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Wah?
Okay, Britain 1950 as seen in the 1928 film
High Treason. Never heard of it? Not surprised.
It was one of the earliest of the talking pictures and the studio was
so nervous about its chances that they not only made a talking
version, but a silent one as well just in case.
Maybe that's just as well, seeing as one critic said about one
performance,
Does Mr. Goddard still think that a stutter adds
to the humour of a character, or is this the effect of the sound
reproduction?
It was also a film that was so overtly anti-war
that it promoted itself as the "Peace Picture," which is interesting,
as it has a rather strange storyline involving a peace movement that
tries to avert a war with a queer combination of Ur Greenham Common
women draping themselves over biplanes to keep them from taking off
and the chairman of the movement assassinating the president of his
own country by blowing him up. Very peace loving, indeed.
For our purposes, however, we're more interested in the future London
skyline. I'll be the first to admit that it's a truly
frightening jumble of brick and mortar, but it's streets ahead of the
real-life architectural atrocities that have been visited on the city
since the war. And there's not a Ferris wheel or
Millennium Dome in sight. |
