The Open Road

One of the many satisfactions that continue to compensate for the frequent frustrations that plague students of silent film are survivals such as 'The Open Road', whose promotion from a passing mention in Rachel Low's book on twenties British cinema while discussing Claude Friese-Greene to a TV series in its own right was a consummation devoutly to be wished.

The colour is good enough to accurately render a rainbow. But 'The Open Road' suffers from the bugbear that afflicts most amateur photography in concentrating on the picturesque at the expense of what appeared at the time to be commonplace but gains in interest with the passage of time. The Yorkshire Dales, for example, continue to look pretty much today as they did a century ago; so it's the fleeting glimpses in colour of what at the time seemed everyday events like the Test at Lords in 1926 or what at the time seemed a rather mundane shot of Tower Bridge Road as it looked at the same time that today gives 'The Open Road' its most lasting value.