(Full move at the Internet Archives.) At slightly less than a full hour in length, The London Nobody Knows is relatively short documentary shot in March 1967 by Norman Cohen (11 June 1936 – 26 Oct 1983), a Ireland-born producer and director better known (if at all) for specializing in lowbrow British comedies like Confessions of a Pop Performer (1975 / trailer), Confessions of a Driving Instructor (1976 / trailer) Stand Up, Virgin Soldiers (1977 / full movie), and/or Confessions from a Holiday Camp (1977 / trailer).
London Nobody Knows Excerpt:
Some five year prior to this mostly forgotten documentary here, Cohen had co-directed, along with Arnold L. Miller (20 Oct 1922 – 26 Apr 2014), the Stanley Long-produced full-color dullumentary London in the Raw (1964 / trailer / full film).* But if that Mondo Cane (1962 / trailer)-inspired "shockumentary" wallowed happily — if condescendingly — in the inanities of yesterday's London and cast but a rare glance at the city's truly non-glamorous, The London Nobody Knows casts its eye above all upon the lost and overlooked, the working class, and the lower echelons. And but for an oddly out-of-place, almost Monty-Pythonesque interlude involving S Behr and Mathew Ltd egg-cracking factory in Borough High Street, London, the humor is dry and definitely outweighed by somber respect.
Not from the film —
short documentary on work at S Behr and Mathew Ltd:
The London Nobody Knows is based on the British artist and writer Geoffrey S. Fletcher's eponymous book from 1962,* for which Norman Cohen hired Brian Comport** to flesh out a screenplay and James Mason (15 May 1909 – 27 Jul 1984) to act as the documentary's neatly dressed onscreen host and commentator. Mason's presence, while enjoyable and hardly detrimental, is somewhat beside the point as it is not his presence but the city itself and the things shown that make the documentary interesting. (Okay, the timbre of his voice is pleasing, but a pleasant voice does not require a star presence.) Most of what was already in the shadows or on its way to oblivion when this film was made is now long gone (or irrevocably different), and therein lies the true appeal of the movie. It is a wonderfully fascinating look at a place and world most of us have never seen, and whether or not you are from London is rather immaterial in this regard.
* "Fletcher was drawn to the undervalued, the ugly, the decrepit — he liked stuttering gas lamps, cast-iron lavatories and railway yards, the urban poetry of dereliction. He was dismayed by the rise of office blocks and the gung-ho redevelopment which would stamp out, he correctly predicted, 'the tawdry, extravagant and eccentric'. The London he loved was disappearing fast — it was a Victorian city still, but one that had been blown to smithereens by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. It was very much a post-war city, with bomb sites and widespread neglect and decay. It was shabby and beautiful and full of accumulated detail. [...] [The Glue Factory]"
** Brian Comport (16 Apr 1938 – 5 Sept 2013) subsequently had a short, splashy period in British genre films, producing the screenplays for a quick succession of cult films: Freddie Francis's Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly (1970 / trailer), Pete Walker's Man of Violence (1970 / trailer), Robert Hartford-Davis's Beware My Brethren (1972 / trailer) and Peter Newbrook's The Asphyx (1972).
The London Nobody Knows —
Chapel Market, Islington:
Opening with a short discourse on the dangers of Modernist architecture — a misdirected discourse, as it is not Modernist architecture that is the danger to urban residents, but office buildings of any style — we join Mason in the ruins of the Bedford Theatre in Camden, a prime if typical example of how the splendor of the past can so easily become the refuse of today, doomed for demolition.
Here, as so often, Mason's neat appearance is a sharp contrast to the decay around him. We follow him as he strolls around the city, from one working class street market to the other; from the then-still-unchanged backyard where Jack the Ripper's second [canonical] victim, Annie Chapman nee Eliza Ann Smith (25 Sept 1840 – 8 Sept 1888) was found to Clink Street, the former location of Clink Prison, the jail that gave us the slang phrase, "in the clink"; from a Salvation Army soup kitchen to what is now the Roundhouse theater but was then the deserted railway engine shed with railway turntable; from a fabulous underground urinal with fish tanks to the previously mentioned egg-cracking factory...
Along the way, Mason chats with the down-and-out as well as some street buskers — one of whom seems to sing in Yiddish, the other of whom does a demented tap dance to guitar accompaniment* — and comments upon the homeless and methylated-spirits-swilling alcoholics that can be counted among those who are the forgotten, the lost, the overlooked, the ignored, the doomed. The methylated-spirits-swilling alcoholics and a live-eel segment treads mighty close to shockumentary territory, but the film is a bit too genteel to go the full monty in that direction — to its advantage.
* Neither busker has anything to do with the other. The first carries himself and performs as if he may have once had a career at least on the sidelines of the lowbrow stages. The other is "Norman Norris a.k.a. Lord Mustard [...]. In later years he became a well-known street entertainer in Oxford, often going by the names Captain Tap or Colonel Mustard. Born in Glasgow in 1911 as George Pirie, he took the name of Alastair MacDonald as his stage name and traveled the country as an entertainer. He claimed to have worked with Norman Wisdom, and to have won the Bognor Regis Opportunity Knocks contest in 1981. He said in a newspaper interview 'I taught myself to tap dance as a boy and also do gurning [making strange faces]. Mostly I entertain to raise money for charity — I was once a living legend in London. [The Glue Factory]"
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Comport and Cohen never fill Mason's mouth with acrimonious statements of blame, accusation or pity, preferring instead to let the images and people speak for themselves. The result is gloomy, to say the least, as most of the people presented — like most of the building and places visited in the documentary — so obviously have no upwards in their futures. But at the same time, The London Nobody Knows remains eminently captivating, a feast for anyone who takes pleasure in seeing the past — be it locations or buildings or style — that time has stolen, that has made way for the new. (A new that itself will also one day make way for something else — the newer.)
Naturally, whatever documentary purposes the film maintains to have pretty much fly out the window during the inane comic sequence involving the egg-breaking factory, which is no way documentary in nature and totally ridiculous in the context of the film as a whole. (For some, the interlude might bring to mind the equally forced dramatic sequence of a staged suicide in the silent-film documentary, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City [1927 / full film], which likewise stands out as decidedly non-documentary interlude amidst the rest of the otherwise apparently non-fiction visuals. A feature film which, like this film here, presents an amazing view of a world that no longer exists.)
It is perhaps rather aside the point to argue whether The London Nobody Knows "works" as a documentary or not, for whatever flaws it might have, age has given the visual time capsule an amazing, eye-catching patina that makes it an absolutely absorbing watch.
Nevertheless, by the end of the 45 minutes, one cannot help but recognize a fact of life: while the locations may be long-gone or long-gentrified, the poverty and lifestyles of the film's underbelly are oddly recognizable as still present in every big city around the world today.
In some ways, life never changes. Today, of course, there are new "forgotten" locations and structures that shall soon be no more, as property is money and money is god, but at the same time it seems, regardless of what is razed or gentrified, there will always be those who get left on the wayside, be it due to personal tragedy, alcoholism, stupidity, or simple bad luck. The only thing that has really changed is the clothing.
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