Live and Learn (1951)
A series of dramatized vignettes follows children who act without thinking — running into traffic, playing with matches, climbing where they shouldn't — through accidents severe enough to land them in the hospital, urging young viewers to pause and consider consequences before acting.
Produced and directed by Sid Davis with assistance from Los Angeles Children’s Hospital and the Santa Monica Police Department, Live and Learn applies Davis’s fatalistic, vignette-driven formula — better known from teen-safety shorts like Boys Beware — to a younger audience, trading sermonizing for a string of blunt cautionary accidents.
Background
Sid Davis directed Live and Learn for his own production company, working with assistance from Los Angeles Children’s Hospital and the Santa Monica Police Department. Davis built a decades-long career on cautionary “social guidance” shorts, most famously the teen safety film Boys Beware, typically shooting them cheaply — often on budgets near $1,000 — using friends and relatives as cast. Live and Learn turns that same fatalistic formula on younger children, stringing together brief dramatized accidents meant to show how ordinary carelessness turns into catastrophe.
What to watch for
One vignette follows a girl named Jill, played by Davis’s own daughter, who is cutting out paper dolls in her room; when her father arrives home she jumps up to greet him, trips on the carpet, and falls on the scissors she is holding. Other episodes show children run over by cars, falling from heights, or blinded by flying glass after playing with it. None of the episodes offer much warning before the accident; Davis lets each injury land abruptly, without the build-up or softening a modern safety film might use, which is part of what has made his films a subject of later fascination.
