An excellent melodrama from Universal starring Mae Clark and brilliantly directed by James Whale. The highest ASL I've come across for an American film, as far as I recall, roughly double the norm for a film of 1931. Lots of fine moving camera work, and ambitious set design.
Users' comments:
Author: Nick Redfern Date: 2009-06-20
Although this film has a high mean shot length, its median shot length is not necessarily atypical for 1930s Hollywood cinema. The median shot length for Waterloo Bridge is 13.2 seconds. Compared to Song o'My Heart (1930) - median = 12.4s (P = 0.6499, Mann Whitney) and Animal Crackers (1930) - median = 13.0s (P = 0.7564, Mann Whitney), there is no significant difference (alpha = 0.05).
This is not to say that there are many films that are not different from Waterloo Bridge - simply that an atypical mean shot length is unlikley to be informative.
Summmary Statistics (to one decimal place):
| Length (s) | 4733.2 |
| Shots (n) | 205 |
| Mean Shot Length (s) | 23.1 |
| Variance (s) | 891.7 |
| Standard Deviation (s) | 29.9 |
| Skew | 3.0 |
| Minimum Shot Length (s) | 0.9 |
| Lower Quartile (s) | 5.2 |
| Median Shot Length (s) | 13.2 |
| Upper Quartile (s) | 29.6 |
| Maximum Shot Length (s) | 184.7 |
| Range (s) | 183.8 |
| Interquartile Range (s) | 24.4 |
Author: Barry Salt Date: 2009-06-21
Song o'My Heart and Animal Crackers are both long-take films like Waterloo Bridge (ASLs of 20.4 seconds and 17.9 seconds respectively) and equally untypical of 1931 or 1930 films. If the bulk of 1931 films have a median shot length of about 13 seconds, their distributions would have a very peculiar shape -- in fact they would have negative skew -- something so far undetected in film shot length distributions. The ASL for Waterloo Road is very informative to me.