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Author
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Topic: As Time goes by
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted April 22, 2008 05:15 PM
"You don't just buy a car, you INVEST in an Austin!"
As Time goes by (1x200’, B&W, Derann Film Services)
Modernity, just like youth, is an illusion. Everything that we consider modern today will someday soon be obsolete. This is what’s wonderful about watching “As Time goes by”, because while the 1940s folks on screen are congratulating themselves about their state of the art “Aeroplanes” and “Motor Cars”, we digital age folks are looking into a transportation museum of the long past, yet this smug satisfaction comes at a price: people of our children’s generation will say things like “Remember the Internet?”, and look just the same at our modern wonders. (Truthfully, which is more obsolete: a thirty year old car or a ten year old computer?)
At the beginning, all progress is yet to come, and we meet a poor medieval Oaf (looking very much like Michael Palin dressed up for a Monty Python skit.) trudging pointy-shoed down a dirt path, but as the narrator says “but soon time moves on, and today becomes tomorrow” and now we are witnessing an 18th century horse drawn coach braving bad roads and foppishly dressed highwaymen before we see “modern” buses on the same routes. This is generally how the film progresses: from primitive beginnings come progress until the wonders of modern times arrive, whether buses, ships, aircraft, trains or finally automobiles. From the standpoint of our times, even the modern stuff is delightfully archaic, so we are treated to a parade of horse drawn omnibuses, sailing ships, biplanes, flying boats, boneshaker bicycles, steam locomotives and antique cars. Either the producers of this film were real artists at skillfully assembling stock footage, or a great deal of effort was put into shooting original footage for all of the historical scenes. They are nicely done.
The fun part of the film is that is in the end it turns out to be the most overdone car commercial in the history of motoring. Through generations of progress starting from our poor Oaf out on the road, through the stage coaches and flying boats, sailing ships, ocean liners and bicycles, the end of progress is the coming of the Motor Car, and the very pinnacle is apparently the Austin (“You just don’t buy a car, you INVEST in an Austin!”)
-made me want to run out and buy one, except they aren’t made anymore…
It seems all that Microchip/Moon Landing/Supersonic Travel stuff in the decades that followed was kind of an afterthought, after all: we HAD the Austin!
At one time this film was part of the Derann Catalog, but hasn’t been for a few years. I found it on the used list. Mine is black and white on black and white stock, and looks fantastic. The image is nice and sharp with acceptable grain and contrast. The sound is good with that certain vintage muddiness that seems just right in a film from so long ago.
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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so he can keep his other hand free to hold the seat while spitting tacks out of his mouth onto a magnetic hammer. ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
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