Night Mail

Unlike the WAR COMES TO America (1945) entry in the WHY WE FIGHT documentary series, this famed British effort in a comparable – if longer-running and, decidedly, less enthusing – cycle of "Transport" films has not stood well the test of time. I was even tempted to shave off another half-a-star to its rating, but I guess – much like a normal movie – one needs to assess such items within the context of the time in which they were made. In its case, too, one has to consider what it was attempting to do – both narratively (a depiction of the train service, often dependent on split-second timing, run at night by the Post Office throughout the United Kingdom) and technically (still, though much has been said of its adherence to the celebrated montage – generally frantic and frequently symbolic – typified by classic Soviet cinema, this is only intermittently evident here!). However, the justifiably lauded finale – edited to the rhythm of a W.H. Auden poem – remains exhilarating to watch.

For what it is worth, a certain amount of nostalgia played into this viewing – not only because we are basically watching a way-of-life that is fast approaching extinction (in the face of the technological wonders of our age), but due to the fact that my father used to work as a postman and, as a kid, I spent a good many Summer's day both at his office and on the road, observing and even helping out in the daily distribution of the local and international mail!

This is a British documentary short about the mail being delivered by the train. It follows the mail from being received and snatched up by the trains. It shows the system as an efficient method manned by hard working people. I don't think that I've ever actually seen someone hangs the mail bags which gets snatched by the train. It's interesting to see these trains close up. It is expertly filmed. The workers are probably not actors which limits any performance. It is still a fascinating time capsule especially for any train lovers.

"Night Mail" is still a famous film 75 years after it was made in 1936. It is not, however, a feature film but a documentary, only 25 minutes long, about an everyday subject, the journey of the mail train from London to Scotland. It is perhaps the best-remembered of a series of films produced by the GPO Film Unit publicising the work of the British General Post Office.

Part of the reason for its fame is the collaboration between two giants of the English cultural scene, the poet W. H. Auden and his friend the composer Benjamin Britten. Auden's poem written for the film, the one starting "This is the Night Mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order" has been much anthologised; I was introduced to it at primary school, and some of its evocative lines, such as "But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes" and "Letters with faces scrawled in the margin" have remained with me ever since. In the film itself the poem is read out in the closing few minutes, beginning slowly but picking up speed in order to imitate the rhythm of the train's wheels, and then slowing down again as the train approaches its final destination in Aberdeen. It is accompanied by Britten's music which also evokes the sounds and rhythms of a moving train.

The film is, however, also notable for its purely visual qualities, with some striking black-and-white photography of the train and the landscapes, both rural and industrial, through which it passes. There are films where virtually every shot reminds us of a painting; here every shot reminds us of a documentary photograph, perhaps something from "National Geographic". The film also serves as a piece of social history, even if the obviously scripted dialogue between the men in the on-board sorting office owes more to upper-class preconceptions about how working-class Britons spoke than to reality. (These scenes were not shot on board the train itself but in a studio). We may today regard the steam locomotive as a quaint and cosy part of the nostalgia industry, and that system of nets used for loading and unloading mailbags while the train is in motion certainly has, to our eyes, a Heath-Robinson air about it. Nevertheless, in 1936 the Royal Mail had a well-deserved reputation for efficiency, and the film helps us to understand how it achieved this reputation with the aid of what would have been the state-of-the-art technology of the period.

I haven't awarded the film a score out of ten, as it seems pointless trying to compare it with the full-length dramas which I normally review. A recent viewing on the "Sky Arts" channel, however, has enabled me to appreciate a much talked-about film which for me had for a long time just been a memory from a school poetry lesson.

Made in 1936 (in black and white of course) NIGHTMAIL has become an icon of the British documentary movement. The budget was only £2,000 and the film was made as a promotional film for the Post Office services. The GPO film unit deserves a posthumous Oscar.

The quality of directing, lighting and camera work in this documentary beats that of many of today's films and brings an almost Hitchcockian atmosphere and tension to the screen.

