Farewell Oak Street (1953)
This documentary presents a before-and-after picture of people in a large-scale public housing project in Toronto. Due to a housing shortage, they were forced to live in squalid, dingy flats and ramshackle dwellings on a crowded street in Regent Park North; now they have access to new, modern housing developments designed to offer them privacy, light and space.
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This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.
Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.
There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
Just watched this online.I have always been interested in Toronto and it's history. I had seen it once before, about 1970 in a high school "social studies" class.The main thing that struck me, apart from the obvious difference between the old and new Oak Street, is how societal standards and attitudes are always changing.Here we see the creation of Regent Park, a perfectly fine and functional place to live, much better than what existed before, and yet just 40 odd years later, it is dismantled, at great expense, in the name of a "better" design!New architecture and design cannot solve problems, people do.The community members, with the help of the Police , need to weed out the bad apples and punish them, so that law-abiding people don't have to live in fear, otherwise the same problems will persist, regardless of design.