Bathing beauties, Britain 1926 (in colour for the first time)
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Your support makes all the difference.One of the most remarkable documentary films ever made, featuring historic scenes shot along the length of Britain, is to be shown to a mass audience for the first time.
The Open Road is a record of a journey from Land's End to John O'Groats by Claude Friese-Greene, the son of cinema pioneer William. Claude made the film to show off his revolutionary colour process but, because of its technical complexity, his invention never caught on.
As a result, this three-hour social travelogue, made between 1924 and 1926, showing bathing beauties in Plymouth, Welsh miners, the Blackpool illuminations and tartan-makers in Kilbarchan, Scotland, was never shown commercially.
In it, Friese-Greene, a young survivor of the Somme, toured the country in his Vauxhall D-type, with his assistant, shooting scenes of everyday, mainly rural, life. And when a scene lacked a certain decorative quality that the young film-maker wanted, he would ask local girls to walk coquettishly through the shot.
The film, whose new colour process required projectors to be run at a faster speed than normal, was used only in fragments at trade shows. Friese-Greene went on to work as a cinematographer with directors such as Alfred Hitchcock. He died aged 45 in 1943. His family gave a version of the film to the British Film Institute.
Now it has been restored and the BBC will broadcast parts in The Lost World of Friese-Greene, a series of three programmes that starts on 18 April on BBC 2.
Additional reporting by Julia White
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