Cinema: London Document

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Fifty years ago the London County Council, created by the Local Government Act of 1888, set about tidying up London. This spring a considerably more livable London is celebrating the L. C. C.'s jubilee with all manner of polite and showy functions, not the least of which will be a firemen's parade in June for the Duke and Duchess of Kent. To add its voice to the general huzza, the Gas Light and Coke Co. this month released in London a 20-minute documentary film called The Londoners, sketching London life from Dickens' day to the present.

Directed by Documentarian John Taylor, with Poet W. H. Auden contributing to its commentary, The Londoners contains no boosts for the gas company but devotes all its footage to London, before and after L. C. C. days. Its staging of Dickens' day is more stagey than Hollywood's, but in its prying around modern London it uncovers much straight, unsugared stuff. It explores sagging flats, unkempt streets, records the pallor and pinch of slumdwellers' faces. The commentary: "Democracy means faith in the ordinary man and woman, in the decency of average human nature. Here then in London build the city of the free."