It Looks Like Rain

This is a short from John Nesbitt's "Passing Parade" series. It's about weather forecast and its need for farmers as well as others. There is some scenes of flooding. It touches on a lot of weather terminology but it doesn't actually explain any of them. I grew up watching the local weather man explain the weather on his green screen map. I learned more from him than from this.

From march of 1945... 10 minute wartime shortie from john nesbitt. The methods for forecasting the weather with an emphasis on farming. And the farmer is reading whitaker's almanac; never heard of that one. Discussions of anemometers. Snowfall cores. Local weather-gathering stations. Balloons. From the passing parade collection of shorts. Pretty basic tools, back in the day. Now it's all weather modeling on computers. Directed by paul burnford; he only directed 15 projects, and they were all short films.

This is one of those ponderous, self-important narrations that confuses MAN with men. Fortunately nowadays that seems to have largely died out in US documentaries although I've heard it when the narration seemed to be aping the old British style.

With the dam floods, tornadoes, hurricane, tropical storm, drought, so far this year, this short has particular resonance.

Historical perspective: radar was developed during the war. The technology of weather took a giant leap forward with that. For instance, nobody knew that the massive 1938 hurricane was on the way. Katherine Hepburn, among many others, almost didn't make it out alive. So the people, not all of them men!!, involved in meteorology were thrilled with the advances and on fire to change life as they knew it. We learn more now in grade school about the weather than most adult city slickers knew about the it in the 40s.

The short had several goals. One was to give city folk a clue that their self-absorbed perturbation about the weather wasn't the whole story. Another was to teach some basics about the weather and weather prediction past and present. And the third was to show examples of the wild swings that can occur thereby giving a reason for us to learn about the subject. I think they covered all three well in the time available. Points off for the mega snub of the ladies, when they had been working hard at all sorts of previously male-dominated jobs through the war including the weather biz.

This episode of John Nesbitt's THE PASSING PARADE series for MGM talks about the weather, and about the people who try to do something about it. It shows how various weather agencies monitor, analyze wind, temperature and other aspects to spread them to people whose livelihoods are dependent on them. In this case, it's "John the Farmer" who needs to know there's a flood coming, so he can prepare for it.

It's more like a Public Service Announcement than the usual short about some forgotten real individual or institution that John Nesbitt's plain-spoken shorts usually concerned themselves with. I believe that this would be explained away as showing the forgotten men and women who serve the world through their work for weather bureaus. Except we don't see any of them as individuals.

It Looks Like Rain (1945)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Interesting (51st) entry in John Nesbitt's Passing Parade series takes a look at how the weather is predicted and what impact this has on farmers. The history side of this short talks about the early days when the only thing people had to warn against bad weather was prayer. It then flashes forward to present times where we see how meteorologist are able to track storms and where they're going to hit. We then see how farmers must listen for this warnings in order to protect their harvest. This entry has a few good moments but in the end I felt we really didn't learn too much even though the film takes a lot of time to try and teach us things. The only interesting aspect of the film was seeing how the weather reports were written out back in the day before computers like we have today. Seeing the old method was at least interesting but I wish the film would have focused more on this aspect instead of the second half drama. The second part of the film shows the farmers sticking together to lay down sand bags. Nothing too original or interesting there. As usual, Nesbitt's narration is top-notch but in the end there's just not enough here to make it one of the better entries from the series.