Hollywood UK Episode Two: Making It In London BBC4 8th August 2005
This is the 2nd of 5 episodes from the series originally broadcast on BBC2 in 1993.
And so we come to `Swinging London'. Did it really exist - as famously declared by Time magazine in April 1966 - or was it just a media construct? A clip of an interview with Julie Christie (from Peter Whitehead's important Tonite Let's All Make Love in London - uncredited by the BBC) from 1966 or 67 shows her saying about the 60s, `A good time is much easier had by all than ever before'. Certainly true by comparison with the 1950s, but it was much truer for `the beautiful people' that Terence Stamp discusses moving amongst here, than for the general population. All the same, something was happening, as evidenced by the films discussed.
Presenter Richard Lester looks at these films - Darling (1965), A Hard Day's Night (1964), The Pleasure Girls (1965), The Knack (1965), Georgy Girl (1966), Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), Alfie (1966), Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), and Poor Cow (1967).
Darling is used to set the scene. In contrast to the gritty northern materialism of the `kitchen-sink' films of the first programme in the series (see previous review), we now have glamour with a capital G, as personified by Julie Christie. Her character, Diana Scott, is an ambitious attractive young woman who is determined to lead her own life. She wants to be economically and sexually independent. Her fascination with powerful men leads her to move up the social ladder from man to man until she finally marries an Italian prince. But it ends in tears with the character isolated and alone in an Italian castle. According to writer Frederic Raphael, the 60s saw a presumption that what was previously considered as `bad behaviour' should be accepted as the norm. So the script for Darling, in displaying Diana Scott's bad behaviour, was a social comment intended to suggest that a better society was needed - in Raphael's words, `i.e. God help us, a socialist one' (this comment says a lot more about Raphael than socialism).
A Hard Day's Night, a `documentary-style' film about a day in the life of The Beatles has been famously described by film critic Andrew Sarris as `the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies'. Yet, as revealed here by United Artists executive David Picker, the film was only made because UA would get a soundtrack album out of it. In fact the film cost only £190,000 to produce (presumably making it one of the most profitable films of all time). Writer Alun Owen tailored the on-screen characters to the Beatles own personalities, enabling fresh lively performances which captivated audiences across the world. The programme takes in the difference between the `realism' of this film and the `let's do the show right here' showbizzy nature of the Cliff Richard precedents, The Young Ones (1961) and Summer Holiday (1962), which director Richard Lester was able to react against.
The Pleasure Girls' fairly realistic depiction of life in London for girls who had just moved there - involving flatmates, independence and boyfriends - is contrasted with Lester's ownThe Knack, a more stylised film about young people in the capital. The latter utilised a high-key photographic style - thus rendering more of an advertising-shoot look - and a kind of Greek Chorus of elderly people commenting on the antics of the younger generation. Lester admits to have used every trick he could think of in the film. All this makes it something of a microcosm of early swinging London. `The knack', by the way, is the ability to pull women. The full title of the film is The Knack...and how to get it.
Georgy Girl explored the other side of this question as Georgy, played by Lynn Redgrave, was frustrated and unable to get what she wanted sexually. Georgy, homely and warm-hearted, shares a flat with her polar opposite, sexy but cold-hearted Meredith, played by Charlotte Rampling. Meredith's boyfriend is Jos, played by Alan Bates. Meredith gets pregnant, has the baby, but doesn't want it. Georgy solves her problem by marrying her old guardian - James Mason - so that she can adopt her friend's baby. How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.
Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment is a very idiosyncratic film, being a re-working of a David Mercer play screened by the BBC in 1962. Mercer's own breakdown and experience of psychoanalysis appears to inform his understanding of Morgan, played by David Warner. A familiar Mercer theme, described as `social alienation masquerading as madness' is at the core of the film. Class differences between working class Morgan and his upper-middle class wife Leonie, played by Vanessa Redgrave, make them incompatible. Their frustration at this makes them resort to games and fantasies. Morgan's mental association with Guy the gorilla makes for some memorable scenes, as for instance when Morgan speeds away from the camera on a motorbike, dressed in a smouldering gorilla suit. A communist motif also runs through the film as Morgan's mother, played by Irene Handl, is a card-carrying member who regards her son as a class traitor. At the end of the film, as Morgan works in the garden of the mental home where he has been sent, and Leonie visits him to tell him she is carrying his child, the pull-out shows us the flowers growing in the shape of a hammer and sickle. The film embodied the psychological theories of R.D.Laing - an important 60s figure - who is shown here commenting on the film.
And so to a more conventional film which was one of the biggest commercial successes of the decade - Alfie. The least conventional aspect of the film was the way that the main character, played by Michael Caine, addressed the camera directly about the merits or demerits of the succession of `birds' that he pulled. The film epitomised male attitudes (Caine comments that all his friends lived like Alfie at the time) while amusing and charming the audience. It wasn't all light-hearted though, with a strong performance as a backstreet abortionist by Denholm Elliott. It contained a number of fine performances amongst Alfie's conquests, including those of Millicent Martin, Jane Asher, Shelley Winters (the `older woman'), and Shirley Anne Field. But, of course, all good things must come to an end, and after contracting TB Alfie finally reflects on the shallow nature of his existence.
According to Richard Lester, Far From The Madding Crowd demonstrated the limits to `Swinging London' - it didn't translate to Thomas Hardy's Wessex. The film, starring Julie Christie, Terence Stamp, Alan Bates, and Peter Finch was not a commercial success, especially in the USA. John Schlesinger's adaptation of the novel focussed on how a young woman could inherit her uncle's farm, then keep it and run it herself without alliances with, or ownership by, any of her three male suitors. Somehow Nic Roeg's cinematography seemed to outshine the principal actors.
The final film featured here, Poor Cow, pointed in a new direction. Directed by Ken Loach, who came from directing television plays for the BBC, it "had a realism about it I hadn't encountered before" according to Terence Stamp. Stamp also recounts how the producer, Joseph Janni, begged him not drive to the shoots in his new Rolls-Royce, because Loach "was a communist and would hate it". Loach complains that he was required to carry a huge crew for the film's production which swamped what he was trying to do. As Stamp says, the film shoot was not structured in the traditional way, with a master shot followed by medium, close-up and reverse close-up shots. Instead, Loach utilised big master shots which continued until the film ran out. He also used a lot of non-actors in his films. Of course, Loach was to continue and develop this style throughout his career.
Lester summarises the `Swinging London' period as "honeymoon years in which pleasure and personal fulfilment could be pursued as ends in themselves [but which] were bound to lead to some kind of burnout. Filmmakers like Ken Loach had already sensed it was time for a rediscovery of the minutiae of people's lives". So the next episode of the series moves on to `issue films', including some of the most important films of the decade.
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