Night Mail (1936) User Reviews

Neither Rain Nor Sleet Nor Track Workers

[boblipton · 8/10 · 7 September 2020]

Where did the British government gain its ability to produce great wartime propaganda films like LONDON CAN TAKE IT!? through the Post Office, where a film unit had been running for years. Here is an early example of one of their masterpieces, making something as dull as sort mail and getting it to its recipient a cinematically exciting short film.

Look at the way the shots are composed, with odd angles, and for 1936, a lightning-fast editing paace that still keeps you watching -- you might miss something.-- and hand-held moving shots.

Utopia, 1936-style

[Gyran · 8/10 · 28 May 2002]

This film was made by the General Post Office (GPO) an organisation that has seen many manifestations and name changes since 1936. It depicts a near-utopian world populated by chirpy proletarians working through the night to sort and deliver the mail. The technology is ancient, steam trains, hand trolleys, manual sorting. Bags of unsorted letters are hung on the side of the railway line and caught by a mechanical grab as the train passes. Bags of sorted letters are similarly hung out of the train and caught in a net as it flashes by. The impression was given of extreme efficiency but I was struck by the lack of controls. If a bag missed the net, probably no-one ever noticed until it was found months later half-eaten in a field full of sheep along the railway line. The photography was excellent with lots of silhouettes against the night sky. The sound quality in the print I saw was poor but the dialogue given to the plucky workers was clunky anyway and largely not worth hearing. The voice giving the commentary had to be heard to be believed. My favourite character was the manager in a suit who wandered amiably down the train dispensing dubious advice. Some things never change. Night Mail is largely remembered today because of Benjamin Britten's and WH Auden's collaboration on the film but their contribution is limited to a brief section at the end.

NIGHT MAIL {Short} (Harry Watt & Basil Wright, 1936) ***

[Bunuel1976 · 7/10 · 4 January 2014]

Unlike the WAR COMES TO America (1945) entry in the WHY WE FIGHT documentary series, this famed British effort in a comparable – if longer-running and, decidedly, less enthusing – cycle of "Transport" films has not stood well the test of time. I was even tempted to shave off another half-a-star to its rating, but I guess – much like a normal movie – one needs to assess such items within the context of the time in which they were made. In its case, too, one has to consider what it was attempting to do – both narratively (a depiction of the train service, often dependent on split-second timing, run at night by the Post Office throughout the United Kingdom) and technically (still, though much has been said of its adherence to the celebrated montage – generally frantic and frequently symbolic – typified by classic Soviet cinema, this is only intermittently evident here!). However, the justifiably lauded finale – edited to the rhythm of a W.H. Auden poem – remains exhilarating to watch.

For what it is worth, a certain amount of nostalgia played into this viewing – not only because we are basically watching a way-of-life that is fast approaching extinction (in the face of the technological wonders of our age), but due to the fact that my father used to work as a postman and, as a kid, I spent a good many Summer's day both at his office and on the road, observing and even helping out in the daily distribution of the local and international mail!

This is the Night Mail Crossing the Border

[JamesHitchcock · 30 January 2012]

"Night Mail" is still a famous film 75 years after it was made in 1936. It is not, however, a feature film but a documentary, only 25 minutes long, about an everyday subject, the journey of the mail train from London to Scotland. It is perhaps the best-remembered of a series of films produced by the GPO Film Unit publicising the work of the British General Post Office.

Part of the reason for its fame is the collaboration between two giants of the English cultural scene, the poet W. H. Auden and his friend the composer Benjamin Britten. Auden's poem written for the film, the one starting "This is the Night Mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order" has been much anthologised; I was introduced to it at primary school, and some of its evocative lines, such as "But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes" and "Letters with faces scrawled in the margin" have remained with me ever since. In the film itself the poem is read out in the closing few minutes, beginning slowly but picking up speed in order to imitate the rhythm of the train's wheels, and then slowing down again as the train approaches its final destination in Aberdeen. It is accompanied by Britten's music which also evokes the sounds and rhythms of a moving train.

