Addio Giovezza! (1918 and 1927), Augusto Genina, Cineteca Bologna Box Set

You men are all Judases. Even when you kiss you betray…

These were the second and third adaptations of Sandro Camasio and Nino Oxilia’s wildly successful 1911 play, the first, in 1913, made by the playwrights themselves. Oxilia went on to write and direct including two of my favourite Diva films Rapsodia satanica (1917) and Sangue blu (1914) both with Lyda Borelli.

They’re part of a new set from Cineteca Bologna that collates four of the director’s work, majoring with a quite wonderful restored silent version of Il Prezzo Della Bellezza (1930), aka Prix de Beauté which, as you all know, stars Louise Brooks in full radiance. That film alone makes this set worth buying at all costs and as soon as possible, but the other films give a fascinating insight into Genina’s work of which so little survives. In their booklet introduction, Mariann Lewinsky and Andrea Meneghelli explain the difficulty in analysing the director’s work based on so few films.

Genina did not always make great films, but in each film he made, he knew how to encapsulate a world…

Ruggero Capodaglio and Lido Manetti in 1918

This is certainly true for his stunning, colourised Cyrano de Bergerac (1922) as well as these films both of which are based in Turin University… Genina also brought out the best in his performers from the sympathetic slapstick of our hero Mario’s sidekick, Leone, to fulsome roles for his lead actresses who are emotionally dominant throughout.

In 1918, Mario’s love interest is his landlady’s daughter Dorina who is played by Maria Jacobini who is a most compelling watch, quickly striking you with her warmth and range of expression. As Lewinsky says, it is she rather than Lido Manetti - later Arhold Kent acting in the US – who is the centre of the film even though his character Mario is the nominal focus.

Jacobini had been in a relationship with Nino Oxilia until his death in late 1917 when he had been planning his own remake of the play… it’s hard not to view her performance and the film itself as a tribute. She was the surprise of this package and I’d like to see more of this contemporary of Francesca Bertini – same age and experience but so different in style.

Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti (later Arhold Kent)

The story is fairly easily summarised but is clearly so malleable as the various remakes show. Small town boy Mario leaves his loving parents behind to study law in Turin. En route he meets the comically short-sighted Leone (Ruggero Capodaglio) who is also to study law, and the two quickly bond; friends for life by the time the train arrives.

They face fresher humiliation together as they are tricked into paying for a huge round of drinks by some senior students… so much changes and yet so little, eh first years? They go in search of a room on the fourth floor of a cheap house being rented by a woman and her seamstress daughter, Dorina. Mario likes the look of both room and girl as does his myopic pal, but, as usual, Leone loses out. Gradually Mario raises the courage to tell Dorina that he likes her and soon his studies take on a broader remit.

The years pass and as finals approach an enigmatic and beautiful woman comes for a fitting at the dressmakers below their apartment. It is Elena played by, erm, Elena Makowska one of the Diva class actors who could hardly have been better cast as the elegantly illusive clothes horse who clearly gets what she wants. Yes folks, a “Jolene” scenario is about to take place as the mystery beauty sets her intense gaze on young Mario and the two click via a lovely set piece in the opera as he searches the stalls and galleries for the lady with camelias originally given to him by Dorina.

Elena Makowska looking like a Diva!

This treacherous play by Mario rather undermines our sympathies and Genina wisely distracts us with a farcical set-up for his planned assignation with Elena in his room. The place is filled with flowers and he gets Leone to pretend that it’s for him so that poor Dorina suspects nothing… but she wasn’t born yesterday. Everything is set until the students start to strike in protest at a reduction in exams… they need their lawyer, Mario to lead the protest…

Convincingly these are people still learning in and out of university and whilst the lessons are sometimes hard, they can also be unexpected.

Augusto Bandini three years before he met Louise Brooks

Move forward almost a decade, and we have a version with a different focus on character.

This version, whilst technically an upgrade, doesn’t always have the edge over 1918 especially as the latter is a fuller version and there are some parts missing especially at the end – the run time was originally 87 minutes and what survives is only just over an hour. Both have their visual strengths and noteworthy performers.

