why are 'british' films shit?

LJ if you get a chance to see Nuts in May you shd also try and find Jack Rosenthal's 70s classic Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. which features the internal monologue of a severely depressed Sunday league referee iirc.

:D :D :D awesome

A lot of Britain's best 60s/70s/early 80s movies were shot as Play for Today made for TV dealies basically.

wait isn't ARFRB about a psycho dude? considine wasn't funny in that, he was terrifying! iirc.

A Fish Called Wanda? Haven't seen it in years though, so maybe it's actually shit.

Don't rate most of Wanda but maybe the Michael Palin (?) offing random pets scenes are good?

Those are definitely the bits that stick in my mind, pretty funny performance by Palin.

iirc 'wanda' is pretty funny.

>wait isn't ARFRB about a psycho dude?

Sure you're not thinking of Dead Man's Shoes? Considine goes full psychopath in that, his turn in ARFRB is menacing at times but not really terrifying.

no im thinking about the one with the disabled kid... it's been a while but my recollection is considine was scary. n e way he is very good.

'hot fuzz' is pretty fuckin funny.

Considine's kid brother in Dead Man's Shoes is disabled. One of the main kids in ARFRB has a bad back, but that's about it.

Jack Rosenthal's 70s classic Another Sunday and Sweet F.A

See also P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang.

'hot fuzz' has its moments but isn't a top-rank comedy by any means imo

xp Although, again, it's not lough out loud funny. Last British film I saw that made me laugh out loud was Oh, Mr Porter!

Next train's gone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBMHU1BJXCw

"I'm Alright Jack" isn't bad fwiw but we're getting into Tweeling territory here

Nothing wrong with that.

Love I'm Alright, it's got some pretty sparky/direct satire compared to a lot of the Ealings plus one of Sellers' toppest performances and one of the saddest lines of all time: "I see from your particulars you was at college in Oxford. I was up there meself. I was at the Balliol summer school in 1946. Very good toast and preserves they give you at tea time, as you probably know."

And obv I will rep for all of the Powell & Pressburger comedy-ish movies above pretty much anything else but again comedy not lollery.

It's a long while since I saw it but I remember it being pretty good (re: IAJ).

AMOLAD is a very good film.

are we ignoring carry on, or

far prefer hot fuzz to shaun of the dead

think it's severely underrated. the only thing i don't like is the big gun battle but considine effing kills it in that film.

hot fuzz gets kinda better as it goes along, sotd gets worse, so i'm biased towards hot fuzz...need to see it again but it brings a few lols and hey timothy dalton!!!!1

I'm so glad someone posted the Will Hay clip above because I found Will Hay films (esp. Oh, Mr. Porter!) really funny when I was a child and I still do. I also like Norman Wisdom, too, although he can be unfunny at times.

THE REBEL w/ Tony Hancock is my nomination for the funniest British film

but considine effing kills it in that film

remember being really pissed off by his turnaround at the end, seemed like a cop-out

SOTD beats it (and most 00s comedies) for me

Late last year I finally saw some early Anthony Asquith - Shooting Stars, Underground, and A Cottage on Dartmoor. I was blown away, particularly by the latter which is easiest to find in the States. It's clearly the equal of contemporary Hitch and a galaxy far, far away from, to answer the thread title, shit.

where did you see 'em?

have been doing a phd partly about this guy.

im glad his stuff is coming back out, but the commentary on it so far has been off-base, saying, "hey, it wasn't just hitchcock!" basically, it was common practice since about 1930 till 19?? to say, "british cinema is shit -- except hitchcock and asquith!"

Well, depending on how one finishes 19??, there's Powell too.

To answer your question, while prepping for a course on Brit cinema, I raided a colleague's collection.

With some slight reservations, I like Murray Smith's piece on Dartmoor.

I've seen Hindle Wakes but it didn't hit me as hard as those Asquiths (sounds like the title of the next 6ths album). Would love to see some Stoll Film Company titles or something like Palais de Danse. Have you seen any?

The earliest films are amazing too - Hepworth, Williamson, Mitchell/Kenyon (whose films I never expected to be so intoxicated by but again wow), etc.

And on into the 1930s and beyond. Current obsessions: Gracie Fields, the amaaaaaaazing Tod Slaughter, The Ghost Camera, every Gainsborough melodrama I've seen so far (about five), several positively jaw-dropping 1960s musicals, etc.