The film is, however, also notable for its purely visual qualities, with some striking black-and-white photography of the train and the landscapes, both rural and industrial, through which it passes. There are films where virtually every shot reminds us of a painting; here every shot reminds us of a documentary photograph, perhaps something from "National Geographic". The film also serves as a piece of social history, even if the obviously scripted dialogue between the men in the on-board sorting office owes more to upper-class preconceptions about how working-class Britons spoke than to reality. (These scenes were not shot on board the train itself but in a studio). We may today regard the steam locomotive as a quaint and cosy part of the nostalgia industry, and that system of nets used for loading and unloading mailbags while the train is in motion certainly has, to our eyes, a Heath-Robinson air about it. Nevertheless, in 1936 the Royal Mail had a well-deserved reputation for efficiency, and the film helps us to understand how it achieved this reputation with the aid of what would have been the state-of-the-art technology of the period.

I haven't awarded the film a score out of ten, as it seems pointless trying to compare it with the full-length dramas which I normally review. A recent viewing on the "Sky Arts" channel, however, has enabled me to appreciate a much talked-about film which for me had for a long time just been a memory from a school poetry lesson.

expertly filmed

[SnoopyStyle · 7/10 · 7 November 2020]

This is a British documentary short about the mail being delivered by the train. It follows the mail from being received and snatched up by the trains. It shows the system as an efficient method manned by hard working people. I don't think that I've ever actually seen someone hangs the mail bags which gets snatched by the train. It's interesting to see these trains close up. It is expertly filmed. The workers are probably not actors which limits any performance. It is still a fascinating time capsule especially for any train lovers.

Around the time of King Arthur's Court and Robin Hood . . .

[oscaralbert · 7/10 · 11 March 2018]

. . . England ran a steam punk version of the Pony Express, NIGHT MAIL contends. An outrageous blend of the most impractical aspects of "Willie Wonka" and "Rube Goldberg," this alleged operation involved Snow White's Seven Dwarfs sorting 500 million letters into 336 pigeonholes, according to a breathless narrator, who winds up getting so wound up that he begins rapping Middle Earth-type place names that are probably only figments of J.R.R. Tolkien's imagination. Though most of the extras recruited to film NIGHT MAIL manage to keep a "straight face" during their ludicrous scenes, a few of them wink and smirk at the camera, confirming what all but the most naïve viewers will suspect after a few minutes on the NIGHT MAIL train: this vehicle is more of a hoax than Harry Potter's Night Bus. Not only are the procedures shown here hopelessly complicated, but it's also clear that they could never be duplicated on a daily (much less nightly) basis for even a week. Furthermore, covering a tiny island such as England with a beta version of SNOWPIERCER when the vast expanses of our USA are handily serviced by a few mail trucks will make sense only to the most deluded fringe element of Anglophiles.

A Brilliantly Noirish Night Journey from London to Glasgow

[JohnHowardReid · 9/10 · 3 August 2008]

Here, courtesy of an excellent DVD from The British Film Institute, is the real-life counterpart of "The Flying Scot". Produced by John Grierson for the General Post Office Film Unit, brilliantly directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, "Night Mail" is a short account (25 minutes) of the special train – literally a traveling post office – that made a 365 nights-a-year journey from Euston station in London to Glasgow in Scotland in the 1930s and beyond. (The film was released by Associated British in 1936). With carriages staffed by the real mail sorters, it's impossible to separate the studio material from actuality. The only giveaways are the snatches of dialogue which have obviously been post-synced by professionals under the direction of Alberto Cavalcanti. True, in almost all cases, the directors have taken great care to cleverly obscure the mouths of the workers, but their accents are undoubtedly those of actors akin to the credited off-camera commentators, Stuart Legg and John Grierson himself.

Many people have praised the Benjamin Britten score and the brief poem by W.H. Auden, but for me, the chief joys of the film lay in the cinematography by Chick Fowle and Jonah Jones. Just about the whole movie was shot at night as the train speeds through unusually bleak, blighted landscapes, which give this film a distinctive, noirish quality that is reinforced by the smelters, mills and smoke-stacks of Scotland's dismally sterile, impersonal and uninviting factory towns.

A unique glimpse of postal services in 1936

[olivia-113 · 10/10 · 27 February 2009]

Made in 1936 (in black and white of course) NIGHTMAIL has become an icon of the British documentary movement. The budget was only £2,000 and the film was made as a promotional film for the Post Office services. The GPO film unit deserves a posthumous Oscar.

