U trailers

The only extra on the cheap DVD of It Always Rains on Sunday that I watched and blogged about over the weekend is a theatrical trailer. There were two things I immediately noticed:

The trailer starts out with what is obviously a card for an overseas print. I don't think we would have gotten one like this in America, and not just because the US was not part of the British Empire. In the us, the movie was distributed by Eagle-Lion films, which handled the Rank Organisation stuff among others. More interesting was the next card, however:

At the time the movie was made in Britain, there were only two ratings: U for "Universal" and A which technically meant "Adult" but would probably be more accurately viewed as a parental guidance suggestion in some cases. This particular movie is not as much something I'd think parents would be offended by if their children watched it with them; instead it's more likely that the children would just be bored. (I don't think there's that much in the movie that's significantly more violent than the trailer.) As I watched the trailer, however, I was thinking more about the idea that they'd make a trailer with a different rating than the movie. But then it hit me that they do the same in the US too. Trailers get rated too, and I'd assume distributors would want to be able to show trailers of A movies even when they were running a U movie.