Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Look at Life: High, Wide and Faster

Another of these short films from the Rank Organisation - or at least the greater part of one. It must date from the mid 1960s, as Abingdon Station closed to passengers in 1963 and construction of the M4 began in 1965.

It is usual to treat Rank films as part of a cosy, backward-looking Britain of the 1950s. But the modernism here - celebrating the Beeching plan for the railways and the coming of the motorways - embraces a worldview that many would not feel wholly comfortable with today.

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