Glimpses of Old England

In post-war England, this travelogue goes to bucolic rural England. It's a James A. FitzPatrick's Traveltalks. It would be asking too much to film bombed out London. To start with a miniature village is more a slap in the face. The show tries to throw it off as an Alice in Wonderland take. England is one of the great civilizations of the world and this starts by going to a roadside attraction. I guess it's propaganda that everything is fine after the war. It's not terribly exciting. It's not terribly interesting. It's not terrible but there isn't anything here.

A series of picture postcard versions of "Old England" are what we get glimpses of in this brief tour of England in grainy looking color. The countryside vistas are pretty enough but the documentary is slow and lacking energy from beginning to end.

It begins with a miniature illustrating the stone architecture of certain regions, the fact that it's a miniature disguised until we see a girl walking among the cottages and gardens looking like a tall Alice in Wonderland.

Then we switch to the real thing, scenes of stone walls, cottages with gabled roofs, some of the buildings built between 1580 and the late 1600s and some pretty country gardens surrounding the old homes.

Glimpses of scenery beside the Y river are next, the shell of a castle built in the 13th Century, and church ruins from one built in 1287 still stand as a sort of tourist attraction.

Suddenly the brief tour is over and another dull FitzPatrick documentary has come to an end with a thud.

Cameramen Hone Glendinning and Virgil Miller take their cameras to the Cotswold Hills and Tintagel Abbey to offer pictures of a vanishing rural England.

In contrast to many of the James Fitzpatrick Traveltalks, there are a lot of moving shots; not on ones taken from a slowly moving boat, but pan shots to reveal the size of structures and the neatly maintained farming fields.

"The Voice of the Globe" as the series titled Mr. Fitzpatrick, is far more restrained in his narration than usual, with a milder tone of voice (until the end, anyway), and gaps in his talk that allow the pictures to carry this short. I find this technique far more effective than his usual constant effort to sell the audience on the virtues of his subject. It's too bad he didn't apply this technique more often. Perhaps he felt this one was good enough without constant talk.

Glimpses of Old England (1949)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Another entry in the never ending James FitzPatrick series from MGM. This time out we travel to England and start off in the Cotswold Hills era, which contains various stone architects. Next up we see such sites as the Tintern Abbey, Laycock Abbey and the Wye River. If you've seen one film in this TravelTalks series then you certainly know what to expect. This one here delivers the same amount of goods that we've come to expect, although looking at these today there's no doubt that they're quite old-fashioned and have been updated by countless documents. With that said, there's still something nice to seeing how Americans back in the day got to see other parts of the world.