Movies: Humphrey Jennings

Londoners prepare for war....

How news of a general reduction in GPO charges was finally brought to parliament and the people, despite attempts by the country's enemies to prevent the announcement......

A tribute to the courage and resiliency of Britons during the darkest days of the London Blitz....

Humphrey Jennings' first film as a director, a brief overview of the British postal service....

Documentary short by Humphrey Jennings...

Documentary about Humphrey Jennings, an English documentary filmmaker from the 1930s to 1950....

Humphrey Jennings’s Crown Film Unit short on the summer 1944 V-1 “doodlebug” campaign, tracking a salvo from the coast toward London as it runs Britain’s layered defenses—coastal AA guns, RAF fighters, and barrage balloons—capturing both interception...

1935 documentary about the hard working life of Welsh coal miners....

Edward R. Murrow narrates Humphrey Jennings' short documentary about life in England during wartime....

A behind-the-scenes GPO Film Unit documentary (directed by Stuart Legg) that races from studio rehearsals and newsrooms to control rooms and transmitters, weaving speeches, music, and outside broadcasts—featuring voices like H. G. Wells and Ramsay Ma...

The film, made to advertise domestic telephone sets, is based around two very different families. The Petts are conventional, happy and have children; the Potts are unconventional and unhappy, without children....

The true story of the massacre of a small Czech village by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales....

A depiction of life in wartime Britain during the Second World War. Director Humphrey Jennings visits many aspects of civilian life and of the turmoil and privation caused by the war, all without narration....

A narrator recounts the state of Great Britain near the end of WWII via a visual diary for the titular baby boy born in September 1944....

In preparation for the celebration of the 1951 Festival of Britain, this short film was released to assure British citizens of their nation's place in the world and of their own places within that nation. Illustrative scenes of farming, science, poli...

Poetry by Rudyard Kipling, John Milton, and William Blake, and excerpts from speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, all read by Laurence Olivier, illuminate documentary footage of England during its defense against the Nazi blitz in World...

Humphrey Jennings’s wartime short rallies Britain’s countryside, showing fields ploughed up from fallow, seed sown, and crops raised on once-idle land as part of the national push to feed the home front—an urgent, lyrical call to turn soil into suste...

The history of wheels, roads and vehicles from cavemen to the coming of steam....

Osbert Lancaster, James Fisher, John Ormston and Ralph Vaughn Williams meditate on the history and culture of England....

The Eighth Army famously adopted a German song in the Western Desert. The Crown Film Unit traces the journey of Lili Marlene from its composition in post-WW1 Hamburg, via Radio Belgrade and the Afrika Korps, through victory in Tunisia and Sicily, to ...