Harold Baim

Harold Baim (1914-1996) was a British film producer, director and writer. He was born in Leeds in 1914; he died in Reading, Berkshire in 1996.

According to his family Baim left Leeds after the death of his father in 1929. Moving to London in 1931, Baim originally wanted to be a journalist but instead got a job working the clapperboard for film producers at MGM and Renown Pictures. Baim then worked for film producer and distributor George Minter and moved on to Columbia Pictures selling their films to the Odeon, ABC and Gaumont cinema chains.

Baim was a prolific producer of 35mm short films, creating over 300 titles in his lifetime. The subjects of his early films, made by his company The Federated Film Corporation, were released in the 1940s and featured well known music hall and variety theatre acts such as Wilson, Keppel and Betty. His later and more well known films were mainly travelogues filmed in England, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, America and Asia as well as music compilations featuring footage of well-known pop music acts of the era.

All but three of the Baim titles released after 1957 are in colour, many in wide-screen formats. A project to restore and digitise the surviving films was started in 1999 by The Baim Collection Limited. After twelve years work seventy-two of the surviving one-hundred and twenty-two titles are available on Beta SP or Digibeta. Fourteen of the titles are available in high definition, twelve restored and graded for television transmission. These films are also available as broadcast quality digital files. More than one hundred films are thought lost.

Twelve of the films were transferred to high definition for transmission on Sky Arts 1 and 2, including the two music films Swinging UK and UK Swings Again. A certain amount of restoration has been undertaken as part of the transfer to HD which was done by Deluxe Soho at 142 Wardour Street, London. Standard definition versions of the two music films and a double DVD release of seventeen other films are also available on a commercial DVD release from Strike Force Entertainment, part of Cherry Red Records. The other ten titles which may be found from time-to-time on Sky Arts are: Floating Fortress, Delta 8-3, S.S. France, Girls Girls Girls!, Big City, Pete Murray Takes You To Nottingham, Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham, Get 'Em Off, Playground Spectacular and Jugglers and Acrobats. Many of these titles are available to view anytime online using the SkyPlayer.

BBC Television Entertainment Department produced a programme entitled Harold Baim's Britain on Film featuring 30 minutes of clips from twenty-three of the British films. Part of their "On Film" series it was first broadcast on BBC 4 on 27 July 2011, repeated 29 May 2012. The BBC press release says the documentary:

...recalls the strange Britain of this remarkable film-maker. Working from the Forties to the Eighties, Baim only filmed on sunny days and used the voices of baffled actors, Telly Savalas among them. Despite their weirdness, Baim's films record a Britain that's gone for ever.

The programme was received enthusiastically by reviewers in The Telegraph, The Independent, The London Evening Standard and The Mirror.

The Baim Collection continues to search for lost prints and negatives of over one hundred missing titles produced by Harold Baim. Many of the missing films were produced between 1945 and 1957 were presumably shot using nitrocellulose (cellulose nitrate) film stock. This film base is notoriously unstable and can spontaneously burst into flames. Any surviving film made by Harold Baim in this early period on nitrate stock will have been copied onto safety film. This is probably the case for Science Is Golden, which was returned to The Baim Collection Limited in 2010. A 16mm black-and-white print of the film, which was released in 1949, was discovered in a school cupboard and was returned by the Department of English and Media at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. The film features Professor Low, who shows how to make "home made" explosives for use in "magic tricks" and also shows a very early domestic microwave oven and other household labour-saving gadgets for the home, accompanied by the unique Harold Baim script.

The travelogues are perhaps the best known and best remembered of Baim's output. The commentaries to these were provided by famous actors and broadcasters of the period. Some of the most well-known examples include Telly Savalas looks at Birmingham and Peter Murray takes you to Coventry. Other titles used the voice-over talents of Valentine Dyall, David Gell, Peter Dimmock, Terry Wogan, Ed Bishop, Franklin Engelmann, Kenneth MacCleod and Nicholas Parsons.

The legacy of Baim's short films give us a valuable contemporary record of the 20th century; particularly of the 1960s and '70s. By pointing his camera at the seemingly mundane he has left a unique body of work in colour on 35mm featuring subjects rarely sought out by contemporary filmmakers.

Baim applied a consistent formula to the creation of his films. No one addresses the camera; the camera becomes the narrator's 'eyes' as they interpret the scene. The majority of the films rely on the unseen narrator's voice-over and very few of the colour films have any lip-sync at all. Wherever he went from Alsace to Aberdeen, (alliteration was a well-used device in the Baim formula) he took the same consistent approach in introducing his subjects to the audience. He often opened a travelogue by featuring transport facilities such as motorways, bus stations and airports (a particular favourite). Then he’d record the old town and educate the audience with a bit of history; this would then contrast well with new "sophisticated" office blocks and shopping centres such as Birmingham's Bull Ring; "the shopper’s paradise”. The shadow of World War Two looms large in the films. Many images showing the rebuilding of London as a result of the Blitz are featured in two films not seen since their original release in the early 1960s Big City and One Square Mile. These two films contain beautiful 35mm shots of the emerging high rise buildings which are now an established architectural characteristic of the City of London. Baim also featured local industries in his films such as the oil industry in Aberdeen or lace-making in Nottingham. Before closing a film there would be a recap and some information about day trips on offer and the narrator often makes a promise to return. The overseas travel depicted was a world away from the holiday aspirations experienced by the every day British cinema-goer who, at the time, was much more likely to have ventured no further afield than the British seaside.

Baim provided an early career boost for Michael Winner who directed and scripted a number of the Baim films in the early 1960s, including Floating Fortress concerning life on HMS Victorious and the popular comedy about modern manners Behave Yourself. This is one of the few films in which actors speak and is only one of three shot in black and white, the others being Playing the Game, a comic look at the game of golf released in 1967 and A Pocket Full of Rye. Winner makes a fleeting appearance in the title sequence of Behave Yourself. Also amongst the Winner titles is the feature-length musical The Cool Mikado starring Frankie Howerd and Tommy Cooper based on the comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan. An unrestored copy of this film has been released on DVD by Strike Force Entertainment.

Several 'B' features were also made by Baim, including the haunted house thriller Night Comes Too Soon (aka The Ghost of Rashmon Hall) and The Fantastic World of Film a compilation of early silent American comedy films.

The Baim short films are quota quickies, originally created for the British cinema and mainly made for distribution with United Artists features enabling the chain to meet legal requirements for the minimum number of UK-made productions shown.

A radio documentary on Baim's films, entitled Telly Savalas and the Quota Quickies, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 26 April 2008. Presenter Laurie Taylor investigated Baim's film legacy through the productions Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham, Telly Savalas Looks at Portsmouth, and Telly Savalas Looks at Aberdeen.

The radio programme together with more detailed information and films clips are available on the Baim Films website.