A birthday present fit for a queen

In 1922, a fast-talking Canadian persuaded the king of Siam to make a movie. The family have been film moguls ever since,

Something remarkable will happen in Thailand on 12 August: Queen Sirikit will receive a five-million dollar birthday present from King Rama IX in the form of a full-blown historical feature-film. Suriyothai is directed by a prince of the blood and is wholly or partly funded by the King himself (details about this esteemed and secretive family are hard to come by).

It's a staggering royal enterprise, full of famous Thai movie stars and stuffed with cameo roles from eminent politicians. As such it brings full circle a story of royal involvement with the Thai film industry that began in appropriately fantastical fashion in 1922, when a well-upholstered chancer from Hollywood persuaded the last absolute King of Thailand to script and fund the first ever movie to be made in old Siam.

Little is known about the life of Henry MacRae, a rumbustious early pioneer of popular cinema. Pictures of him show a shortish, balding character in tightly buttoned linen suits, his barrel-chest proudly puffed-out and chin raised with an air of supreme self-confidence. MacRae was Canadian by birth but his talents were quickly recognised by the fledgling Hollywood film industry. He joined Universal Pictures in 1910 as a jobbing director and quickly showed an aptitude for adapting comic-book stories, cowboy romps, mysteries and horror yarns for the screen.

MacRae is credited with, among other things, the first Werewolf movie in 1913. Called simply The Werewolf, it's a truly sensationalist fable (though nowadays a feminist reading would not be out of place) that features a Navajo woman seeking revenge on paleface men by morphing into a feral beast. According to one source, MacRae may also have developed the most basic technical requirements of cinema: artificial lighting for interiors especially, but also the wind machine, the use of double-exposure and even filming by night. He's probably best-known, however, for making the Flash Gordon movies of the Thirties – a deliriously kitsch vision of the future with its villainous beard-stroking rulers and camp technology, all of which continue to exert a fascination on the present (witness the continual referencing of the Star Trek Voyager TV series to its aesthetic).

Who knows what was going through MacRae's mind when he first had the improbable wheeze of going to Thailand to make a movie. In a curious essay, Picturesque and Unusual Siam written for The Film Yearbook in 1924, it appears he was simply roving South East Asia on a chartered yacht looking for exotica to film; on finding some obliging natives, he would make an impromptu movie on the spot. After putting in on various islands and filming a certain amount of "real savages in action" as he so quaintly puts it, it seems he ended up in the rather more civilised environment of urban Siam.

MacRae was fascinated by the idea of the gentle and bookish King, who had been educated at Oxford and was known as a royal moderniser. "He believes he is a second Shakespeare," the director observes in a later account, (rough translation: I know a sucker when I see one).

When MacRae discovered that the sovereign had his own richly resourced acting troupe to put on the king's own translated plays, the opportunist Canadian went to great lengths to secure a royal meeting. "I felt his Majesty would be interested in moving pictures" he confides. "After considerable manoeuvring I finally secured an audience."

Was it a wise or a foolish move? Since 1782 and the first Chakri dynast Rama I, the king's ancestors had shown an unswerving passion for theatre and writing. King Rama VI was the grandson of the king immortalised in the 1956 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I and his father had been taught English by the redoubtable English teacher, Anna Leonowens. Nevertheless, reverence towards the monarchy was the bedrock of the culture (you can still be imprisoned for 15 years in Thailand for insulting the King). MacRae was treading a perilous path.

As it happens, King Rama VI – wearing the tiered Great Crown of Victory and sitting on a blackwood throne inlaid with mother-of-pearl – was no match for the fast-talking entrepreneur. He was fascinated by this fresh dramatic art-form and its loud-mouthed LA proselytiser. Within a short time MacRae had persuaded the monarch, a virtual god to his people, not only to write the story for the film, but to let his own family and assorted governmental ministers appear in it. He also secured permission to use the royal actors and sacred white elephants, and have at his disposal the king's 52 cars, 600 race horses and the entire Thai navy.

The resulting silent film was titled Miss Suwanna of Siam and in 1923 received a premiere in the Royal Palace. MacRae tells us that the King reacted enthusiastically to the screening, providing translations of all the English title cards as they flashed up. The Bangkok Daily Mail of 25 June of that year describes the film – which received "record attendances" when screened at several other cinemas across the capital city – as "affording a kind of panorama of the country with the story of Suwanna running through [with] all the necessary features of melodrama, love, hate, revenge, injured innocence, false accusation, man-slaughter etc."

Since that first screening, the Thai royal family has had an almost ceaseless involvement with its native cinema – one reason, perhaps, why its cinema has remained so curiously conservative. Prince Sukrawandit Ditsakul, for example, continued to make silent movies till after the Second World War, thereby prolonging, half-a-century after it became obsolete in China and Japan, the practice of having a live narrator to accompany the film.

Film-making in the Fifties was another thing again. Ironically, though all the film versions of The King and I are banned in Thailand for disrespecting the Crown (from the Yul Brynner epic to the recent Anna and the King), it's from this period that Thai princes started making film musicals themselves. Various blue-bloods became powerful producers who helped fashion a healthy indigenous industry that for some reason never thought to export abroad. India, rather than Japan provided the template – not Bollywood so much as Tollywood, USA.

These days, a new generation of advertising-trained, distinctly non-royal directors have started making movies for international consumption. Iron Ladies, for example, is the first Thai movie ever to recieve UK distribution. But those overwrought, orchid-strewn spectaculars from the past have not been forgotten. It's a vernacular gloriously revived in the brilliant, colour-saturated melodrama Tears of the Black Tiger. Suriyothai's director, Prince Chatree, is similarly indebted. By getting real-life politicians to appear in his brand-new drama (the most expensive film ever attempted in Thai history), he's deliberately courting comparisons with his great-uncle's long-lost gem.

There's a final mystery about Miss Suwanna: though copies were lodged in the archives of the Royal Palace and with the Thai Royal Railroad, no reels have survived to the present day. The Thai royal family endured many upsets this century before settling down with the popular present King; one can't help but think that the movie has been deliberately destroyed.

As for MacRae, he never made any further features with royal actors, complaining that for one crucial scene in Miss Suwanna, a prince (who was the main actor) had vanished during a long set-up procedure for a complex shot. "I discovered," MacRae later recalled, "that he was taking a bath."

From that moment on it was Saviour of the Universe over the Lords of Life for him, the galactic sci-fi universe of Flash Gordon over the vague and easily distracted scions of foreign climes. But the rulers of Thailand would never forget their first addictive taste of cinema: while the Windsors make It's a Royal Knockout, the Chakri family wear their celluloid crowns with pride. It's enough to make Prince Edward weep.

'Iron Ladies' plays at the ICA for the rest of August (Call 020 7930 3647 for info). 'Tears of the Black Tiger' goes on general release from 24th August.