Traffic with the Devil

I caught this on AMC and loved it! It is a documentary about traffic safety from the eyes of a motorcycle cop. I love how it shows fashions, autos and scenery of the real L.A. right after the war. This post-war, pre-Elvis time period is one that I find interesting and this film sheds some light on life in America then.

It was filmed about the same time as "It's a Wonderful Life." Life depicted in this film is very different from life portrayed in Bedford Falls.

I understand that it won an Oscar but I cannot find a copy of the film for purchase. If you find a source, let us know!

Ah, the automobile in 1946! How American! How wonderful! How can we ever live without them! How can we deal with the consarned things, with the crowded roads, the traffic cops, no place to park and no time to get to where we want to?

Director Gunther Von Fritsch was not known for his comedy work, but with this short, musing on the problems and joys of automobiles, he produces a movie that veers from comic to tragic -- corpses lying on the road show us the latter.

It's an early version of the movies they showed us in driving class back when I was a teenager: BLOOD ON THE ROAD, and so forth. Those, however, started off horrifically and got worse. This one lures you in and then hits you with the deadly facts.

This is a nicely done short film about the Los Angeles traffic scene in 1946. It's post war and people are starting to return to the good life. That means more cars and more efforts to enjoy life. The problem is that, as the motorcycle cop says, the people in the cars don't realize the responsibilities they have. Most of these rather pedantic features are a bit much. This one has some nice production quality. The cop narrating it lives in the real world. He is compassionate but also stunned by people's stupidity. It also give us a picture of a place where the automobile has gone beyond the places that service it. Nicely done. Some great characterizations.

Every driver should see this! The world would be a safer place. The images of death and destruction are a blunt reality check. I wish they'd still shown this type of thing when I was in Driver's Ed. Somebody should remake this eye-opening short.

...with a curiously ambiguous parting shot.

For better or worse, the other IMDb reviewers of this short have covered most of its salient points, so I'll content myself firstly with praising its epigrammatic narration, and secondly (and much more importantly) with expressing my surprise at its closing line, which is spoken by real-life LAPD traffic cop Charles Reineke to an outraged motorist complaining of a close encounter with a reckless driver:

"Anyway," says Reineke, "stopping cars won't stop reckless driving. That's up to the driver."

By "stopping cars," Reineke means "giving tickets to drivers," and it could be argued in his defense that he's alluding to the fact that his outraged motorist was himself a reckless driver only a little while earlier, and ticketed by Reineke to no effect, before that recklessness led to a crash which left the motorist with his neck in a brace, and a harsh lesson to ponder from the school of hard knocks.

But Reineke's remark is nonetheless troubling. It seems to point to a time when reckless driving was considered an offense worthy only of ticketing and not loss of license and, in egregious cases, imprisonment. Until the 1980s, a similar laissez faire attitude was prevalent toward the carnage caused by drunk driving - many of us are old enough to remember "lovable" drunk driver Foster Brooks on THE DEAN MARTIN SHOW.

Thank goodness for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)! We need them as much as ever, and as much as we need something along the same lines to combat the latest scourge of America's bloody highways - thoughtless texting.