Vintage 1970s Montreal chit-chat in health food store film

    Fill your appetite for Lower Westmount health food chit chat in this 1973 NFB film by David Bairstow.
   Being a Westmounter who grew up two blocks from the store at 580 Grosvenor, this is none too exotic to me but perhaps someone else might find it charming.
   Tom Marchant* started his Sunny Munchy Crunchy Natural Food Shop at 361 Victoria in 1971 and it was still going in 1973, as this movie attests and perhaps a little longer... but probably not much longer because he's a lousy salesman.
   The store only bore its cute purported name for the documentary. In reality it was called the considerably more-drab Westmount Health Food Centre.
   Many stores have come on gone at that spot. The jewelry store that currently inhabits that space is soon closing.
  Marchant comes off as a chatterbox who might overdo the chit chat with his shoppers, including an 85-year-old who he tries hard to sell a single loaf of apple bread made of "five little apples."
  Sheesh.
  You might enjoy this 10-minute movie because it's reassuring to know that you didn't miss much by not being at this time and place.
   Conversely you might not enjoy it because it proves that life is an empty meaningless spiral into the void of nothingness where nothing has weight or meaning.
  Another basement health food store later opened on Sherbrooke not far west from the spot. It  appears to be thriving.
  You'll note that the NFB movie features a scene of a  jogger running into the store and taking items without paying. That scene, for some reason, was shot on nearby Prince Albert just above Chesterfield, although made to look like it was here.
   If anybody recognizes any of the faces, please send the news. The longhaired guy is a dead ringer for comedian Richard Lewis.
 
 
 

  *I never met Marchant to my knowledge. He's is in my extended family but is not my blood relative. If I understand right, he married my father's sister and was the father of my four cousins, Pammy, Christopher, Tony (recently deceased) and Valerie, all splendid people.