Marvelously elusive war-time propaganda documentary that is both patriotic and mysterious. It is about the leisure activities of miners, steel-workers and cotton-mill employees, mostly musical.
The scene that annoyed the social realists at the time was the kazoo band of the millworkers, who play Rule Britannia and produce an elevated tableau of the Britannia figure with her shield and trident. It is almost André Kertész in its surrealism (Jennings was a member of the UK Surrrealist group). But the film is moving too in its trust in the people it presents, a trust tempered with strangeness, angularity and some kind of apprehension of darkness, as in the last shot of the miners descending in their cages. There is no war fever in it at all. It is almost the Blakean view of what it is to be English (I speak as a Hungarian...)
The scene that annoyed the social realists at the time was the kazoo band of the millworkers, who play Rule Britannia and produce an elevated tableau of the Britannia figure with her shield and trident. It is almost André Kertész in its surrealism (Jennings was a member of the UK Surrrealist group). But the film is moving too in its trust in the people it presents, a trust tempered with strangeness, angularity and some kind of apprehension of darkness, as in the last shot of the miners descending in their cages. There is no war fever in it at all. It is almost the Blakean view of what it is to be English (I speak as a Hungarian...)