. . . in your own backyard, favorite picnic area, or on your local ball field during the past million years or so. LOOKING AT LONDON is narrated with the attitude that normal people WANT to know that this small pile of ashes was "Bill Shakespeare's" original draft of TWELFTH NIGHT, or that those smoking embers were once the final resting place chopping block for the noggins of "Annie Boleyn, Walt Raleigh, and King Chuck I." There's way too much historical stuff and famous art work still around for any one person to view it all in even a dozen lifetimes (largely because a few parochial nations insist upon making the "Kodak Moment" process highly expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient by REFUSING to move their most important relics to Arizona for safe-keeping: London Bridge has been kept from falling down ever since it was relocated to near the Grand Canyon decades ago--what are The Great Pyramids, Notre Dame Cathedral, and that Tower of Pizza waiting for, an engraved invitation?) LOOKING AT LONDON strives for a melancholy tone likely to cause viewers to vow NEVER to set foot in England. But the fact of the matter is that if you're the first one in a couple centuries to dig down 10 feet virtually ANYWHERE on this globe, you're simply bound to unearth a few human skeletons before working up a sweat.

. . . if credited producer\director (and probable uncredited writer) James A. FitzPatrick would have put London's WWII bruises in some sort of historical context. I'm not planning to re-dub this short, but even dispensing with thousands of dollars worth of fact-checking, it is clear from the 10 minutes of footage shown here that the Nazi V-rocket attack achieved nowhere near the level of destruction of total city infrastructure as the Great Fire of London (1666, give or take 500 years). Further, several waves of bubonic plague and small pox epidemics wiped out a much more substantial percentage of Londoners than Hitler managed with all his marks worth of rocketry and Luftwaffe bombing runs. Though I saw this short in color, the memory of it lingers so grimly I could swear it was a black & white piece. If rival travel commentary pro Paul Harvey had tackled this "it's safe to see Big Ben again" piece, I'm sure he would have been much less of a gloomy Gus than Mr. FitzPatrick acquits himself as here. Since being upbeat seems the whole point of this LOOKING AT London, it is too bad the narrator miscast himself thus.

Looking at London (1946) *** (out of 4) Another entry in MGM's TravelTalk series this time taking a look at London with such sites as Buckingham Palace, the Bank of England, Hyde Park, the various bridges and much more. This series paid quite a few visits to England so the sites here aren't anything new but what is new is that this was filmed just years after WW2 so we get to see some of the destruction caused by the war. We get to see various buildings that were involved in bombings and this includes the birthplace of Charles and Mary Lamb. While the documentary does look at many bombed sites, it also wants to make clear that the British people are very strong and moving out in repairing their cities.

The narrator is quick to point out that although the blitz during WWII did destroy many buildings in London, many did survive intact. And, of course, the British spirit never died. Once the war was over, the renewal began with the building and reconstruction of the city. This is a typical James A. FitzPatrick TravelTalk short subject.We get a glimpse of London sites--the Thames, the bridges, the Bank of England, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, and monuments to Queen Victoria and Lord Nelson. All of these buildings and Piccadilly Circus survived.Then we're shown some of the damaged buildings, foremost among them being the birthplace of Charles and Mary Lamb and some ruins surrounding St. Paul's Cathedral. The cathedral itself was miraculously undamaged and stands proud and tall above the ruins.A closing section deals with the British spirit to survive the scars of war and the assurance that the rebuilding will soon begin.Aside from the monuments for Queen Victoria and Lord Nelson, we're also shown a statue of Abraham Lincoln near Buckingham Palace, proof of the good relationship Great Britain has with the United States.