24 MARCH 1939, Page 6

The film Londoners is not yet on public show, but

it soon will be, and I counsel all who can to see it. It appears appropriately at the time of the L.C.C's jubilee, and the Gas Light and Coke Company, under whose auspices it was made, has presented copies of it to the L.C.C. for the Council to do what it will with. Its theme is London and its government, the London of today compared with the London of a hundred years ago, where cess-pools abounded, Sarah Gamps drank and prospered and "thieves, drunkards, harlots, the sick, the aged, the blind and the idiot found their only refuge in the discomfort of the hated shelter." Against that back- ground the best of the London of today, its schools, its hospitals, its green belt, its playgrounds, are admirably por- trayed, and there are some excellent shots of the County Council, which governs and directs it all, in session. The Realist Film Unit, and Mr. John Taylor, the director, have added one more, and far from the least distinguished, to the lengthening list of front-rank documentary films in which this country still holds acknowledged pre-eminence. The Gas Light and Coke Co., which in preparing its own admir- able propagandist films adds each year one, always of a high order, in which it grinds no axe and has no financial or busi- ness interest at all, performs therein a public service which merits full recognition.