Very shit - Cliff Richard musicals

Well, depending on how one finishes 19??, there's Powell too.

yeah. he began to get recognized only in the 1960s – 70s really, is when he had his first retrospective shows. hitch and asquith were seen as dudes upholding the great tradition, ie "russian cutting". now people are beginning to recognize their contemporary thorold dickinson too.

murray smith's piece is interesting -- i haven't read it since i started my phd, which has been about getting rid of the bias towards 'close up' magazine. it wasn't the only source of intelligent ideas about film in the 1920s. im hoping to write about 'underground' and asquith's own writing when the dvd drops n e way.

I've seen Hindle Wakes but it didn't hit me as hard as those Asquiths (sounds like the title of the next 6ths album). Would love to see some Stoll Film Company titles or something like Palais de Danse. Have you seen any?

the real insurmountable problem is that practically everything from the 1920s was destroyed. bits and bobs turn up. but the director who was seen (including by asquith) as the best of the bunch, george pearson -- almost nothing survives. this partly accounts for the low standing of british cinema. truffaut simply didn't have a clue. wonder if he'd even seen any powell.

The earliest films are amazing too - Hepworth, Williamson, Mitchell/Kenyon (whose films I never expected to be so intoxicated by but again wow), etc.

i think every country had its mitchell/kenyon tbh! another sad loss, going on accounts, is all the action films from the 1910s. but that's before my period and the names escape me.

v. impressed you can see all that stuff. i'd have difficulty in the grossly underfunded UK.

my phd, which has been about getting rid of the bias towards 'close up' magazine.

Fascinating! I've been reading about The Film Society and understand that literature was handed out at some screenings. Would love to see what was written.

The only Thorold Dickinson film I know of is Gaslight so I'll seek out more.

Yeah, Truffaut, no cigar for you.

I've been reading about The Film Society and understand that literature was handed out at some screenings. Would love to see what was written.

haha! the phd is also about getting rid of the FS bias! i mean, it's good that that work has been done. buuut it skews things to just have those two, which has been the pattern for ~80 years.

they did a programme at each screening -- actually there was a bootleg of the programmes published by arno (NY) in the 1970s.

basically: it ran from 1925-39, eight times a year. the most important thing it did was show the big russian montage films, starting in 1928, most of which were banned. it is usually credited with showing the other major "art-house" movements of the era, but this is wrong. almost every important german film had commercial distribution. it's basically credited with making possible art-house cinemas, which were established in london, basically, between 1928–35. that case is more complicated.

n e way, asquith was distantly involved with it. it's claimed hitchcock was involved with it. but thorold dickinson really was: he ran the backstage stuff, programming, etc. eisenstein came over in 1929 and gave lectures: thorold dickinson and asquith (contemporaries at oxford) attended. dickinson got in a fist-fight with dziga vertov a few years later.

dickinson's best films (imo) are 'next of kin' (war film) and 'secret people' (kind of like hitchcock's 'sabotage'. the latter has just come out on dvd, with 'the queen of spades' -- which scorsese reps for, and has done an intro on the dvd for.

kevin, you are also better placed to see things like terence fisher's early hammer quota quickies, which are available on dvd in the usa, but not in the uk

v. jealous that hkm got to write some of the booklet material for the BFI's release of HEROSTRATUS, a film i have been obsessed by for years, ever since i saw this grotesque still reproduced in prob the first film reference bk i ever owned:

http://wpcontent.answers.com/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/0a/Herostratus_Pressbook.jpg/180px-Herostratus_Pressbook.jpg

also keen to own the relase of peter watkins' PRIVILEGE in the same series, as well as the lindsay shonteff and pete walker exploiters - shame these discs don't have commentaries, tho

sry!

haha as the booklet says, that film is all part of the Great Tradition im trying to establish, from george pearson thru thorold down to the 60s...

must get privilege. p cheap on amazon.

(is it me or is it hard even to get fisher's major hammer films in the UK?)

I'll also rep for Queen Of Spades, KJB. May be Anton Walbrook's best performance.

Re: The Film Society, the (sometimes deliciously gossipy) material I've been reading on it has been coupled with more current work about the era, e.g. Andrew Higson's brilliant “Polyglot Films for an International Market: E.A. Dupont, the British Film Industry, and the Idea of a European Cinema, 1926-1930” which makes clear that Dupont's scintillating (and German) Varieté was an international hit.