Now, I’m not claiming to be an expert on the films of Cliff Richard but after some time watching the 1927 version, I realised that the young lead was Walter Slezak, who plays Susan Hampshire’s grumpy director dad in Wonderful Life (1964). That aside, he had a distinguished career and it’s always interesting to see younger versions of actors you know only in later life.

Here Slezak’s Mario is more of the fulcrum and the real drama is between the two women, in this case Carmen Boni’s Dorina and Elena Sangro’s Elena who, whilst lacking her predecessor’s ethereality puts in a more convincing performance, acting Elena’s way to Mario’s heart and showing a good deal more tenderness in the process towards her helpless rival.

Walter Slezak

Another familiar face pops up and promptly falls over and it’s Prix de Beauté’s Augusto Bandini getting more laughs than Leone No. 1 with his greater physicality and comic energy. Leone’s myopia may well be real but there’s one uncomfortable instance on the train ride to Turin when he sits down next to an actress in black face and then quickly shuffles away once he gets close enough to detect her skin colour; a reminder of the way the wind was blowing in Italy at the time where Il Duce was already premier.

The new friends arrive at University and face the same ragging from the more experienced students, before ending up in the student bar, The Ark, where we witness a comic rundown of some of the student types; the Hippo, the Giraffe Piggy and a shapely pair of legs named Leda – shades of the director’s fascination with Brooks’ pins in Prix.

Carmen Boni

They find their rooms and Dorina, with Carmen Boni’s gamine delicacy a contrast to Maria Jacobini’s more physical performance.  There’s more of a focus on their friendship group and one delightful sequence in which a portable record player is set up and the youngsters dance along in ways reminiscent of Brian Ferry’s backing singers… their moves are robotic and comically stylised – the youth dancing to sounds with an appeal laughably obscure to one of Genina’s generation. Timeless inter-generational confusion, which brings us back to Slezak and Cliff…

As they romp, the vamp is downstairs getting her clothes fitted, marvelling at the youthful energies and planning her introduction to Mario. His betrayal of Dorina is again bitterly pragmatic, a young man who can’t say know to a more experienced offer; is this his real education and is the answer to focus on himself and his studies more? As Dorina’s quote at the top says, perhaps all men can be faithless when it comes to love and ambition.

Elena Sangro

Both films make the choice to buy this set an easy one – even without Brooksie – although the cover photo and multiple images of her legs emerging from the car at the lakeside, show that Cineteca Bologna know their main selling point.

You can buy the disc direct from them or from Amazons who place it in the “Books” section because of the lovely booklet which is very informative on the actors and the films.

 

Nation or nurture? Maeve (1981), BFI Blu-ray out now

 

I felt very strongly that documentary was fiction because the shots were chosen and because of the politics of the person with the camera. Thus, I decided that if Maeve were fictionalised, we would have more scope to tell the truth.

Writer/director Pat Murphy was well ahead of the curve on this issue, as quoted in Dr Emmie McFadden’s excellent booklet essay, Sites of Power – Memory, Storytelling and Identity; what we get is not necessarily what we see and this new BFI release has a wider discussion about the portrayal of Ireland by film makers from without the country in the documentary Irish Cinema – Ourselves Alone? (1996). Murphy is very much from within having grown up in Dublin and Belfast before coming over to study in England and whilst her other films Nora (2000) and Anne Devlin (1984) were based on actual lives, Maeve is based, in part at least, on her own experiences. The film was also the first made entirely on location in Belfast… a mere 84 years after the Lumiere Brothers filmed O’Connell Street down in Dublin.

Maeve is a film that reads like a book; a dialogue-rich mix of naturalism, magic-realism and deliberately challenging set-piece debates about Irish nationalism and the feminist cause. Arguing with her – increasingly ex – boyfriend Liam about the true cause, Maeve tells him that this very masculine history erases her sex, past, present and, very probably, future whilst his response is that feminism is a side show weakening the main priorities of the movement for one state.

