António Roma Torres - Como Amam os Homens

On a summer afternoon, Saturday, July 4, 1914, after the assassination of Prince Franz Ferdinand and before the Austrian invasion of Serbia, James M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, took his friends to a farm on the outskirts of London to try out a new machine that had arrived from America and allowed them to see themselves on a screen, in what would mark the entire nascent 20th century: cinema.

The operator was the director of the National Theatre in London, Harley Granville-Barker; a young aristocratic millionaire, Lord Howard de Walden; Thomas Evelyn Ellis financed the operation; and the main competition was between the inseparable friends-enemies George Bernard Shaw and Gilbert Keith Chesterton, watched discreetly by the critic William Archer. Two years later, on June 9, 1916, the cowboy film then made was shown at the London Coliseum in a charity matinee for the benefit of the War Hospital, starring actress Irene Vanbrugh, which H. G. Wells is said to have attended, although he had previously missed the event. The film, How Men Love, is now considered lost, but it expressed a warlike spirit that was already cooling. Wells, like Mr. Britling in the novel he had just published, was finally beginning to see clearly.