The Hepworth Manufacturing Company’s house style was ‘based on simple stories told with high photographic quality’ (Brown). Their output included melodramas, comedies, literary adaptations, scenics and travel films. The company was among the first to understand the value of using film stars, including the canine star of their first noted picture, Rescued by Rover (1905), and actors such as Harry Buss, Alma Taylor and Chrissie White, who were each featured in several of their films.

The Hepworth Manufacturing Company was among those that experimented in combining sound with pictures. In 1907 they introduced the ‘Vivaphone’, an electromagnetic system, which synchronised the projector with a gramophone (Talbot, 1970, 182). It was among the more successful of such systems and was praised in Bioscope for being as ‘near perfection as human ingenuity can make it’ (Bioscope, 13 July 1911, 57). It was also less expensive than others on the market (Low, 1949, 265).

The Rollicking Rajah is one of Hepworth’s ‘singing pictures’. It is comprised of a performance of the song of the same name, which was written by lyricist Arthur J. Mills and composer Bennett Scott, one of the most prolific music hall songwriting teams of the period (‘A. J. Mills (1872-1919)’). In March 1914 The Bioscope reported that the music hall artists Tom Powers and Florence Turner had recorded a number of songs and dances for Hepworth’s Vivaphone system, and it is possible that Powers is the lead actor in this film. The journal also noted that the Hepworth Manufacturing Co ‘had an unusually large number of orders to install their Vivaphone singing pictures in all parts of the country’ (The Bioscope, 19 March 1914, 1257).

The Rollicking Rajah concerns a fictional Indian prince – the Rajah of Ranjipoo – who ‘has his fling’ while visiting England. The Indian Princes were thought of as being synonymous with wealth; Ann Morrow writes that ‘Carpets of ivory, pearls of gold, coffers of diamonds and rubies, emeralds as big as goose eggs, jewels designed by Cartier were taken for granted’ (Morrow, 1986, ix). In this film the Rajah’s wealth and charm fascinate ‘the lovely dancing girls’, who in turn fascinate him, and he eventually decides to take one as his bride. Barbara N. Ramusack has stated that during the British colonial period marriage between Indian Princes and western women was looked upon with disfavour by both Britons and Indians; she notes that the subject was ‘disparaged in official discourse and literature’ (Ramusack, 2004, 135). Although these marriages were also considered to be of dubious legality, Ramusack notes three prominent unions that did take place (Ramusack, 2004, 136). It is possible that the inspiration for ‘The Rollicking Rajah’ was the 1910 marriage between Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala and the Spanish dancer, Anita Delgrada, a cause célèbre in its day (Vázquez de Gey).