Presented by United World Films and distributed by United Education and Visual Arts, this 1958 black-and-white film, “The Way We Live,” takes a look at “Making a Living Around the World — Trade and Transportation.” The film opens on “Main Street” in any small town of the 1950s, with quaint grocery stores, hardware stores, clothing stores, cobblers, and bakeries. “When we want things others have to sell, we give them money,” the narrator explains at mark 1:22. “When we exchange money for things we need, we begin to understand the meaning of trade.” The film then launches into an explanation of how trade is carried out around the world.

In Quebec, Canada, we are told, French-Canadian farmers take advantage of the rich farmland of the Saint Lawrence Valley and sell their product to businesses and families in the city, where some homeowners pay with cash and others pay using credit. At mark 04:25, the film travels to the Netherlands, where farmers use a series of canals as “water highways” to transport their produce to wholesale markets. Meanwhile, in China (at mark 07:27), we learn how sampans (flat-bottom wooden boats) are integral parts of trade. Other farmers walk with their goods to markets in Canton — sometimes a day’s journey — or carry their goods in carts. Due to a lack of refrigeration, markets are busy on a daily basis. “The housewife who buys fresh food will buy no more than her family can use in a single day,” we are told at mark 09:00. In the southeast Asian country of Malaya, shown at mark 09:26, farmers rely on more primitive forms of transportation such as bamboo rafts to make their way on rain-swollen rivers to a jungle trading post, exchanging rattan and a monkey for items like bush knives before returning to their rain forest homes.

In industrialized European countries such as Germany, France, and Belgium, raw materials and manufactured products are transported cheaply via barges or over land. Among the products exchanged are iron ore and coal. “The industrial districts of Western Europe can operate only so long as trade continues between the nations involved. This trade is made possible by the well-developed network of transportation of Western Europe,” it is explained at mark 12:54. In the United Kingdom, London serves as a trading hub, thanks in part to the River Thames, importing raw materials from overseas to be made into manufactured products such as automobiles. “As a result of her dependence on shipping, Great Britain long ago became a great maritime nation,” the viewer is told beginning at mark 14:25.

At mark 14:40, the film lands in New York Harbor, where hundreds of vessels regularly load and unload their cargo, before giving an aerial view of (a very different) Manhattan, “on which the world’s greatest skyscrapers are clustered, thrusting their towers skyward,” before scanning the city’s highways and bridges. The film closes with the idea of air transportation playing a role in the future, as it “has provided new and additional means of bringing goods and people to our already great trade and transportation centers.”