According to his family, Harold Baim left the family home in Leeds after the death of his father in 1929, and by 1936 had moved to London. Baim originally aspired to be a journalist but instead gained employment in the film industry, initially operating the clapperboard for film producers. He later moved into film distribution and production, working at MGM, United Artists and First National, before gaining a more substantial role at Columbia Pictures, selling their films to the Odeon, ABC and Gaumont cinema chains.

By December 1938, aged 25, he joined the board of Renown Pictures. He married Glenda Freedman (1919–2021) at Hendon in April 1940, and the couple celebrated with a reception at The Dorchester. Baim worked with film producer and distributor James George Minter at Renown, becoming a senior director alongside Minter in March 1941. In May 1941, Baim announced his own company, The Federated Film Corporation, based at 60–66 Wardour Street, London. His first film was entitled Lady Luck. His fellow director was Leeds-based J.H. Overton.

In the 1940s, Harold and Glenda Baim acquired the Regal Cinema, Fordingbridge, and The Electric Theatre, Church Street, Caversham. Both were renamed ‘The Glendale Cinema’ (after Glenda). The Regal was sold by 1948. The 500-seat Electric Theatre was renovated and CinemaScope was installed in 1955. It closed on 4 June 1977 and the building was converted into the New Testament Church of God. (Facts provided from interviews with Harold Baim’s surviving family, 2002 to 2008, and also published extracts in the trade paper Kinematograph Weekly, copies of which are available from the British Library.)

With the start of The Federated Film Corporation in 1941, Harold Baim became a prolific producer of 35mm short films, creating over 300 titles in his lifetime alongside three or four features. The subjects of his early short films featured well-known music hall and variety theatre acts such as Wilson, Keppel and Betty. His later and more well-known films were mainly travelogues, filmed in England, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, America and Asia, as well as music compilations featuring footage of popular music acts of the era.

Nearly all of the Baim titles released after 1957 are in colour, using EastmanColor film stock, and were produced for distribution by United Artists in the UK. Many are in widescreen formats. Baim was keen to use widescreen, and the paper archive shows he rented ‘Camera-scope’ lenses from Adelphi Films in the mid-1950s, probably to coincide with the upgrade to CinemaScope at the Glendale Cinema.

A project to restore and digitise the surviving films was started in 1999 by The Baim Collection Limited. After twenty-five years’ work, over eighty of the surviving one hundred and thirty titles have been restored and are available for licence. Sadly, more than seventy films are thought to be lost.
A selection of more than one hundred of the films is available for review by researchers and producers online via Vimeo.

In 1976, Baim became Chief Barker of the Variety Club of Great Britain, having been a board member and supporter for the previous ten years.
From 2012 until 2016, eight titles made up part of the programming on Sky Arts in HD: Swinging UK, UK Swings Again, Girls Girls Girls!, Big City, Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham, Get ’Em Off, Playground Spectacular, and Jugglers and Acrobats.

BBC Television’s Entertainment Department produced a programme entitled Harold Baim’s Britain on Film, featuring 30 minutes of clips from twenty-three of the British films. Part of the “On Film” series, it was first broadcast on BBC Four on 27 July 2011 and repeated on 29 May 2012. The programme was received enthusiastically by reviewers and critics, with newspaper reviews appearing in The Telegraph, The Independent, The London Evening Standard and The Mirror, all available online.

Clips and excerpts from the Baim Collection are often used as illustrative footage in feature films and television documentaries on BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Four, as well as in programmes screened by ITV and Channel 4. The feature film The Duke, which premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, makes use of Baim footage from the early 1960s.

The Baim Collection continues to search for lost prints and negatives of over one hundred missing titles produced by Harold Baim. Many of the missing films were produced between 1945 and 1957, the earlier ones mostly on nitrocellulose (cellulose nitrate) film stock, which is unstable and liable to spontaneous combustion. Surviving films from this time would have been transferred to 16mm or 35mm safety film stock. One such film is Science Is Golden (1949), which was returned to The Baim Collection Limited in 2010 after a 16mm black-and-white print was discovered in a school cupboard. The film was returned by the Department of English and Media at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. The film features Professor Low, who demonstrates how to make “homemade” explosives for use in “magic tricks”, and also showcases a very early domestic microwave oven and other household labour-saving gadgets, accompanied by the unique Harold Baim script.

In 2013, MGM/UA in London discovered a number of Baim films made in the late 1950s and early 1960s in their vaults at Denham, and kindly returned the titles to The Baim Collection. These included Cormorant Fishing, Cotswold Craftsmen, and Where the Avon Flows. These films were digitised by Deluxe142 in London and added to the Collection. MGM/UA also returned missing elements from other films — a total of 36 cans of 35mm and 16mm negatives and prints.