The quality of directing, lighting and camera work in this documentary beats that of many of today's films and brings an almost Hitchcockian atmosphere and tension to the screen.

This is the story of the Travelling Post office from Euston station in London to Glasgow in Scotland, in the days when the railways were efficient, frequent and run by proud workers who wore waistcoats, ties and hats and spoke politely to one another like the team that they were. It is surprising how old the men all seem now, in these days of youth culture, gentle character-full faces bearing no guile, tired and lined but proud and honest. The journey begins with the great spoutings of steam and turning of oiled wheels and the sound of banging doors, cries and whistles that emanate from all mainline stations and follows the trains from station to station throughout the night as they pick up mail along the way. A weird and wonderful Heath-Robinson device had been invented whereby bundles of post could be hurled onto a moving train as it passed through the station, propelled from a rope net on a pulley with such precise timing that it would land with a forceful thud onto the moving train. Long before emails and mobile phones had been dreamt of the only means of co-ordinating the system and ensuring safe delivery was the telephone, and this was used to perfect effect as the arrival of the Night Mail train would be phoned through from one station to the next down the line, accurate to the last minute, this being essential for the bundle to be aimed and "fired" at the right moment by those on the look-out. Rushing through sleeping towns and landscapes, main stations and rural ones, the efficiency of the Travelling Post Office and the men who worked on it throughout the night to get the post to its destination is awe inspiring. There is nothing mundane about it – it almost has a spiritual quality about it not dissimilar to the night-life photographs of Brassai.

The ultimate section of the film is positively inspired, when the score by Benjamin Britten is combined with the words of W. H. Auden in time to the sounds and rhythms of the train, making one want nothing more than to be on that train, to be part of the workforce, to be part of the team that works for the Night Mail that delivers the post to letterboxes all across England. It evokes the England of John Betjeman and of Alan Bennet, of strong tea and washing on lines, of lonely sheep and flint walls, of industrial chimneys and cloth caps, of invention and hard-work, of grand-fathers and family reunions, of childhood and of old age, when the work is done and stories are told of how it was.

How Scots got their mail

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 27 July 2016]

"Night Mail" is a British 25-minute short film from 1936, so this one has its 80th anniversary this year and is still in black-and-white of course. But it does have sound. This was the year when Nazis came into Power in Germany and politics became a huge issue in films in the 10 years after that. But here we still have a completely unpolitical film, which shows us how busy postal workers were already in the 1930s in order to make sure everybody gets their mail the next day. And "everybody" means Scots in this very case as this is where the train is headed and we see how people are working through the night to make sure the letters reach their mailboxes on time. I personally must say the contents in here are nothing too exciting, so I am a bit surprised that this film is a lot more known today than thousands of other movies from that time. Probably for sentimental value. I guess you must be a postal worked yourself or just be really interested in trains to appreciate this little documentary. I myself did not really and that's why I give it a thumbs-down. Not recommended.

One of the most important documentaries to ever come out of Britain

[tomgillespie2002 · 9/10 · 23 August 2011]

From 1933, the GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit produced many documentaries, inspired by the likes of Nanook of the North, to promote their service. The films had many talented British film-makers working for them, including the likes of Basil Wright and Alberto Cavalcanti (both on the production team here), and have recently been released in three DVD collector's editions by the British Film Institute. As well as producing some damn fine films, they are key works in understanding the mentality and living conditions of a Britain long gone, when we took pride in our work. They are both uplifting in their detail and wholly depressing given the state of Britain today. I'm only 27 and feel this way, so God knows what the old folk must think.

Night Mail follows the midnight postal train from London to Scotland, looking at various things such as the sorting room, the loading of the train, and the inspired way of collecting mail from various places by catching the bags at high speeds in a retracting net. The last ten minutes features a now famous poem by W.H. Auden, read to the music of Benjamin Britten, that is read rhythmically to the sounds of the train. Starting slow, it gradually picks up pace as the train gets faster, and ends at a breathless pace.

