A stunning 8mm film of Alaska & Canada from the 1950s

The film embedded here is one that just had the title, Alaska & Canada on the reel and no other information, so I’ve had to try to work out exactly where it was shot. TLDR – it’s mostly from those two countries, but there are some other interesting scenes.

The 30 Minuit film was digitised with my home constructed telecine machine, and edited with Adobe Premiere Elements, but the editing was really just adding the titles and tweaking the exposure etc – the film has not been cut or edited from the original film as made by the photographer in the mid 1950s.

The Alaska & Canada film

Film Contents

The film starts with some shots taken on the ship which took the film maker from the UK to their first port of call. There are some scenes of life aboard the liner and then some shots of a home and garden followed by a shopping trip with some obvious large American cars from the 1950s period.

I assumed this was Alaska, but at about 4 minutes the scene changes to a city and there is a scene of a Green and Yellow bus with the words, “Go the motor coach way” written on the side of the bus top and ‘fifth avenue’ written on the side of the bus near the door. This didn’t look like Alaska or Canada to me, and a little research with ChatGPT suggests that this is actually New York, because the phrase, “Go the motor coach way” was a known advertising slogan for the green and yellow busses that ran in New York in the 1950s.

The evidence that his is New York is confirmed a bit later in the film when a gold statue and fountains appear, which I found is the Rockefeller Centre. There are then views of the United Nations building, and some footage shot through a taxi or car travelling through New York.

So it’s likely that New York was the actual destination of the ship and the film maker spent some time there before moving on to Alaska via Canada.

After some more footage in the garden of the house in New York (presumably the house of the family the photographer was staying with), we see the first glimpse of Canada. The camera captured a few seconds at the White River railway station which is in the town of White River, Ontario followed by some views out of the train as it makes its journey. There are views of mountain ranges and the train stops at a station close to Mount Dennis.

There is quite a lot of film of the journey across water, presumably some of the Canadian lakes, including one scene which appears to have been filmed on a car transporter. It’s interesting to see the cars on the deck of the boat surrounded by passengers as the boat makes its way across the water.

Just after the sequence showing the car transporter, there is a brief shot of a woman standing in front of a lifeboat on which I can just make out the name, ‘Princess Louise’. This has allowed me to track down some more information and I found that this boat was used by the British Columbia Coast Steamship company carrying passengers between Vancouver and Southeast Alaska on a round trip of up to 1,750 miles. This means that the views on water earlier in the film are likely the coast of Canada.

At about 13 minutes into the film we see a shot of the boat arriving at its destination and a big sign saying, ‘Alaska Transportation Company‘ and from here the photographer and his family take a train on to Carcross which is in the northern area of Canada very close to the Alaskan border.

The remainder of the film seems to have been shot around the location in Alaska that the photographer and his party finally arrived at. There are many shots of the surrounding countryside along with family reunions and meet-ups.

Altogether a fascinating look at a trip that was probably the holiday of a lifetime for someone all those years ago.