Watch West Virginia, the State Beautiful For Free

ridiculous rating

Good concept, poorly executed.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This is a rather amateurish style documentary about the state of West Virginia in order to encourage tourism. It's included in the 50 film set "Treasures From American Film Archives"--a four-DVD set of mostly ephemeral films for historians and nutty cinemaniacs like myself.The film consists of intertitle screens with captions (using Reverend Snodgrass' sermon board outside his church) and then moving images of the various scenes around the state. Much of it, surprisingly, is not of the state's greatest resources--the lovely mountains and rivers. Instead, a lot of it is factories and cars--signs of prosperity, certainly, but not exactly stuff the average sane tourist would want to see. It's a silent film with sound accompaniment provided by the DVD producers. Originally, it was full-length but the set only includes a portion of this original film.So is it worth seeing? Well, for the average viewer probably not. But for historians, film historians and cinemaniacs, it's a great record of a bygone time and place.

I just saw the 8:22 minute section of this film called "The Scenic 'Midland Trial [sic]', Route 60" shown on TCM in their Treasures of American Archives series. Reverend Snodgrass filmed this when U.S. Route 60 was just completed in 1929. He takes us from one end (Ohio) to the other (Virginia), stopping along the way to point out gorgeous scenery and other West Virginia items which would interest any tourist. So it was basically a well photographed and well titled travelogue. As an amateur photographer myself, I loved it. He starts out with a full-frame map of West Virginia and I was somewhat disappointed he never made use of that map again. It would have been nice to show where on the map he was as he got there. I had to get out my Rand-McNally map to locate the places. Still, it was great to get a record of 1929 West Virginia, with its rather sparse traffic and those square-looking automobiles.