Never a Backward Step
1966 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Donald Brittain, Arthur Hammond, John Spotton
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Canadian publisher Roy Thomson's relentless rise from Timmins to newspaper, television and finance empires in Britain is profiled as a frank study of ambition, wealth and power.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Three directors wrestling a 57-minute doc about a newspaper magnate into something actually *about* power itself—it's the kind of institutional biography that subverts the form by refusing hagiography, and yeah, it mostly works.
A formally rigorous example of observational documentary lineage (Grierson school meets postwar Canadian inquiry), where the measured pacing and editorial restraint become the argument itself—ambition dissected through structure rather than narration.
The decision to let Thomson's own voice and contradictions do the heavy lifting, layered against archival footage and neutral observation, transforms what could've been corporate puffery into genuine unease about what relentless accumulation actually costs.