British United States

How can distant countries ever get the right idea about each other? One way would be through the cinema. In Britain last week such a film was released--perhaps the best single contribution to Anglo-American understanding in recent years.

Short (43 minutes) and inexpensive (about $30,000), the film is simply titled United States. It was written, directed, and produced by greying, 35-year-old Lieut. Colonel Eric Ambler, author of distinguished and popular thrillers (Journey Into Fear, A Coffin for Dimitrios). To gather his material, Ambler spent about five weeks in the U.S. viewing close to a million feet of film, spent many more poring over volumes of Americana. The final product is a composite of snatches from U.S. films--by Pare Lorentz, the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the MARCH OF TIME--and original scenes photographed in Wembley.

United States begins with a British soldier and his girl watching a U.S. gangster movie. After the show, at a tea counter, the Tommy tells his girl that the tough talk, the chattering machine guns, the breakneck getaways are all true, that America is really like that; he read all about it in a crime magazine. Nearby a G.I. (played by Corporal Warren Bryan) sulks out loud: "Why, I've never even seen a gangster, never heard of anyone in our town who has. . . . That's not American but you can't tell them so. . . . But if some British guy who'd been around back home could tell them, he wouldn't even have to like us, not if he just put things down fair and square. . . ."

United States does precisely that. With Cinemactor David Niven, now a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, acting as narrator, it shows first New York, which "isn't America," then traces U.S. history from the landing at Plymouth, through the Revolution, the Civil War, the settling of the West, winding up with a panorama of the current U.S. scene. Typical of the tone that makes United States so successful is the commentary on the Revolution: "The men of Washington's Army were no longer British subjects resisting the armed forces of their king. They were Americans, fighting a war of liberation."

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