In November 2013, the Media Archive for Central England (MACE) discovered a 16mm print of the “lost” Baim black-and-white film about magic and magicians, Say Abracadabra (1952). MACE kindly returned it to the Collection. The film was digitised at Deluxe 142, Wardour Street, London, who also transferred the 1946 film Stadium Highlights from nitrate stock. This nitrate film had been stored for many years by the BFI in the National Archive and had not been seen since its original release. The subject matter is the Empire Pool, Wembley.

In June 2015, the 1965 film The Mood Man was transferred from the original 35mm negative to HD files by Encore at 142 Wardour Street, London. The film features Ross McManus singing If I Had a Hammer, and the negative was transferred to HD for use in a concert tour by Ross McManus’s son, Elvis Costello. Prior to this, a 16mm print had been the only known copy of the film. The 35mm negative of the McManus song was released to Cinelab London, who transferred the extract to 4K and undertook further minor restoration for a DVD release for Elvis Costello’s 2015 tour.

Digital copies (ProRes files) of over 80 titles, transferred from the original negatives including these recently rediscovered titles, have been donated to the BFI National Archive.

The travelogues are perhaps the best known and best remembered of Baim’s output. He wrote the scripts, which were recorded by well-known actors and broadcasters of the period, including the voice-over talents of Valentine Dyall, David Gell, Peter Dimmock, Terry Wogan, Ed Bishop, Franklin Engelmann, Kenneth MacLeod and Nicholas Parsons.

Harold Baim applied a consistent formula to the creation of his films. No one addresses the camera; the camera becomes the narrator’s ‘eyes’ as it interprets the scene. Wherever he went — from Alsace to Aberdeen (alliteration being a well-used device in the Baim formula) — he applied the same consistent approach in introducing his subjects to the audience. He often opened a travelogue by featuring transport facilities such as motorways, bus stations and airports (a particular favourite). Then he would record the old town, educate the audience with a bit of history, and contrast this with new “sophisticated” office blocks and shopping centres. The shadow of the Second World War looms large in the films. The overseas travel depicted was a world away from the holiday aspirations of the average British cinema-goer, who at the time was more likely to have ventured no further than the British seaside.

Not everyone in the industry was a fan of Baim. He was criticised in publications, notably in a slim volume entitled “A Long Look at Short Films” (1966). In November of that year, Baim took part in a BBC television programme, The Look of the Week, where he robustly defended his work.

Baim provided an early career boost for Michael Winner (1935–2013), who directed and scripted five Baim films from 1959 to 1963. Winner gained his first Associate Producer credit on Floating Fortress, concerning life on the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious. Winner also directed the popular comedy about modern manners, Behave Yourself. This is one of the few Baim films in which actors speak, and is one of a small number of surviving titles shot in black and white. Michael Winner makes a fleeting appearance in the title sequence of Behave Yourself. Also among the Winner titles (where he also appears as an airline passenger at the start) is the feature-length musical The Cool Mikado, starring Frankie Howerd and Tommy Cooper, based on the comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan. An unrestored copy of this film was released on DVD by Strike Force Entertainment. The title is now deleted from their catalogue, but second-hand copies are available online.

The other surviving black-and-white films include Playing the Game (a comic look at the game of golf, released in 1967), A Pocket Full of Rye, Where the Avon Flows, Our Mr Shakespeare, Cartoons and Cartoonists, The Things People Do, Stadium Highlights, and Science Is Golden.

Several ‘B’ features were also made by Baim, including the haunted house thriller Night Comes Too Soon (also known as The Ghost of Rashmon Hall), and The Fantastic World of Film, a compilation of early silent American comedy films.

The Baim short films were originally created for the British cinema and mainly distributed with United Artists features, enabling the chain to meet legal requirements for the minimum number of UK-made productions shown. The legislation was introduced in the 1927 Cinematograph Act. These short documentary films were sometimes called “Quota Quickies”, due to the fact they were made to fulfil the quota of UK productions required under distribution legislation of the time.

A radio documentary on Baim’s films, entitled “Telly Savalas and the Quota Quickies”, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 26 April 2008. Presenter Laurie Taylor investigated Baim’s legacy through the productions Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham, Telly Savalas Looks at Portsmouth, and Telly Savalas Looks at Aberdeen.

The radio programme, along with more detailed information and film clips, is available on the Baim Films website. Viewing copies of all titles mentioned above are held for public reference by the BFI and The Baim Collection. 

See Harold Baim on Wikipedia.