Three-Fingered Kate: Celebrating Womanly Cunning and Successful Female Criminal Enterprise

The early British screen heroine Three-Fingered Kate was engaged in seven film exploits between October 1909 and October 1912. Uniquely, she was a female thief. Moreover, she was, by and large, a successful thief. Her series was produced by the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company (B&C) and was directed by Oceano Martinek. He also scripted the first four stories, while the company’s story editor Harold Brett wrote the last three. B&C had been founded by the cameraman Albert Bloomfield midway through 1908 as a modest company to produce film ‘locals’ and ‘topicals’. These were short actuality films depicting, on the one hand, particular local events of interest only to audiences in discrete areas and often ordered by a local exhibitor and, on the other, newsworthy events, such as the Derby or the State Opening of Parliament. Success in these genres, however, encouraged Bloomfield to venture into the more ambitious terrain of fiction film production – both comics and dramas – in the autumn of 1909. Martinek and his sister, Ivy, who was to play Kate, were recruited to engage in this side of the company’s activities. Over the next few years, B&C underwent dramatic growth to become, in the mid-teens, one of the country’s leading film producers, its fictional output vastly eclipsing its actuality work. In fact, the company established itself in Britain’s expanding production sector as one of the leading manufacturers of film series – ThreeFingered Kate being their first venture into this field. A film series would present the adventures of an established and popular character through a succession of discrete films, each of which would tell a complete story. This contrasted with a parallel genre, the film serial, a continuous narrative where any one episode would conclude with a ‘cliffhanger’ ending that would only be resolved in the next episode. In fact, as Alex Marlow-Mann (2002) has pointed out, B&C’s launching