Foot and Mouth (1955) - extract

By the time he made 'This Sporting Life' in 1963, Lindsay Anderson had already had a 15-year documentary career, his output including the Oscar-winning 'Thursday's Children' (1954) and the Free Cinema classic 'Every Day Except Christmas' (1957). Sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the lesser-known 'Foot and Mouth' is a briskly efficient, devastatingly effective cautionary tale of how foot and mouth disease, the farmer's worst nightmare, can easily break out thanks to a simple act of carelessness.

The complete film is one of 32 included in the four-disc DVD box 'Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain 1951-1977' - http://filmstore.bfi.org.uk/acatalog/info_17997.html - which is part of 'Boom Britain', the BFI's celebration and reappraisal of postwar documentary filmmaking in Britain: http://www.bfi.org.uk/boombritain.html

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• BFI National Archive
• MAFF
• Ministry of Agriculture
• Lindsay Anderson
• COI
• Central Office of Information
• Boom Britain
• Shadows of Progress

[darcyfason]

best video fo' me today!

[astralagosto]

Dear BFI,

It's a great documentary. However, it is a tragic event that those animals had to be killed. It's tragic that they had to be shot. I thought there was a humane way of putting these animals to sleep. It is barbaric the way they were shot!!!!

How horrible that they had to die this way because of the foot-and mouth disease outbreak.