Mary Jackson's Maeve arrives home

So it goes and, whilst this debate is still alive, the activists of forty years ago are now themselves outflanked/diluted by agitators with new concerns for social recognition even as buses are still being burned in Northern Ireland. At one point Liam talks enviously of his father’s ability to grow up “inside all that and accepting it…” republican history; an unmovable trajectory for independence that provides its own myths and momentum and its own rewards. He bemoans the fact that at his age his father was already blowing up border posts and that he might be just one of those revolutionaries who don’t want to get shot.

The narrative moves back and forth as Maeve (Mary Jackson) looks back on everything she left behind on her return home from London where she intends to study photography. Such a lifestyle is frivolous to Liam (John Keegan) who is becoming only more entrenched in his views, all the more so as what he considers Maeve’s self-obsession moves her further away from him. But is the whole cause as likely to one day be as obscure as the stone circle Maeve flies over on her way back home? There’s an Englishman next to her who’s going to write an article on megalithic monuments for The Journal of Lost Knowledge…

Brid Brennan's Roisin brings home unwanted attention

We begin with Maeve’s father, Martin Sweeney played by the excellent Mark Mulholland, who you fancy, must have known Ted Hastings as a young man, spinning yarns in a pub by the River Lagan. He writes to Maeve after being told to take to his back room by British soldiers clearing the streets for a bomb nearby.

A lot of actual stories are relayed through the characters – giving real substance to Murphy’s documentary purpose. Maeve sits with her sister Roisin (Brid Brennan excelling in only her second film) who tells her of being stopped by a group of republicans with a boy armed with a gun. Then there is the story of a British soldier who climbed into bed with them – rifle in hand – expecting a warmer welcome than he got. The girls are made to jump up and down by a patrol and generally the view of the army is mixed to say the least.

But there’s little unity even within the Catholic “side” with most people, like Maeve’s parents just wanting to get on with their lives – to compromise. This isn’t enough for Maeve. As Dr McFadden points out, a woman’s duty here is seen as supporting the men in the fight for nationalism and yet her own mother is derided by her Uncle who caused her father to spend a year in jail by hiding explosives in his house without telling him. Martin gets the respect for doing the time and yet his brother has little respect for the wife that held the family together.    

Mary Jackson and John Keegan

A centre. A landmark. Laying a foundation, giving new ground. Grounding ourselves… Clarity. About what happens, about what’s supposed to happen… A lie. The truth. A lie that tells the truth… A projection. A memory… A way of thinking. A way of not thinking.

Younger Maeve recites this free verse as the camera pans over a misty clear Belfast, seen from the hills… all peace and possibility just before she rows with Liam, pining for the freedoms brought by blowing up border posts.

It’s Murphy’s willingness to experiment like this that keeps the film fresh and delivers the unexpected delights and shocks that make it so rewatchable. It’s a very earnest film but that’s a compliment given the subject and our unwillingness to let go of categorisations that lead to binary thought. She’s not didactic and leaves us to take things at face value and make our own minds up – a rare objectivity. A very Irish objectivity.

Mark Mulholland with Nuala McCann as Young Maeve

There are strange and lovely episodes with young Maeve exploring a dry-stone wall as her father, looking straight to camera, retells a story about a calf following him home, as they break from delivering his baked goods to the rural areas where they lived for a while before being forced back to the city and eventually the Falls Road. Then there’s a visit to the Giants Causeway on the Antrim coast, where mother and daughters walk barefoot before encountering an odd man blasting the sea with catholic verse, nature shouted down by nurture.

Writer director Lizzie Borden also writes an essay for the booklet in this set and notes that Maeve has been pushed into the ‘Irish Troubles’ bin, “… important but a partial and patriarchal view of its content” yet re-watching it she was “…stunned by how relevant its feminism is, ahead of its time and exactly of this time”. She also notes the bravery of filming in an actual warzone.

