BFI

"Don't pick your nose," says a chef to his young kitchen-hand, "it is so very dirty." A man falls victim to near-fatal food poisoning, and there's no shortage of suspects: the food factory he works at, where the girls on the production line sneeze and toss their hair over the cream buns; the local restaurant, where flies and mice roam the kitchens and knives and forks stand in rancid water, the butcher's shop, where the butcher handles both a dog and a cat before handling the meat (and wears a bloody bandage while he's doing it); the pub, where the barmaid polishes a dirty glass with a licked finger... Even his wife's kitchen is a paradise for germs.

In the best tradition of public health campaigns, A Case of Poisoning - from the stable of Richard Massingham, uncrowned king of the postwar public information film - aims to terrify its audience into paying attention to its message, in this case the vital importance of food hygiene. If the standards shown here are anything to go by, it's a miracle anybody at all survived the 1940s.

Mark Duguid

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