In Stella Gibbons’ sharp parody of the melodramatic rural novel, Flora Poste (who possessed ‘every art and grace save that of earning her own living’) descends on her relatives, the Starkadders, at Cold Comfort Farm in Howling, Sussex. There is a cinema, ‘The Majestic’, seven miles away in Beershorn which screens ‘a stupendous drama of sophisticated passion called ‘Other Wives’ Sins’’. In the extract below, Flora Poste skewers cinematic pretension, recounting a Sunday afternoon meeting of the Cinema Society in London to which she once went with a ‘friend who was interested in the progress of the cinema as an art.’ Later, Flora also targets the Charleston set, ‘those Bloomsbury-cum-Charlotte Street lions which exchanged their husbands and wives every other weekend in the most broadminded fashion … And it must be so discouraging for them to find each new love exactly resembling the old one’.

Flora’s cousin Seth loves the talkies and collects photographs of female stars of the silver screen such as Lotte Funchal and Sigrid Maelstrom. He is the local hunk with a ‘graceful, pantherish tread’ (which recalls how Sean Connery was described when he was signed up to play James Bond). Flora introduces him to a visiting Hollywood film producer looking for new film stars, someone to become a new Clark Gable or Gary Cooper, who whisks him off to the US. A year later Flora sees him on the silver screen, ‘Seth Starkadder in “Small Town Sheik”’.