"A Vacation with Lucy Carlisle, Margaret Pinkham, Virginia Carlisle." oldfilm.org
"West Virginia, the State Beautiful is organized as a series of scenic vignettes taken during an auto trip eastward on Route 60, known as the Midland Trail .... This route, first proposed by George Washington in 1783, had been upgraded for automobiles in the 1920s and is portrayed here as a source of civic pride. Rev. Snodgrass probably screened his 75-minute travel documentary for church and civic groups. The five excerpts included here begin with the start of the tour in the border town of Kenova, whose name is laid out in an intertitle (“KEN. O. VA.”) to drive home its derivation from the first letters of the states the town touches: Kentucky, Ohio, and (West) Virginia. In Huntington, Route 60 runs down busy Fifth Avenue and past the International Nickel Company, opened six years earlier and rightly labeled in the titles as the world’s largest nickel alloy plant. Farther east in the higher Appalachians are glimpses of sheer “LOVER’S LEAP” cliffs (before the Hawks Nest Dam was built in the 1930s) and lumber-industry trains geared for the steep hills. Rev. Snodgrass closes with a homemade sing-along slide for the state song, “The West Virginia Hills.”" —Scott Simmon
"Western Holiday offered one of those thrills in the sequence of sunrise on Mount Robson. Here Kodachrome caught, with what seemed magic, the first rosy glow on the cold, blue snow, which the continuity of photographic motion permitted to increase, to blossom and, finally, to blaze into a chromatic crown of jewels. To see this on the screen is to enjoy a rare experience. Hamilton H. Jones, in the highly intelligent cutting of his train sequences, gave the student of continuity another of these thrills. Those who are charmed by double turntable accompaniment will recognize the perfection with which an almost impossibly difficult feat of lip synchronization with record scoring has been handled. These are some of the higher spots in a film of unusually high general average. Mr. Jones is a Kodachrome movie maker of proved ability, who has made editing a special art. The film chosen for the first Hiram Percy Maxim Memorial Award will be used by Mr. Jones in his work as a lecturer on the vacation advantages of the Dominion of Canada, although it was made as his own enterprise, entirely at his own expense and not for compensation from a client. It is a part of his professional equipment. Briefly reviewed, Western Holiday carries the audience, via Canadian National Railways, from Victoria, Canada's most westerly metropolis, across the Rocky Mountains back to the Eastern Seaboard. Beginning with city views in Victoria and Vancouver, with strikingly colorful parades of the famous Canadian Mounted Police, we visit tourist centers and make trail trips from them. The camera goes into the interior of a glacier, it finds mountain goats and sheep, it clambers over the Continental Divide on horseback. All through the trip, it studies the progress of trains, weaving in and out of tunnels and over bridges. In his personal presentations of this film, Mr. Jones manipulates effects, such as whistles, bells, train noises and other oddments, with something approaching wizardry. In the face of competition of the highest order, Western Holiday is its own justification of preferment." Movie Makers, Dec. 1937, 602.
"Stan Midgley returns again, this time presenting the "Yellowstone Tetons and Glacier Park." In the wonderful northwest corner of Wyoming you can see spectacular mountains, beautiful lakes, canyons, waterfalls, wild animals and more natural wonders than a tourist can see in a month. There are superb pictures of most of the world's greatest geysers and the changes made by the great 1959 earthquake with before and after pictures. There is Earthquake Lake and its notorious landslide. The Cooke City Red Lodge Highway over the Beartooth Mountains —Ghost Towns and modern towns of Western Montana —Glacier Park, beautiful from the highway, incomparable from the wilderness trail. The ending comes in the golden glory of autumn." Central Union Reaper, Sept. 27, 1966, 3.
Total Pages: 7
Amateur Cinema