Chris Flackett
For such a small island, Britain has produced a disproportionate amount of quality films over the years, films that speak to the British character, culture, politics and society and, in turn, have spoken to millions of people around the world.
Here, I choose five of my favourite British films of all time, movies that deserve to be celebrated as examples of the best that British film-making can offer to cinema.
A Clockwork Orange
Stanley Kubrick was American of course, but A Clockwork Orange is pure British. It was filmed almost entirely on location in London and the surrounding Home Counties, featuring clothing not a million miles away from what the British skinhead subculture was wearing at the time, speaking a curious blend of Russian and Cockney slang, all using novelist Anthony Burgess’s perception of the “juevinile delinquent” Teddy Boy scare that was terrifying Britain’s upper class and offending its newspapers as its jumping off point.
It’s a film that works on several levels, but what’s always fascinated me is how the film presents a magnificently garish evocation of the world of the British teenager of the 50s and 60s, with its record stores and youth-oriented shops (filmed at the famous Chelsea Drug Store), the clothes as expression of attitude (“like trousers, like brain”), the passion for music (even if it is classical). But it’s all made strange, as if seen through the eyes of an adult that cannot understand or relate to what it is seeing and therefore what they see is sinister, provocative and dangerous to them.
It’s why the Korova Milk Bar, for example, is so surreal, with its female porcelain statue milk dispensers, its bodyguards in full white lycra, its deathly black walls and oddly long and narrow shape which suggests being trapped in a dark claustrophobic tunnel as opposed to a social meeting place. Likewise, the clothes of the droogs are a bizarre combination of the boots-and-braces uniform of the anti-social skinheads and the emblematic costume of the then-establishment (the bowler hat). The extra little accoutremonts, like the eyeball cufflinks, give an additional grotesque dimension to the look. It’s the appearance of the horrific from the point of view of those who are all too easily horrified.
Of course, such horror was not without justification, and the film is an often bleak presentation rape and ultraviolence. But, unfortunately, with its central theme of free will vs. an immoral authoritarian government, it’s a film that sadly still seems all too pertinent.
Britannia Hospital
This is perhaps the least well-known of all the films on this list, which is a crying shame, as Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital is one of the most wickedly, acidicly funny and politically pointed films Britain has ever produced—and that’s considering his previous two films, If… and O Lucky Man!
Britannia Hospital sees a big London hospital preparing for a Royal visit from Her Majesty the Queen to open a new wing. Unfortunately for said hospital, workers in the kitchen are striking in opposition to having to feed privileged private patients in a National Health Service hospital; protesters are demonstrating outside against an African dictator VIP patient; and the dangerously bizarre Professor Millar (the brilliantly cast Graham Crowden) is experimenting in secret with dead bodies to create the perfect human. What could go wrong? Rather, what could go right?
Politically, you’re not in for an easy ride with Britannia Hospital. It doesn’t choose sides; instead, it expresses a misanthropic view of human hubris, something Anderson saw as cutting across all classes and political wings. It was this that upset the left wing of the day. Whilst solidly left wing in his politics, Lindsay Anderson was not above criticising the left for what he saw as their self-serving actions. The left believed Anderson should support striking comrades as a matter of principle. Anderson thought it depended on whether the strikers’ motives, beneath the sentiment, were worthy of such support.
As such, everyone gets it in the neck in Britannia Hospital. The hospital administrator, Potter (the late great Leonard Rossiter), is portrayed as pompous, insincere, and simpering to greater authority, his only concern being to get the Royal visit to go off without a hitch so that he can bask in the reflected glory. The strikers are bullish and only concerned with what they can get, rather than any strong morals. Professor Millar is so obsessed with playing God that he cannot see that what he has created is a monstrosity. The Royal Family themselves come in for the biggest kicking, made to look obsolete and ridiculous. It’s not the most balanced view of Britain and its subjects, but its done with such vicious humour and individuality that you can’t help but be galvanised by it.
If you’re new to some of these films and you only watch one film on this list, make it this one. It deserves to be way more widely seen (and it has an especially random Mark Hamill cameo, fresh from the first two Star Wars films, which makes for an interesting little cinematic curio!)
Get Carter
By the start of the 1970s, Michael Caine had successfully worked his way to the top of the British film industry. Through leading roles in such classic films as Zulu, Alfie, The Ipcress File and The Italian Job, Caine had also made himself a kind of talisman for the 1960s, a living embodiment of the changes happening particularly in Swinging London. The classes were beginning to mix, thanks in large part to the success of British pop music around the world, and Caine took full advantage of this new social mobility to move beyond his working class background, something that he would have been unable to do just a decade before. His cheeky cockney chappy persona with its shades of anti-authority feeling captured something of the feel of the English sixties underground, dissenting against perceived social, cultural and Establishment norms while enjoying its youthfulness and new found freedom.
If the 1970s can been seen as the hope and excitement of the 1960s having curdled, its sensuality now dirty and sordid, its concentrated anger at local and global British politics burning up into directionless, excessive violence, then Get Carter, only Michael Caine’s second film of the decade (1971), can be seen as the film that best represents that transformation from the progressiveness of the one decade to the bleakness and disillusionment of the next.
