'What sort of a blow am I in for?" I'm asked myself as I threaded this 200ft reel into my projector, having been told nothing of the content by KW. I half expected it to be a documentary on hurricanes until the title came up against a background of a Royal Marines band marching through London.
The blowing of wind instruments, that's what I was in for. I'm not too sure when this interesting little documentary was made. Perhaps there's a clue in the Censor's Certificate's reference to Look At Life - Series 8. Could it have been made in the 'Sixties? Anyway, according to the narrator, at the time there were 3,000 brass bands in the country registered for competitions. Brass band competitions is mainly what the film is about, but it also shows the manufacture of instruments at an unspecified London factory - coronets, trombones, bugles, sousaphones, euphoniums ' basses - around 900 instruments turned out every week, many for export.
We see two bands in rehearsal. One consists of a group of dedicated amateurs, mainly youngsters, in a Wiltshire village, while the other is the world-famous Black Dyke Mills band of Yorkshire, shown preparing for a championship contest at the Albert Hall. Mills and factories accounted for a large number of bands, and we see employees at one turning up with their instruments for a practice after a hard day's work.
At the time the film was made brass band contests had been going for 100 years, the first at Crystal Palace, and this form of music-making became so popular that ten years later there were as many as 40,000 brass bands in the country!
This reel, which is of average print quality, finishes with a look at regimental bands. The army alone had 93 at the time. We see a Royal Marines band playing at a Trooping of the Colour ceremony, and the film ends on a particularly soggy note with an RAF band playing a colour presentation ceremony in torrential rain. I almost began to think I was going to see a hurricane after all!
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Distributed by: Derann
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The above review was printed in Super Eight Film Review |
This page was last updated 02 Dec 2002