Production Background
Because the British authorities in 1939 wanted as many people as possible to enlist for World War II, it was not a good time to be talking about ex-servicemen having problems. Although the film had a première at the Houses of Parliament before an invited audience of MPs and charity workers, it was never shown to the public. A fiscal disagreement between the charity and the agent who was booking the film caused it to be pulled from distribution.
Smith wasn't just thought to be lost, most people didn't even know that it even existed. It wasn't included in any filmography of Michael Powell, and Powell only refers to it briefly and obscurely in his autobiography. The film was discovered in 2003 through the detective work of Mark Fuller of Bristol and a safety print was made by the BFI. This was shown at film festivals in Vienna and Bologna in 2004 but it didn't have its first public screening in the U.K. until 15 October 2004 when it was shown in Canterbury, 65 years after it was completed.
Read more about this topic: Smith (film)
Famous quotes containing the words production and/or background:
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)