Chris Flackett
Five more favourite British films? ‘Weren’t the first five enough?’ you ask.
No. No, they are not.
Perhaps I’m biased, being an Englander (not a blinkered little Englander, one would hope), but for me, British Cinema has produced some of the all-time great works of entertainment and art, often in the same picture, but quite often overlooked by their bigger, more famous American cousins. Working through a shortlist for my previous list of favourite British movies, it occured to me that not only was it difficult to whittle such a catalogue of exceptional quality down to such a short list, but there would have to be a second list to celebrate those that missed the first cut. It’s a beautiful problem to have, of course.
So, here it is: Five more favourite British movies, and a tribute to the wealth of creativity this tiny island has had to offer over the years.
The Long Good Friday
It’s hard to imagine, in a post-Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels landscape of cheeky-chappy gangster films, populated by fast-quipping rough diamonds who are just as likely to try to make you bust your gut laughing as to pull your fingernails out with a rusty pair of pliers, but British cinema used to excel in producing serious gangster films—serious in tone, intent and violence. The Long Good Friday is the epitome of the serious British gangster film and is the crown jewel of British crime cinema overall.
Depicting a changing London, one that anticipated the real-life mass redevelopment of London Docklands, The Long Good Friday depicts a man of the old-school pushing ahead with the new without really understanding it, so that he underestimates the challenges the new presents, which eventually seals his (potentially bloody) fate for him.
Harold Shand (a superb Bob Hoskins) is the leader of one of the main crime firms in London, but, mirroring the Thatcherite push of the time on free enterprise, he wants to expand out of the gangster business and into redevelopment. But, much like the kind of people who found success under Thatcherism, for all the lip service Harold pays to his love of Britain and wanting to rejuvenate London, it’s clear his main motivation is the glory it will bring: to bask in the reputation of being the man who rebuilt London.
But herein lies the tragedy, and the seed of what makes The Long Good Friday such a classic: Harold wants to dictate the future, but he cannot adapt to the changes already at his feet. He wants to go legit, but he looks to the Mafia for partnership and a corrupt councillor for planning permission. Meanwhile, there’s the issue of the IRA attempting to assassinate Harold and killing his men. Harold treats them like any old firm, but the IR doesn’t play by the old rules. All that’s left is violence and bloodshed and a ride to certain death in the back of a lonely car…
Performance
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment the sixties went sour: the shootings of both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; the May Day riots in Paris; Charles Manson: each are emblematic of the erosion of the peace and love philosophy which had permeated 1966 and 1967. As Peter Fonda says in Easy Rider, “We blew it.” Yet, it is much easier to pinpoint the films that first captured this sense of disillusionment and confusion, and what Easy Rider expressed about the American scene, Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance (1970) did for England.
Performance is the story of a sadomasochistic gangster, Chas (James Fox), on the run from his own firm after a violent confrontation leads to the death of someone the firm wanted very much kept alive. Hiding out in bohemian Notting Hill, London, he finds himself caught in the tangled web that is the dilapidated yet decadent house of reclusive rock star, Turner (Mick Jagger), whose disillusionment with the scene leads him to play some pretty freaky identity mind games with the unsuspecting and unprepared Chas.
The great thing about Performance is its air of authenticity. Marianne Faithful, Mick Jagger’s partner at the time and a successful singer in her own right, vouched for it, describing the film as “an allegory of libertine Chelsea life in the late ’60s, with its baronial rock stars, wayward jeunesse doree, drugs, sex and decadence.” As such, you really believe in the world Performance presents: the house in Notting Hill was a genuine house in the area; the mixed decor of peeling walls and fine Persian drapes and fineries; the sense of the unsavoury and occult that pervades the entire film; the free and easy attitude to sex, culminating in the infamous threesome scene—all paint a vivid picture of the mixture of high and low found in the social mix of pop stars, upper class society people turned on by bohemia, and gangsters that made up the era—all something The Rolling Stones knew something about, making Jagger the perfect choice to play Turner.
Ultimately, it is the complex relationship between Turner and Chas that gives the film its biggest appeal. Two men on the run from the worlds they’ve known, disillusioned and lost, Turner and Chas represent the sixties dream, if not dying, certainly curdling. Many people involved in the counter-culture would turn their back on their supposed peace and love ideals as the seventies arrived. Some were scared off after encounters with the law; some died or were killed; some moved with the times and the fashions, businessmen to the last; and some were just bored with peace and love and were waiting for the next thing. As such, there is an irony in Turner and Chas’s verbal sparring with each other, suspicious of each other yet not recognising they fundamentally share the same problem. That this leads to a suitably psychedelic, mind-melting (or is that mind-melding) conclusion should not be in doubt.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
If ever there was a film whose visuals you could positively sink into like a warm bath, then it’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), director Peter Greenaway’s richly sensual crime/art film, with nods to the theatre.