This is the story of the Travelling Post office from Euston station in London to Glasgow in Scotland, in the days when the railways were efficient, frequent and run by proud workers who wore waistcoats, ties and hats and spoke politely to one another like the team that they were. It is surprising how old the men all seem now, in these days of youth culture, gentle character-full faces bearing no guile, tired and lined but proud and honest. The journey begins with the great spoutings of steam and turning of oiled wheels and the sound of banging doors, cries and whistles that emanate from all mainline stations and follows the trains from station to station throughout the night as they pick up mail along the way. A weird and wonderful Heath-Robinson device had been invented whereby bundles of post could be hurled onto a moving train as it passed through the station, propelled from a rope net on a pulley with such precise timing that it would land with a forceful thud onto the moving train. Long before emails and mobile phones had been dreamt of the only means of co-ordinating the system and ensuring safe delivery was the telephone, and this was used to perfect effect as the arrival of the Night Mail train would be phoned through from one station to the next down the line, accurate to the last minute, this being essential for the bundle to be aimed and "fired" at the right moment by those on the look-out. Rushing through sleeping towns and landscapes, main stations and rural ones, the efficiency of the Travelling Post Office and the men who worked on it throughout the night to get the post to its destination is awe inspiring. There is nothing mundane about it – it almost has a spiritual quality about it not dissimilar to the night-life photographs of Brassai.

The ultimate section of the film is positively inspired, when the score by Benjamin Britten is combined with the words of W. H. Auden in time to the sounds and rhythms of the train, making one want nothing more than to be on that train, to be part of the workforce, to be part of the team that works for the Night Mail that delivers the post to letterboxes all across England. It evokes the England of John Betjeman and of Alan Bennet, of strong tea and washing on lines, of lonely sheep and flint walls, of industrial chimneys and cloth caps, of invention and hard-work, of grand-fathers and family reunions, of childhood and of old age, when the work is done and stories are told of how it was.

The acknowledged leaders of documentary films for more than twenty years beginning in the 1930s were the British. The brilliant foundation English filmmakers' laid down in the 1930s carried over to the 1940s documenting their country's ordeal in World War Two. The famous 'British Documentary Film Movement' was led by one of its more popular early contributions, February 1936's "Night Mail." Scotsman John Grierson was instrumental in the formation of United Kingdom's documentaries. As a film critic for the New York Sun, Grierson was the first to use the term "documentary" in his paper's review on Robert J. Flaherty's film 1926 "Moana." Later, he was named an assistant to the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) film production department.

At EMB Grierson produced his first documentary, the influential 1929 "Drifters," detailing the daily life of herring fishermen. When EMB closed its film unit in 1933 because of the Depression, Grierson and several colleagues relocated to the General Post Office (GPO), an improbable government agency where England's imprint in documentaries really took off.

England's General Post office was the largest employer in the country, numbering over 250,000. Its public relations office, with an adjunct film unit, spent more money than any other governmental agency informing the country about the operations of the GPO. "Night Mail" was produced to illustrate how the evening express mail train from London to Scotland was the lifeblood to innumerable communities along its route, delivering daily newspapers, important legal paperwork and simple 'feel-good' letters to its customers.

Explains film reviewer J. Watts, "'Night Mail' is one of the best known British documentaries of the 1930s and is often considered to be one of the best documentaries and best short films ever made." The 24-minute film was under the direction of Harry Watt, who relied on Basil Wright's research and script following the progress of heaps of mail originating from London's Euston Station and other points on their nightly journey to the London, Midland and Scottish Railway terminus. A dramatic highlight shows the train's collection of mail bags along the way without slowing down by snaring them on hanging poles. Conversely, when a hamlet's mail needed to be dropped off, the coordination between the train and the people on the ground was performed with split-second precision.

Meanwhile as the train raced throughout the countryside, mail was sorted onboard. The bucking of the train made it virtually impossible to get a steady shot, so a reproduction of the coach was built in the GPO studio. At first the set was shakened to simulate the train's movement, but Watt noticed the structure "just rattled like a sideboard in a junction town." The solution was to show a string hanging down and swinging. The postal worker 'actors' were told to sway at the same time as the string to fool its audiences.

Once the rough cut of "Night Mail" was seen, Grierson acknowledged the film captured the machinery of the overnight delivery system, but questioned "What about the people who write them and the people who get them?" A poem was inserted to be read in the film's coda. Famed poet W. H. Auden was hired to compose the concluding passage set to a Sergei Eisenstein-style of montage shots. "It's the final scenes of the film that turn 'Night Mail' into a little masterpiece," pointed out reviewer Watts. The poem made "Night Mail" a work of art and departs from the many other documentaries produced by GPO.

"Night Mail" proved to be a huge hit with the British public. Its popularity is so enduring that in 1987 an update on the documentary was produced, 'Night Mail II." The documentary format was so prominent in the United Kingdom that once the war was over, British dramatic feature films inserted an inordinate amount of documentary-style footage that gave its cinema a sense of realism that other countries eventually duplicated.