Waverley Steps: A Visit to Edinburgh

Waverley Steps: A Visit to Edinburgh (1948)

Waverley Steps - subtitled ‘a visit to Edinburgh’ - is an evocative minor classic. John Eldridge’s film takes the semi-documentary form of a collage of scripted vignettes, at first disconnected but gradually overlapping. With visual grace, and a certain wit, the film entwines a coalman’s working day with students’ revels by night, the proceedings of a court with the rituals of a courtship.

Date of release
1948-01-02
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (2)
Runtime
31m
Genres
Drama
Director
John Eldridge

Interesting facts

Waverley Steps is a 1948 dramatised documentary film depicting a period of 30 hours in the life of people in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was directed by John Eldridge, produced by Paul Fletcher for Greenpark Productions and sponsored by the Scottish Home Office for the Central Office of Information. It had its premier at the second Edinburgh Film Festival in 1948. Unusually for a government-sponsored film, it also received a cinema release.

Production

The film was the idea of Forsyth Hardy, a film critic and writer who was head of information at the Scottish Office at the time. While in Stockholm researching a book on Scandinavian cinema, Hardy became familiar with the work of Swedish director Arne Sucksdorff and was especially attracted to his Rhythm of a City.

According to David Bruce, there was "a continuing tension between the film-makers and the Edinburgh establishment". The local council was unhappy with the original treatment showing an encounter between the Danish sailor and a prostitute. The New Club, where the banker is seen taking coffee, insisted that no actual members should appear in the scene.

Hardy took a copy of the finished film back to Stockholm to show to Sucksdorff. The Swedish director said that he could "see clearly the influence of Rhythm of a City but thought Waverley Steps was much the better film".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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