The Beach of Nazaré

I've spent the last couple of years looking at the James A. Fitzpatrick Traveltalks that play on TCM, making fun of the narration and occasionally admiring the spectacular but often faded beauty of the Technicolor images. This one just turned up, and my analysis is exactly the inverse. The narration is pretty good, talking about the antecedents of the folks, and he town's isolation and routine, but the black-and-white camerawork, although competent, and the print in good shape, is less than eye-popping.

So, which is better? I guess that's a matter of taste. Without the interest of figuring out what snarky thing I'm going to say, this is a bit less interesting to me.

Beach of Nazare, The (1954)

** (out of 4)

Part of RKO-Pathe's Screenliner series, this short takes us to Bazare on the Atlantic coast of Portugal. Once there we get to see the fishing village and how people there make money. We also hear other stories about the small place including one hunter's story about being saved by a Heavenly vision. This is the third of fourth film I've seen from this series which tries to copy the style of MGM's TravelTalks series. I'm really not sure what RKO-Pathe were trying here because the MGM series was in color so why this one, in B&W, tried to match wits with them is beyond me. With that said, the film has another negative thing going for it and that's the narration, which is just too dry to make the film all that entertaining. The movie has some nice images but it still comes off as a second rate filler.

I saw this on TCM, and it's very similar to the "Traveltalks" travelogues made and narrated by James A. FitzPatrick for MGM, which are regularly shown on TCM. The main differences are having a different narrator and this short is in B&W instead of color.

This short is about the tiny fishing village of Nazaré on the west coast of Portugal, which was settled by Scottish immigrants during the Napoleonic Wars. Despite a nearby resort beach, the inhabitants have maintained their traditions and have lived in much the same manner for the last 10 generations. They go barefoot and wear plaid traditional dress, the men work on fishing boats, they use oxen to move the boats into and out of the sea instead of building piers, most of the people help with the fishing industry, and most of the people stay in the village their whole lives and live "the only way they know".

By today's standards these old travelogues are pretty forgettable. But they were quite popular back in the days before TV (or during the early TV years) and the internet because most people never saw a glimpse of life outside their own small world except in the travelogue shorts shown at the local theater.