Based on Geoffrey Fletcher’s book, this captivating documentary exposes the real London of the swinging sixties. Turning its back on familiar sights, the film explores the hidden details of a crumbling metropolis. With James Mason as our Guide, we are led on an tour of the weird and wonderful pockets of London from abandoned music-halls to egg breaking factories.
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James Mason is our guide through the slums, crowded markets, live eel shops, Sally Bash hostels and the docklands, and even when he knocks on someone's door in Spitalfields and asks to come in, no one seems to recognise that an international film star is in their midst.
There's the decaying gradeur of the old Bedford Theatre, Camden, which succumbed to the wrecking ball two years later. This palace of varieties with its plaster saints and ghostly memories is now a job centre.
There's a fun bit at an egg-cracking factory - who knew there was such a thing - and a despondent old man who is incoherent until he raises his voice in a Jewish lament.
There's Cardinal Cap…
James Mason visits a Victorian toilet where the attendant used to keep goldfish in glass tanks above the stalls. What more do you need from a movie?
The ‘ah well…’ of Hogarthian melancholia, neither entirely lament nor accusation - ire for postwar buildings aside (themselves now probably replaced and due a relative sigh).
As it is it’s as much a study of what anybody could see on the streets as anything off the beaten track. But these pen portraits of people, scuffed and creased, are affecting - doubly so from a director later associated with smutty comedies (there’s probably an analogy to be made here).
Esse é um achado sensacional. Um documentário onde Mr Mason nos guia por todos os buracos londrinos dos anos 60, não é simplesmente narrado por ele e sim guiado de corpo e alma, Mason visita cada local e conversa com as pessoas, tornando este um dos mais interessantes documentos de uma cidade e época. Ainda passa pelo local de assassinato de Annie Chapman e que hoje virou uma garagem, mal sabia ele que pouco mais de dez anos depois voltaria às telas na pele de Watson para investigar aquele mesmo assassinato.
London is changing and James Mason is mildly disgruntled about it.
A fascinating snapshot of a London that no longer exists. Lots of eels, meths drinking, toilet goldfish, dilapidated music halls, slums in places that you could now barely afford to buy a pint in, let alone a house and an excessive amount of egg destruction.
It's all rather melancholic and Mason is a charming host.
This was well worth watching just to spend time with James Mason as he wandered around London with his cap and stick waxing wistfully about the lost age of the music hall and the evils of modern architecture or inviting himself to have tea with some old codgers in a hostel. The film was a mixed bag overall as it strove to show a different side of London in the swinging sixties. The parts without James Mason dragged in comparison.
Rather interesting fifty-minute documentary about the 'hidden', less swinging side of 1960's London, presented by James Mason.
Now, the problem with listening to James Mason when you're a fan of comedian Eddie Izzard is that it's terribly distracting. It took me about twenty minutes to stop thinking about Izzard's routines on "God, played by James Mason...". And realising that actually, his impressions of Mason were rather bloody good: why, said my brain, was Eddie Izzard being so serious and projecting his voice from a man looking like a less-muddy contestant on One Man and His Dog? (Yes, James Mason in a flat cap!)
The London Nobody Knows would be a great watch for people who are into urban exploration (who…
THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS (1967) colour. 46 minutes.
Directed by Norman Cohen.
Based on a 1962 book by Geoffrey S Fletcher.
Narrated by James Mason.
Blending together:
A large portion of East End with declining buildings and sites from Victorian London, before the gentrification to come.
Memories and people from before World War 2 and the BLITZ.
Hungry and thirsty, down and out people in the streets.
The underbelly of Swinging London 1967 with places and people no tourist would want to look at twice.
Street vendors and performance artists.
A place in Old Spitalfield where one of Jack the Ripper's victims were found. The Salvation Army and one of the hostels.
The river.
An egg cracking factory with a…
This messy, unfocused documentary, from the director of Confessions of a Driving Instructor, is an entrancing jumble of elegy, history tour, meretricious Swinging '60s crap, lies and James Mason being brilliant. The 'Boy I Love' sequence is one of the best, most moving things ever put on film.
"The partial destruction of the city of London in the second world war offered us a great opportunity to reconstruct in a way that was not only practical but also aesthetic—but somehow we blew it"
With its 'putrefying' architecture, this begins like Marguerite Duras' India Song—or to be more precise, like that film's follow up Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert, which repurposes India's audio track over empty footage of decayed decadence to further dislocate people from place, and to send that place spinning forwards through history into a dank relic of its mossy, messy past, haunted by people and politics, an echo of an echo ringing through eternity till it is rendered inaudible—but never quite gone.
And so…
Fantastically strange documentary, that swings from Vertov-esque storytelling through editing to deliberately humourous recreations of bizarro and surely false events - egg breaking factory scene as prime case in point - it's a tour of places and ways of life surely lost to time now. Fascinating and not even remotely long enough for my liking and James Mason's wonderful narration goes missing at all the wrong times. I want to know more dammit! I shall have to check out some of Geoffrey Fletcher's books I think.
Can be found in its entirety: here
I’ve been meaning to watch this for an age, and stumbled across it online. It’s utterly fascinating. Well worth 45 minutes of your time.
