Considering it was such a warm Sunday, there was a reasonable attendance to see The Courier which starred Dominic Cummerbund as the British spy Greville Wynne. It was mainly about his relationship (professional and not sexual) with a Russian spy who was passing on information to the British and American authorities.
I thought it was an excellent film full of suspense. There's Media coverage at the end of the real Wynne being interviewed after his release and Cumberbatch was the spitting image. I think it's amazing how films portraying real life people manage to make the actors look exactly like them.
Anyway it was an interesting afternoon for a number of reasons. Firstly the film was good and enhanced my knowledge of the cold war and the Cuban missile crisis. Secondly there was a short film entitled "Living with the Car" which discussed how congested our roads were becoming and how something had to be done so that people and vehicles could live side by side harmoniously (yeah right).
The only problem was this film was from the 1960s and was looking to the 1980s and further forward to the turn of the century. It had high hopes of people being separated from traffic by various tiers with walkers on one tier and vehicles on another. It all sounded good but virtually none of it has come to pass.
The film highlighted the traffic problems in Norwich. London and Liverpool - so there was local interest. It was one of over 500 short documentaries under the Look at Life series that ran from 1959 until 1969. A bit of research established that the Hethersett-shown film comes from November 1964. That means the baby in the pram featured in one of the shots is now 58 years of age and the youngsters safely having a race along a road that has no traffic are in their 60s.
There's a load of these films available on You Tube. The other interesting thing was a survey that the Village Screen group has been asked to circulate. This was none of their doing and some of the questions were just plain ridiculous. One asked what the major earner of your household did for a living when you were 14. I have no idea what is behind this question. I have enough trouble remembering what it was like when I was 14 without answering questions on it.
Then there was a question about how valued I feel as a human being on a scale of one to 10, whether I have anyone to talk to if I'm feeling depressed, how stressed I felt yesterday on a scale of one to 10 and how happy I was yesterday on a scale (yes you've guessed it) of one to 10. There were other questions about why I was watching the film and was I there to be entertained and/or educated.
Strikes me that in our modern world you can't just do anything on a whim. There's always somebody trying to analyse every human movement and trying to work out why you are you.
Going back to the film. I couldn't make my mind up whether the theme music was modern or came from Shostakovich's Jazz suites. It was the former which left me ruminating on the fact it seemed to be a pale rip off of the Jazz suite number two which is one of my favourite pieces of music.