Name: The Scene from Melbury House
Genre: Short
Duration: 15 min
Rating: 7

There is a scene in this film that really did make my toes curl. A man is painting a flagpole, hundreds of feet above the ground without any visible harness. That's the kind of image that doesn't feature quite so often, thankfully, in this quite entertaining observation of central London in late 1973. It's got just about everything from railway fire drills and roof repairers to mounted cavalry officers, wrecking balls and even nuns exercising as if they were rehearsing a scene from the "Ugly Duckling". There are some lovely old cars, cringe-making fashions and of course, there's plenty of rain. Indeed, at one stage there's even evidence of a white Christmas and an heatwave! It's a little time-capsule of a film illustrating a society that's got plenty going on in a thriving urban area where people still had real, functioning chimneys - and pea soup fogs! It was all shot from the same camera perched on the rooftop of the British Railways building and is edited sparingly and scored sympathetically.

The short form refers to creative works characterized by their brevity and concise storytelling. Unlike full-length feature films, short films have a running time of less than 45 minutes, while TV shorts have a running time of less than 22 minutes.

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As a training exercise for their apprentice camera operators, British Transport Films used surplus roll end length of film to record the daily lives of their neighbours from the roof of their building Melbury House.

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The Scene from Melbury House

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