To the Four Corners

Haunting colour travelogue taking in Ulster, Lewis, Lincoln and Cardiff's Tiger Bay.

Rare colour footage of multiracial Cardiff is the obvious highlight of this travelogue of Britain's four nations - also taking in Ulster, Lewis and Lincoln. It's a charmingly creaky film, but there's something about it... Something hard to pin down, something almost ghostly - as if we're touring the Britain of 1927 rather than 1957. It was sponsored by Brooke Bond: keep an eye out for product placement.

In his debut, director Eric Marquis betrays his inexperience and tiny budget. But in flashes he displays the instinct for strange, striking images and sounds that would mark his later career as one of the more flamboyant directors working in sponsored filmmaking. For instance, the Lincoln Cathedral sequence, with its unusual angles and jarring editing, points forward to Marquis' far more successful experiments in later films like Time out of Mind (1968).