Informed by the Jacobean play ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (something that would inspire David Bowie years later), Greenaway constructed a film that was as much a play as it was a movie. Utilising slow, purposeful pans to create the sense of scenes taking place on sets and the frame as a kind of stage, Greenaway then uses this semi-staticness to load the mise-en-scene with as much lushness and luxuorious colours as to completely seduce the viewer into delirious submission. There’s almost a decadant romanticness to the sumptuous blocks of red and green that infuse the rooms. Not surprising, when you consider this is a film with costumes designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier and a score by Michael Nyman.
This romantic aesthetic would be enough to recommend The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover alone, but then you take in the sheer wealth of acting talent involved: Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren, Tim Roth, Liz Smith, Alan Howard, Roger Lloyd-Pack. Wow! As you’d expect, each scene pops with exquisite acting, in particular, Michael Gambon’s boorish, irrational, extremely violent philistine gangster, a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But Helen Mirren tops it as his suffocated wife, moving with grace through stages ranging from quiet submission and despair, arousal and rediscovery of self, grief and finally the most delicious vengeance…well, delicious might not be the right word—watch the film for yourself and see what I mean…
A Jacobean tragedy brought into the then-modern age, a tale of submission, dominance, beauty, brutality and wealth without taste, love as rediscovery, and vengeance as self-defense and self-assertion, all wrapped up in the most gorgeously seductive and sumptuous visual aesthetic, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is one of the great British film, and one which, while not obscure, deserves to find a wider audience.
Threads
A little bit of a cheat, this one, being a TV movie made for and aired on the BBC, and not having a theatrical release, but Threads completely deserves it’s place on this list, being one of the most frightening and harrowing things I’ve ever watched and yet being completely compelling. Watching Threads, in fact, is an experience to the old Samuel Beckett phrase: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Set in then-contemporary 1984, in Sheffield, England, Threads depicts the escalation of tensions between the United States and Soviet Union, which results in attacks on nuclear attacks on NATO targets (including an air base near Sheffield), causing a nuclear winter. The film consequently shows the results and aftermath of the attack and the resulting and continuing devastation.
There have been numerous apocalyptic films sand nuclear war films made over the years, but what makes Threads so powerful is the level of detail it goes into without bogging the film down in exposition, meaning that as events speed up towards the attack, the film speeds up too, in pacing, editing and detail, giving a queasy, lurching rush as we head into the inevitable. The actual sequences of the nuclear attack are some of the most impactful I’ve ever seen, and adding to the impact is that Threads stays with the attack and its immediate aftermath for a substantial time. Rather than skim over the horror of the attack itself and move onto the aftermath, Threads wants you to understand the horror of the immediate consequences at all, the awful things that will happen to the body and the mind, the terror, despair and desolation in those moments, the chaos of failing systems and how fragile these civilised structures we have built society on truly are.
Threads, in genre terms, is not a horror film. But it is the film that, out of everything I’ve ever seen, has filled me with the most horror and has terrified me the most. I truly mean that as a complement.
Jubilee
Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1977) was the right film at the right time. Wanting to express something of the awful mess that England was in at the time (full of strikes, poverty, electric blackouts, violence and IRA bomb threats), Jarman’s creativity was set alight by the sight of Sex Pistols associate Jordan walking down the street in jaw-dropping attire, most notably a transparent plastic mini-skirt with nothing underneath—brave anywhere, never mind stodgy, conservative England! Soon, Jarman would meet Adam Ant, then a punk, walking down the street with the word ‘FUCK’ carved into his back (by Jordan, as it would happen). Jarman had his two main actors, and a way for his film to satisfactorily express his dissent.
Jubilee is an astonishing record of its time. Jarman is perhaps best known as a maker of art cinema, and Jubilee is no exception, a heady mix of musical performance, super-8 footage and prolonged sequences which speak to polemic and mood as much as story. There are references to ‘highbrow’ culture such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, mixed in with scenes of an over-the-top street-level nihilism. The film becomes the equivalent of watching a punk waking dream—or nightmare.
There is homosexual desire, historical and esoteric references to Britain’s past (John Dee and Ariel appear), almost pantomime-like sections of outrageous camp grotesque (like a British John Waters), and a healthy and righteous sense of punk fury at a Britain that was thought to be going down the drain. Real-life punk musicians and associates appear throughout, such as The Slits, Chelsea, Adam Ant, Jordan and Helen Wellington-Lloyd, offering a punk legitimacy to proceedings (and the footage of both Adam Ant and Siouxsie and The Banshees performing is a real treat).
Notably, Jarman caught the ire of Vivienne Westwood for suggesting in the film that the punks would sadly be bought up by the music business (something sadly not far from the truth). Jarman, though, was shrewder than the likes of manipulators like Westwood and Malcolm McClaren and could see the bigger picture, socially and historically. Jarman has Elizabeth I see the future, where she is confronted by the sheer horror Elizabeth II would be at the head of. It’s a pointed reference, and much like Greil Marcus’s epic tome on punk and the idea of secret paths and links through history, Lipstick Traces, suggests moments of history cannot be simply isolated to themselves.
