Old Yorker

  • 1964:  Today in Britain

    Old YorkerFilm review

    (Various directors) (1964)

    This BFI programme comprised three documentary shorts, all made in 1964:   Today in Britain (directed by Peter Hopkinson); Faces of Harlow (directed by Derrick Knight); Portrait of Queenie (directed by Michael Orrom).

    Today in Britain:

    This was sponsored by the Foreign Office, the Commonwealth Relations Office and Colonial Office ‘to present the nation to a global audience’.  The narration is by James Cameron:  his distinctive, relaxed but authoritative voice is perhaps a little intrusive but it brings out the quality of the language in the script he wrote with Peter Hopkinson – the alliteration and other linguistic curlicues now seem as much a piece of history as the images they accompany.  Even allowing for the film’s promotional purposes, the vision of Britain presented by Hopkinson and Cameron is strikingly complacent:  we have a unique history but we’re up for the future; the seamless transition from Empire to Commonwealth is without parallel; ditto the recent expansion of higher education.  The latter development at least allows the film-makers to feature one of the rare black faces in the film:  the only others I noticed were in a shot of the West Indies cricket team fielding (with John Edrich at the crease) and a bus conductor, who gets a friendly smile from one of his white passengers that seems meant to sum up multiracial harmony across the land.    It’s not clear when in 1964 the film was made or released:  there’s no suggestion that the Profumo affair and related events of the previous year caused any ripple of anxiety; the brisk tour of each country of the United Kingdom includes a remarkably brief glance at Northern Ireland without of course a whisper of the Troubles to come.  An early sequence focuses proudly on world-leading technological advances:  the army of white coats in gleaming laboratories makes this science fact look like science fiction and exudes an ominous whiff of we-know-what’s-good-for-you.  But the tone is confidently positive – Today in Britain may well have appeared between Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ speech to the Labour conference in 1963 and the General Election of 1964 which brought him to 10 Downing Street.

    Faces of Harlow:

    Harlow was created in the wake of the New Towns Act of 1946.  Derrick Knight’s film, which he also wrote, was designed to boost local self-esteem as well as display the town’s amenities and activities to a wider public:  it was made for the Harlow Development Corporation.   Like all three films in this BFI programme, it’s too long – more overlong than the other two – although it’s interesting to see a community of this kind being promoted in the mid-1960s without any implication that the concept of a ‘planned community’ might be sinister (or any intended implication anyway:  I kept thinking of Pete Seeger singing ‘Little Boxes’).   Some of the artwork by Harlow schoolchildren is good but Knight’s attempts to suggest a vibrant local culture and indeed the whole sense of ‘community’ feel forced.   The BFI curator Alex Davidson, who introduced the evening, noted that pop music was conspicuous by its near-absence from the film, in spite of the fact that most of the biggest acts of the time played Harlow.  But Faces of Harlow, regardless of its shortcomings, evidently did what it was meant to do:  Davidson also explained that when it showed at the local cinema it got bigger audiences even than The Guns of Navarone.

    Portrait of Queenie:

    Michael Orrom’s camera spends an evening in and around the Ironbridge Tavern on the Isle of Dogs, run by Queenie Watts and her husband Slim.  Orrom and James Stevens, who co-wrote the script with him and contributed ‘special numbers’ to the programme of songs performed in the pub, seem more interested in presenting Queenie Watts as the symbol of a way of life than exploring her as an individual.  I don’t have much feel for East End culture, particularly its knees-up side, or for the jazz that Queenie sang but the piece is fascinating as an historical document.  Here too, you’re struck by the virtually all-white pub clientele, although a couple of the musicians are black, and friends of Queenie.  What’s also startling is how old she looks:  she was only in her late thirties when the film was made (only 53 when she died in 1980).  Queenie’s family were evacuated to Oxford during the war:  her mother and sisters stayed there – in a brief interlude we see them all performing ‘My Old Man’ together in an Oxford pub (the mother’s piano-playing isn’t too hot).   But Queenie is umbilically attached to the Isle of Dogs:  the shots of her walking round a landscape that’s still not recovered from the air raids of a quarter century earlier are strong.   Orrom begins and ends his film with two blonde-beehived girls arriving in the area for their visit to the Ironbridge Tavern and eventually heading tipsily home.  It’s a running joke that the pair order the same (and buy their own) drinks all evening – ‘Sweet martini, gin and bitter lemon’.   Just when the joke is wearing thin, Orrom rescues it:  their last orders are drowned out by the music onstage but we can read the girls’ lips.