Finishing at around the 30 minute mark, it leaves a great impression regardless of its slight running time. As mentioned before, it manages to capture the spirit of old Britain, and of a time when our public services were actually efficient. Now, the Post Office seems to lose more mail than it delivers, and if you're lucky to catch a train that arrives on time, you have the pleasure in sitting near some gormless scumbag listening to his s**t dance music out loud, or some lazy fat single mother who won't deal with their screaming baby. But anyway, the quality of the film-making is often overwhelming for a documentary short, using interesting camera angles, lovely cinematography, and informative narration. I was surprised to see that the average user rating for this on IMDb is 6.8, considering this is one of the best, and most important documentaries to come out Britain. Ever.

www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Heavily Influential in the British Documentary Film Movement

[springfieldrental · 8/10 · 11 July 2023]

The acknowledged leaders of documentary films for more than twenty years beginning in the 1930s were the British. The brilliant foundation English filmmakers' laid down in the 1930s carried over to the 1940s documenting their country's ordeal in World War Two. The famous 'British Documentary Film Movement' was led by one of its more popular early contributions, February 1936's "Night Mail." Scotsman John Grierson was instrumental in the formation of United Kingdom's documentaries. As a film critic for the New York Sun, Grierson was the first to use the term "documentary" in his paper's review on Robert J. Flaherty's film 1926 "Moana." Later, he was named an assistant to the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) film production department.

At EMB Grierson produced his first documentary, the influential 1929 "Drifters," detailing the daily life of herring fishermen. When EMB closed its film unit in 1933 because of the Depression, Grierson and several colleagues relocated to the General Post Office (GPO), an improbable government agency where England's imprint in documentaries really took off.

England's General Post office was the largest employer in the country, numbering over 250,000. Its public relations office, with an adjunct film unit, spent more money than any other governmental agency informing the country about the operations of the GPO. "Night Mail" was produced to illustrate how the evening express mail train from London to Scotland was the lifeblood to innumerable communities along its route, delivering daily newspapers, important legal paperwork and simple 'feel-good' letters to its customers.

Explains film reviewer J. Watts, "'Night Mail' is one of the best known British documentaries of the 1930s and is often considered to be one of the best documentaries and best short films ever made." The 24-minute film was under the direction of Harry Watt, who relied on Basil Wright's research and script following the progress of heaps of mail originating from London's Euston Station and other points on their nightly journey to the London, Midland and Scottish Railway terminus. A dramatic highlight shows the train's collection of mail bags along the way without slowing down by snaring them on hanging poles. Conversely, when a hamlet's mail needed to be dropped off, the coordination between the train and the people on the ground was performed with split-second precision.

Meanwhile as the train raced throughout the countryside, mail was sorted onboard. The bucking of the train made it virtually impossible to get a steady shot, so a reproduction of the coach was built in the GPO studio. At first the set was shakened to simulate the train's movement, but Watt noticed the structure "just rattled like a sideboard in a junction town." The solution was to show a string hanging down and swinging. The postal worker 'actors' were told to sway at the same time as the string to fool its audiences.

Once the rough cut of "Night Mail" was seen, Grierson acknowledged the film captured the machinery of the overnight delivery system, but questioned "What about the people who write them and the people who get them?" A poem was inserted to be read in the film's coda. Famed poet W. H. Auden was hired to compose the concluding passage set to a Sergei Eisenstein-style of montage shots. "It's the final scenes of the film that turn 'Night Mail' into a little masterpiece," pointed out reviewer Watts. The poem made "Night Mail" a work of art and departs from the many other documentaries produced by GPO.

"Night Mail" proved to be a huge hit with the British public. Its popularity is so enduring that in 1987 an update on the documentary was produced, 'Night Mail II." The documentary format was so prominent in the United Kingdom that once the war was over, British dramatic feature films inserted an inordinate amount of documentary-style footage that gave its cinema a sense of realism that other countries eventually duplicated.

Night Mail 1936 Style

[CocaCola18 · 24 June 2003]

If you've ever studied film or Media in England you would have certainly come across the GPO Film Unit during your studies. A unit formed by John Grierson after being influenced by Robert Flaherty of 'Nanook of the North' fame!

This documentary shows how the people of 1930's United Kingdom got there mail from a to b!

Directed Basil Wright with commentary by John Grierson & Stuart Legg and superb and now famous poem finale by the now great W.H. Auden this is a good documentary.

8/10