Re: Dickinson, my local vidya store has The Queen of Spades!

Re: Fisher, I'm not a noir fan but I really should plow through some of those Hammer noir collections seeing as how they're so easily available. Fisher's filmography just seems so insurmountable.

Re: Herostratus, all I can say is that I'm glad I didn't know about this remarkable film until moments before actually seeing it else I can very much see myself being obsessed with it for years. Instead, that designation goes to Michael Sarne's Joanna (1968). Why is this film so hard to find???

Other Brit(ish) films of interest:

The Invader (1935) - Starring a somehow game Buster Keaton, this is often upheld as one of the worst results of the Quota. But for the first half at least, it moves into that so-bad-it-doubles-as-a-surreal-art-film zone.

The Holly and The Ivy (1952) - Actorly ensemble drama of family tensions at Xmas.

And I'm deeply in love with (American, I know) Joseph Losey's impossible mid-to-late 1960s Brit films like
Modesty Blaise, Secret Ceremony, and my very favorite Boom!

modesty blaise is classic.

what have you been reading about the film society?

yah variety was a metropolis-sized hit. i've never quite "got" higson. seems to have a bee in his bonnet about "national" cinema?

Dusinberre, Samson, other names I'm forgetting now.

I love Higson's piece for how seamlessly it unites aesthetic and socioeconomic concerns.

yeah... they're ok, those ones. there is MUCH BETTER (AND ACUCRATE) GOSSIP to spread. fucking hell i must get round to publishing on the FS.

"Modesty Blaise" is classic, yes. I saw it on TV a loong time ago (I think before CH4 started even) and can still remember loads of it, I'd love to see it again. For some reason the inflatabe bow & arrow sticks in my mind the most.

A couple of old brit films I like would be:

"Cash on Demand" (1961) w/Peter Cushing as a bank manager - his family is abducted by robbers who try to blackmail/lever him into emtying the bank vaults. Again, I saw it on TV years ago, I watched a little bit just because it was Peter cushing, and good grief did it grip! Very tense, w/a really excellent performance from Cushing. I'm not sure but I think it's actually a Hammer production.

"Valley of Song" (1953) a small-scale, vaguely ealing-ish piece about a rivalry between 2 factions in the choir at a Welsh pit village. Really quite magical & atmospheric, I wd love to see it again, it's an unusual film that I saw once probably 20 years ago and I still get a bit of a lump in my throat when I think about it.

(I must pick up that Gracie Fields DVD set, as an aside)

i rescreened MB only a few weeks ago. just incredibly photographed, and i think it was losey's second colour film (and his first was in like 1948).

how about 'radio on (1979)' then

this is wenders' english franchise

haven't seen it in the best part of a decade so

but i don't entirely get the love

or like wenders very much

people want it to be "the post-punk of movies", very badly

oh well, perfect example of what im talking about:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/exclusive/grey_area.php

penultimate par particularly choice

It isn’t only the poor and the non-white who are edited out of Notting Hill, for example – it’s also the Westway, west London’s Ballardian flyover, which now stands as a relic of “the modern city that London never became”.

well, obviously we all hate notting hill, but the westway is just a gd flyover. it doesn't represent the modern city london could have become. a city comprising flyovers would be what?

is it a modernity we even want? i always enjoyed the ride over the westway. nice view. but it is still just a flyover.

people want it to be "the post-punk of movies"

Not the worst thing to be - I know with Reynolds et al. that has probably changed.

Anyway, love Kings of the Road and this is a nice companion piece.

Need to check out Flipside.

notting hill was pretty ok i thought

yeah well the thing with it being post-punk and krautrock is... there isn't any post-punk iirc. no cool stuff ne way the s/t was produced via an apparently very innovative deal with, erm, stiff.

xpost

yeah im being sarky re notting hill -- it's basically the softest (and in this case most random) target going, british cinema wise. not a whole lot of black or poor people in 'radio on'.

why are 'british' films shit?

At one point in Chris Petit’s haunting new film Content, we drive through Felixstowe container port. It was an uncanny moment for me, since Felixstowe is only a couple of miles from where I live – what Petit filmed could have been shot from our car window.