Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

118 DOCUMENTARY FILM NEWS New Documentary Films This Is Britain No. 30. Produced by Merlin Film Productions. Robinson Charley. Produced by Halas and Batchelor. Man Alive. Produced by Anglo-Scottish Pictures. Technicians: Leonard Reeve, Jim Davies, Dick Andrews and Julien Canter. One Man Story. Produced by the Horizon Film Unit Productions. Directed by Max Munden and Dennis Shand. Photographed by Henry Hall. Music by William Alwyn. this recent batch of COI films can perhaps be regarded as a typical selection of the best of 1948. They exhibit the strengths and weaknesses of British Documentary at the present time. This Is Britain is the excellent informative COI magazine. If it has not got quite the verve and pace of Rotha's original Worker and Warfront, which it supersedes, it has a solid, sensible approach to present-day happenings which should make it popular all over the world. The Issue No. 30 starts with a description of a new motor-car, passes on to a description of some ingenious methods of handling heavy loads, and ends up with a run round the open-air exhibition of sculpture in Battersea Park. The fact that the film is due to be released in January, while the exhibition of sculpture was in August, suggests that the COI should step up its tempo. It is absurd to take four months to bring such a simple item to the screen. Moreover, the magazine is released monthly, which makes it even more difficult to understand why the item was not included in the September or October issue. A maddening feature of this particular reel is that the name of the motor-car in the first item is not mentioned. If the motor-car is worth showing, it is worth identifying. Are we still in the dark ages where, if a Government mentions the name of one motor-car, all the other motor-car manufacturers twitter like a cackle of schoolgirls? Robinson Charley is one of the latest examples of the new colour cartoons made for theatrical release by Halas and Batchelor. If their technique has not broken much ground unfamiliar to Disney, the reels have a verve and a sprightliness of their own and are usually amusing and goodtempered. This one takes us for a trot round contemporary economic theory. Charley explains that if we want to import, we must export. We lost our overseas investments in the war, if we must have wars, what do we expect? To him, evidently, the war was an exciting expedition into knight-errantry, which we took on for the love of it. And now we must pay for our fun. One cannot help feeling that Charley's attitude PUBLIC RELATIONSHIP FILMS LTD MAKERS OF ENTERTAINMENT AND DOCUMENTARY FILMS Recent Films: — "THE GREEDY BOY" Awarded Silver Medal at Venice Festival "THEY TRAVEL BY AIR" Both films were shown at Edinburgh and Venice Richard Massingham iii charge of production 29 WHITEHALL, S.W.i WHITEHALL 4000 is a little strange, and it does not occur to him to explain to us how and why it was that our overseas investments were removed while we were holding the baby for just those people who stripped us. Man Alive and One Man Story are two documentaries running along more or less normal lines. Both of them are made for the Foreign Office. They are finely photographed, smoothly directed and well edited. They meet their points clearly and succinctly. Yet one feels that the writers and directors have not done more than attempt a smooth, workmanlike job. They have not felt the subjects. As a consequence, the very efficiency of the films is a little dull. They run smoothly from end to end, and show little variation in pace, a"nd little sense of dramatic climax. Man Alive tries to be humorous, but without much success. Man Alive deals with safety in factories, and the Safety Inspectors. (Incidentally, surely the directors of Man Alive could have found a better joke than to make the Inspector trip over his own carpet?) The world the film shows us is just a little too easy. We are blandly informed that most progressive employers co-operate. Of course they do. But what about the unprogressive ones? The film implies that we have reached a kind of paradise where lions and lambs, employers and workers, managers and Government inspectors, doss down together in one great, glorious bed of luke-warm self-esteem. One Man's Story is a sketch of the life of Dr McGonigle.thecelebrated medical officer of health for Stockton-on-Tees who, second only to Sir John Boyd Orr, aroused the national conscience on such questions as bad housing and malnutrition. He was a social scientist of great importance and a pioneer. He had an uphill struggle against reaction and complacency. Little or none of this goes into the film. Again, we are shown the world of mutual luke-warm self-esteem. It is characteristic of the film that the only housing problem McGonigle runs across is that of a slum landlord, dependent for a living wholly on the rent of two cottages and his old age pension. He cannot afford repairs and our sympathies are with him. This kind of odious distortion of truth is something which the COI had better avoid in future. In fact, most landlords are not living on old age pensions and the rent of two cottages. At that time, for every hard-luck case among landlords, there were a score of thousand hardluck cases among tenants. Why not select, then, from the majority? If these two films, expertly handled though they be. are representative of what the Foreign Office (for whom both were made) considers suitable propaganda abroad, the sooner these matters are taken out of Foreign Office hands, the better. The presentation of Britain as a country of luke-warm compromises. complacent reformers, bobbish workers and suffering landlords, is one which can do us no good. If the recent Social Films from Denmark could deal with social problems as yet unsolved, surely such a powerful country as Britain can onl> gam esteem by being equally frank, a. e.