TWO NOTABLE FILMS

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 84, 3 January 1930, Page 8

TWO NOTABLE FILMS

AMBITIOUS PROJECT Dominion Special Service. London, November 21. The most elaborate British Empire film yet attempted is now nearly complete at the British Instructional studios at Welwyn, and will be shown before the end of the year. It is the work of Mr. Walter Creighton, who has been given the most extensive facilities all over the Empire by the Empire Marketing Board. He travelled himself to South Africa and Canada, and arranged for other scenes to be taken in Australia and New Zealand. But the film will bo more than a series of views. It is linked together by the story of a schoolboy who goes to Buckingham Palace, and there, at the heart of the Empire, sees in a kind of a dream what the Empire means. The Buckingham Palace scenes include views of the Throne Room, and other apartments, which, with their art treasures, have never been photographed before for the screen. Since the war, the Papworth Village Settlement outside Cambridge has established itself as one of the most valuable counter-measures yet attempted against tuberculosis. A film has now been made of its activities, in the hope that the work going on there will be more widely known and more generously supported. We see in the Central Hospital, where all patients go on arrival, the open-air huts where the convalescents sleep, and the workshops where they earn a living as soon as they are strong enough. At Papworth now a great many men who would otherwise almost certainly have become a charge on the community are happily settled with their wives and families, doing useful work and earning regular wages. It has been found that occupations in well-ventilated workshops are usually much healthier for tuberculosis patients than outdoor pursuits, which are nearly always too strenuous. Hence the chief industries at Papworth are upholstery, carpentry, sign-writing, leather goods making, and so on. No one works more than six hours a day, but Papworth products are well able to hold their own in competitive markets, and since 1918 the turnover has risen from a few hundred pounds a year to well over £50,000. Rut the great difficulty has always been, and still is, lack of capital.