Facing Your Danger

Here's an early and quite beautifully shot short subject about white-water boating. It is startlingly beautiful, with its images of of the Colorado River canyons above Lake Meade. It's no wonder that it won an Oscar for Best Short Subject in its day.

The copy that TCM runs occasionally is a bit unfocused, alas. I think it likely this was drawn from a 16-mm. print. Warner Brothers seemed to take poor archival care of their short subjects, even the Oscar-winners, and the difficulties of storing Technicolor, which requires three prints, all of which must age at precisely the same rate; this is just about impossible.

Knox Manning narrates this in an excited voice. He always narrated as if people were going to die, whether he was talking about soldiers in war, or a county-fair pie contest. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one, even though logic tells us if they boaters were killed, this movie wouldn't have made the theater.