Primitive London. Arnold L. Miller, 1965.
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Edition screened: BFI Flipside Blu-ray #003, released 2009. English language. Runtime approximately 87 minutes.
Summary: Real footage from a chicken processing plant.
Details: The entire killing, cleaning, and packaging process is shown 1:07:25-1:11:12.
Immediately before the chicken processing sequence is a scene in a veterinary operating room where a goldfish has a very small section of bacterial growth cut from a fin (1:05:52-1:07:06). The fish is given anesthesia prior to the 1-second procedure, and other steps focused on the fish’s safety and comfort are demonstrated and explained.
This segues to the chicken processing sequence, with workers in the plant neither intentionally cruel nor compassionate as the young chickens are removed from crates, placed on the conveyor chain, killed, plucked, and packaged for retail. The voice-over narration is unemotional but provides factual commentary that would be considered suspiciously compassionate, possibly un-American and terroristic, by today’s standards. The chickens “have never been out of their cramped cages, never felt the earth beneath their feet,” and the housewife seen buying the birds in a market is exposed as a “common predatory animal” rendered ineffectual and reduced to paying others to kill on her behalf.
The chicken processing sequence concludes with the commentary that while other foods have doubled in price, the cost of chicken has been cut in half due to modern methods. The message is unstated but clear: Those with excessive money can buy surgery for a 10-cent pet fish. Those with little money still can afford to eat chicken since the birds themselves compensate for low pricing with their short and terrible lives.
The BFI release of Primitive London also includes John Irvin’s then-controversial Carousella (1965) which dramatizes the lives of three young strippers, and we also get three interviews by Bernard Braden with participants in London’s strip club scene: club owner Al Burnett (1967, 18 minutes), club owner Stuart McCabe (1968, 16 minutes) and performer Shirley (1968, 6 minutes).
Primitive London is Arnold Miller’s follow-up to London in the Raw (1964), and is somewhat “less” in most ways, sometimes to its advantage. Less seedy, less diverse, and less oomph in general, but also less excruciating musical entertainment, and less time loitering pointlessly in restaurants.
About 14:30 into the movie, montage of a gangster-themed and a Native American-themed playfields spliced together as though it were one machine.