    30 December 2010

  • ’71

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Yann Demange (2014)

    It was especially interesting to watch Yann Demange’s debut feature just a day after The Cut.  ’71 is visually kinetic and the story, set mostly in Belfast during the Troubles, is both strongly rooted in the particular conflict that triggers the action and mediated through a convincingly individualised central character.  These are all qualities unfortunately lacking in Fatih Akin’s film.   Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell) is a young soldier from Derbyshire.  ’71 begins with a montage that describes the military training that he and others undergo.  They’re expecting, on completion of the training, to be stationed in Germany but the worsening situation in Northern Ireland (the film’s title refers, I assume, simply to the year 1971) sends them to Belfast instead.  Demange and Gregory Burke, who wrote the screenplay, set the scene there naturally and efficiently, imparting essential information about the sectarian geography of the city through a lecture given by a senior officer to the newly-arrived soldiers.  Within a few screen minutes, the unit of which Hook is a member is caught up in a street riot that develops from a house-to-house search for weapons in the Falls Road area.  Hook and another soldier are separated from their colleagues; this other soldier is shot dead and Hook is pursued by his killers through backstreets and alleyways before taking temporary refuge in an outdoor toilet.  From this point onwards, ’71 is, in narrative terms, the story of how Gary Hook – unsure in the first place what he’s doing in Northern Ireland, now traumatised and disoriented – tries to get back to the barracks where his unit is based.

    The plotting of the story, once Hook is alone, is designed so that he survives a series of close shaves; Demange and Burke ratchet up the drama by describing tensions both within the IRA and between uniformed and undercover British soldiers – and how these tensions boil over and converge so as to intensify Hook’s perilous predicament.  There’s a risk with this kind of material and treatment that a film will turn ‘thrillery’ but the strength of the characters, especially Hook, and Demange’s direction combine to ensure that ’71 very rarely loses its particularity.  The hand-held camerawork in the street riot sequences may be excessive but, as well as enhancing the sense of frightening disorder, it gives increased impact to the moments when the camera movement slows down, as it does before the horrifying death of Hook’s fellow soldier.  ’71 is almost relentlessly violent, either physically or verbally and sometimes both at the same time.  The dramatic salience of key acts of violence – the shooting of the soldier, the detonation of a bomb in a Unionist pub, Hook’s fatal stabbing of an IRA man in an act of self-defence – is remarkable in the circumstances.  Demange, with the help of his cinematographer Tat Radcliffe, also does a fine and shocking job of locating the war zone within urban streets, the terraced houses and bars, where families live otherwise ‘normal’ lives.

    Without overdoing it, Yann Demange and Gregory Burke make some incisive comments about the background of Gary Hook and young men like him who join up.  There’s a kind of gruesome adventure holiday atmosphere to the scenes in which the young recruits are doing their training.  Before he goes to Belfast, Gary takes his younger brother, who’s in care, out for the day.  A remark to Gary from one of the staff, when the boy is returned late, makes clear that Gary himself used to be in the same or a similar institution.  When the army unit first arrives for the house-to-house search, one of the children in the street shows what he thinks of the soldiers by mooning:  Gary’s amused by this – it’s almost as if it’s the kind of cheeky thing he might have done himself as a kid.   At one point, an IRA man whose responsibility as a doctor takes precedence as he stitches a wound in Gary’s side, explains that he was an army medical officer for twenty years and tells the patient that the British army is about ‘posh cunts telling thick cunts to kill poor cunts’.  However much or little you agree with the sentiment, the line keeps ringing in your head for the remainder of ’71.

    Jack O’Connell, much praised for his performance in Starred Up (which I’ve not yet seen), is outstanding as Gary Hook.  O’Connell is luminously ordinary – he’s excellent at suggesting a young man who doesn’t know much but feels more.  There’s good work in the supporting cast from, in particular, Sam Reid, as the well meaning, literal-minded lieutenant in charge of Hook’s unit.  Sean Harris is, of course, a powerful presence as Browning, the undercover army captain, but both he and Demange may be a bit too aware of this:  as soon as Harris appears, the director moves the camera onto him – the effect is too deliberate and Harris might have been stronger if he’d played the role a shade less aggressively.  Richard Dormer, although effective enough as Eamon, the IRA man who tends Hook, is a limited actor.  Some of the playing of the smaller parts, especially in the training camp before the soldiers go to Northern Ireland, isn’t that great but the actors concerned come and go very quickly.

    A few things in the plotting and storytelling are, respectively, improbable or unclear.  When Eamon and his daughter Brigid (Charlie Murphy) find Gary lying wounded on a street corner, the father says he can’t leave him there:  Eamon shows incredible physical strength to carry Gary back to the family home and into Brigid’s bedroom.  Nearly all the action takes place between dusk one winter’s afternoon and daybreak the following morning; I didn’t therefore understand the placing of a short scene when Gary gets inside a flat and finds himself face to face with a young girl, who doesn’t appear to have gone to bed yet.  In a postscript to the Belfast story, Gary returns, in uniform, to the care home and collects his brother; the final shots show them sitting side by side on a coach, with Gary now in civvies – I wasn’t sure if this meant he’d left the army or if this was just another day out with the younger boy during leave.   Overall, though, ’71 is impressive.  Yann Demange shows a lot of skill in balancing the political history and action film ingredients and he’s greatly helped by Jack O’Connell’s ability to make Gary Hook both typical and individual.

    13 October 2014

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