Just One of the Boys
1975 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Ted Haley, Mike Mahoney
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Mechanic Eric Davidson, blinded as a toddler in the 1917 Halifax explosion, builds a reputation as an antique-car specialist known among enthusiasts as 'the Rolls man.'
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A '75 NFB doc about a blind mechanic who became a Rolls-Royce savant should be maudlin hagiography, but instead it's weirdly restrained—the filmmakers refuse the expected uplift, letting the contradiction between darkness and mastery just sit there, unresolved.
A classical portrait of craft and perseverance shot in the documentary tradition of intimate observation; Haley and Mahoney position Eric Davidson within a lineage of character studies that trust restraint over sentiment, allowing the work itself to speak as the truest autobiography.
The sound design—the specific grammar of tools, engines, and Davidson's own breathing—does the heavy lifting here, turning a straightforward biography into something tactile and immediate; it's a small choice that transforms how we understand what blindness means in the grammar of work itself.