To be clear, Get Carter is bleak. Newcastle-upon-Tyne looks grey, tired and miserable, and the people don’t look much better. Caine’s Jack Carter discovers a pornography racket, but he was already aware of it—it only bothered him when he discovered his niece was used in a film. It’s certainly not a question of feminism: Carter dispatches of the woman, Margaret, who set his niece up with the pornographers by sticking her with a lethal injection in quite the nasty little scene. It’s revenge sought due to insult to Carter’s male pride and injury to his family. The film is under no illusions that Carter is just as vile and violent as the people he works for and the people he seeks vengeance against. That he is dispatched by a sniper and left to die, alone, in silence, in a grey, desolate quarry makes it clear that Carter is no hero. There is no dramatic myth-making here, only death.
The audience wasn’t ready for this Michael Caine. While it performed respectably at the cinema, Get Carter was criticised for its (at the time) use of extreme violence and for the lack of moral centre, particularly in the character of Jack Carter. Looking back from today, though, the film is an excellent examination of a man of low character brought even lower by his pride, and how violence is not heroic, rather that violence breeds more violence and ultimately death—and in death, no one wins.
The Wicker Man
“Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ!”
So goes one of the most terrified deliveries of a line I’ve ever heard, Edward Woodward’s voice trembling with panic as he faces his the means of his awful future fate: the titular Wicker Man. It’s both exhilarating and discomforting—much like the film itself.
The Wicker Man, the brain child of actor Christopher Lee and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, and atmospherically directed by Robin Hardy, not only has the reputation of being one of the greatest British films of all time, but is also pretty much the figurehead for the folk-horror sub-genre of movies, the talisman behind which all other folk-horror stands behind. It’s a lofty reputation to have, for sure, and one that is entirely deserved.
Ultimately a tale of a modern sanctimonious Christianity coming up against a liberal, freeing, sensual form of Paganism, what is impressive about The Wicker Man is how it leads you to believe that the one side is actually of detriment, only to pull the curtain back and reveal that neither side is without issue. As we follow Woodward’s police officer “hero” Sergeant Howie deeper into his investigation of a missing child on the island of Summerisle, we find ourselves becoming more and more uneasy and yet, we do not side with our hero: Howie is intolerant, arrogant, impatient, and aggressively insistent that Christianity must be followed at all costs.
In comparison to the friendly, cheerful, if eccentric, sexually open British locals of Summerisle, we start to believe that the real enemy here is the uptight, repressed Sergeant. By the film’s end, though Howie is proven right, that the island’s leader, Lord Summerisle, is deliberately and cynically playing on the old Pagan traditions to keep the locals from blaming him for the poor harvest. Howie may be intolerant but he does truly hold his faith; the locals of Summerisle, on the other hand, however free and unrepressed they might be, are going to murder Howie under the influence of a lie, thereby negating their faith.
It’s a fascinating theological examination and one that would perhaps have less impact if it didn’t take the form of an extremely eccentric folk-horror movie. The foreboding as Howie gets deeper and deeper into his investigation is palpable, the lovely folk tunes of Magnet set an atmospheric and cultural tone, and there are many memorable characters, from Christopher Lee’s magnificently strange and charismatic Lord Summerisle, to legendary mime artist Lindsay Anderson’s turn as ferret-like pub landlord, Alder MacGregor.
British cinema doesn’t get much better than The Wicker Man.
Withnail and I
Bruce Robinson’s legendary fictional exploration of his experiences as a drama student in London in the late 1960s, Withnail and I perhaps took on its biggest life as the ultimate student film, being subject to its own drinking game where students attempted to match Withnail and Marlowe (the ‘I’ of the title) as they sink pint after pint and spirit after spirit—and lighter fluid, of course, for the truly brave!
The film remains an exceptionally popular cult film, and its easy to see why its fans are so passionate. Withnail (Richard E. Grant, in arguably his greatest ever performance) is perhaps one of the finest comedic creations of all time, certainly in cinema. He is living in student poverty, constantly switching between states of drunkeness, drug high and wretched comedown, and yet, he carries himself as if he is a lord (his family are certainly of upper/upper-middle class background), pompously denouncing those who mock or annoy him, and bemoaning his rotten place in the world.
Withnail is a complete fool, and yet you can’t help but take his side. Most of us can relate to periods of being at the bottom of the rung, feeling unappreciated, and yet putting on a front of being above the grind, of being better that our station in life. It’s classic British living—you never let people know when you’re down on a slide. It’s this that makes Withnail more human, less of a grotesque, and it’s what gives Withnail and I its depth. When Marlowe (Paul McGann), at the film’s end, decides to retreat from London and leaves Withnail all alone at London Zoo in Regent’s Park, it is hard not to get a lump in your throat as Withnail shows a sudden sense of self-awareness, desolately reciting the “What a piece of work is man!” monologue from Hamlet. It’s wonderful vulnerability from such an obnoxious, brazen character, and it’s one of the most moving moments in British cinema.
But the film will always be remembered for its humour first, and understandably so. A sign of a film’s loveability is the ability of its fans to be able to quote from it, and in this respect Withnail and I is an embarrassment of riches. To quote just a few (join in now!): “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake”; “We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here and we want them now!”; “GET IN THE BACK OF THE VAN!”; “My thumbs have gone weird! I’m in the middle of a bloody overdose!”; and “Don’t threaten me with a dead fish!”
