Donald Brittain is well known for his National Film Board documentaries, all shown on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) television. In the 1980s, Donald Brittain directed Running Man, an early exploration of homosexuality in the CBC’s topical anthology For the Record. He then created two biographical docudramas: one about mobster and union boss Hal Banks, the two-hour docudrama special Canada’ s Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks (1985); the other about Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King, a six-hour miniseries, The King Chronicles (1987).

In Canada’s Sweetheart, Brittain shows us, through the lens of the Seafarers’ International Union, the primitive state of labor-management relations in Canada from the late 1940s to early 1960s. In The King Chronicles, he explores Canadian political culture from the days following World War I to the wrenching changes in society in the aftermath of World War II. Brittain spells out Canadian complicity in the activities of both men—an imported thug who controlled Great Lakes shipping and a prime minister who, to quote Brittain’s narrative, was “a creature who cast no shadow though he ruled the land of the midnight sun.”

Canada’s Sweetheart incorporated interviews with survivors from those years, stills, newsreels, and dramatization. Brittain uses full color for the dramatized Royal Commission hearings, the interviews with real people, and some of the flashbacks. Black-and-white scenes include Banks’s quiet entrance into Canada and his equally surreptitious exit, and union leader Jim Todd’s futile challenge to an executive in a packed meeting hall. Some scenes that are particularly violent or menacing are given a specifically film noir treatment.

The film is also quite self-reflexive. Todd recalls how Banks’s bully-boys came to his house one night while his wife was in the kitchen. The camera then discloses the hitherto silent Mrs. Todd, who tells us that “Friday is fish and chips night” and that when she heard a commotion she went into the living room with a full pan of boiling fat in her hand. At her firm word “that dinner was ready,” the thug left. Her understated telling of the situation is far more effective than a dramatization would be, a strong illustration of what happened when ordinary seamen and lock masters had finally had enough. In another sequence, Jack Pickersgill, a cabinet minister in St. Laurent’s government, is filmed with a pet dog in his lap—a nicely ironic touch. He damns himself without knowing it. The episodic narrative then turns into one of the oldest forms of dramatic confrontation—the trial. However, in typically Canadian fashion, the drama ends not with the damning report of the Royal Commission but with Banks slipping out of the country with the implicit cooperation of cabinet ministers.

In The King Chronicles, Brittain dramatizes both the public records and the private diaries of Prime Minister King. As with Hal Banks, the public King is represented by news footage intercut with drama, often with ironic effect. For the private life of King (who was discovered, after his death, to have been a spiritualist who talked to his dead mother and his dead dog), Brittain uses recurring, visually lyrical motifs. Less successfully, he also uses grotesque fantasy sequences for King’s visions.

The primary focus in each film is on power: how it is used for a variety of purposes, and how it changes the men who use it. Throughout both films, Brittain shows his viewers how Hal Banks and Willie King grappled with the necessity of maintaining an acceptable public face and how they managed to hide both their goals and methods and their eccentric and dangerous private personae.

Of course, he shows us King the manipulator, the obsessively vain and insecure politician, object of a hundred political cartoons, editorials, and sardonic poems. Yet there are enough glimpses of the man’s ability to surprise us throughout the miniseries. Maury Chaykin as Banks and Sean McCann as King gave superb performances full of subtextual nuance covering a wide range of emotions. Each actor was physically brilliant in his gestures and body language.

Brittain has said he enjoyed “the tone of someone’s voice combined with a certain visual setup against something that went before,” an effect achieved in post-production. Editorial decisions such as splicing are crucial to his work. Brittain includes a sense of scale and of social context, a feel for curious juxtapositions, a sense of ironic detachment and black humor, and what has been called his signature, a “tart historical narrative.”

In both these films, Brittain provides almost continuous voice-over, counterpointing the images on the screen with a highly personal interpretation of events. This ironic inflection of the “voice of god” conventionof early National Film Board of Canada documentaries was intended to signify an objective, omniscient perspective. These two films also stand within a tradition of docudrama at the CBC, one that included the very controversial modern adaptation of the Easter story told in the style of direct cinema, The Open Grave (1964), as well as massive projects such as the six-hour The National Dream and the critical look at Canada’s October Crisis. Brittain was one of the few who used television to tell memorable tales that redefined the life and times of the viewers.