Now is the right time to reappraise this invaluable film and this is another superb set from the BFI.

The booklet includes an interview with Murphy, co-director John Davies and cameraman Robert Smith from March 2021. Davies remains “really pleased with the way the political commentary dipped in and out of the fabric of the film…” and I have to say they got this right as you care for Liam, Martin, Roisin and Maeve. The remains no easy answers.

Also included is a video essay on the film from Chris O’Neill, filmmaker and Head of Cinema at Triskel Arts Centre as well as the Donald Taylor Black and Kevin Rockett's documentary mentioned at the top. Ourselves Alone? separates the reality of domestic productions from the shamrock-tinted spectacles of The Quiet Man and other films which, even though they have merit, don’t really tell the whole story.

If you want that, you can and should order Maeve direct from the BFI online!

 

PS My Dublin uncle, actor and comedian Mike Nolan, was once in a film with Rock Hudson called Captain Lightfoot (1955) playing “Willie the Goat”. It’s a load of Hollywood blarney directed by Douglas Sirk, but at least Mike was the real thing and it was filmed in Ireland! It’s a riot, check it out on blur-ray too or on Amazon Prime.

Back in the NFT 1… L’Eclisse (1962), BFI, Southbank, London

 

I wish I didn’t love you, or that I loved you much more…

 

A couple of years back in the old normal, the BFI ran a spectacular Antonioni season and this was the only major work I missed seeing on the big screen… how very good of them then to programme it as part of their re-opening season of Big Screen Classics. How could I not be there for this, mask on, hand gel at the ready and even beard trimmed should anyone recognise me from the days before. I feel so much of a connection with Charlton Heston right now and if you swap guns for vinyl records, I'm your omega man and we’re cooking Solent Green with gas although we'll never escape this planet of so many damn apes.

Special measures in place I was guided through unfamiliar routes the NFT 1, every other seat of three taken out and pre-booked precision now essential. A short promo plugs the cinematic survivors and urges us to return and when things are as well organised as at the BFI, there is no reason to hold back; this old-new normal, feels comfortable already and the reward is worth the small sacrifices. It always has been.

Alain Delon and Monica Vitti 

 

L'Eclisse (The Eclipse) is regarded as the last part of a trilogy preceded by L'Avventura (1960) and La Notte (1961) - all are essays on modernism, architecture, politics and communication: the spaces between people with the greatest gulf being between men and women. All feature Monica Vitti, an actress with supernatural levels of expression, who can deliver the most impenetrable depths even as she smiles a look of uncertain love.

 

You don’t have to watch these films through chic horned-rim glasses stroking bearded chin, dressed in pressed white lined shirts and the finest Armani – although it does help. They operate as puzzles for the ages and were so ground-breaking that we now cannot help but view them through the prism of their influence. Directors from Goddard to Scorsese have lauded Antonioni as perhaps the father of modern European cinema: the man who, as he claimed, took the bicycles out of neo-realism and mixed the sensibilities of documentary filmmaking with innovative narratives focused on the cultural tipping point of the early sixties when concrete and deadly technology had turned post war Europe into a society whose progression was built on philosophical quicksand: instinct left behind by innovation.

 

L'Eclisse is divided into segments beginning and ending with endings that may well be beginnings; two very “cinematic” sequences that play with expectation and context as Monica Vitti’s Vittoria, searches for a valid relationship with modern masculinity set adrift by a culture in flux. Vitti was Antonioni’s partner at the time and you can only wonder what their weekends were like… Their relationship went back to Antonioni’s Il Grido (1957) for which the Vitti voiced the character Dorian Gray, Michelangelo surprised her in the dubbing booth one day by telling her she had a beautiful neck and should be in the movies… the silver-haired, silver-tongued charmer!

“Other male directors have adopted the point of view of a female character, but none has made a woman his surrogate in the way that Antonioni has Monica Vitti.”

 

So writes Gilberto Perez in his Criterion essay, L’Eclisse: Antonioni and Vitti (see below) and he presents a good argument for the director and actresses’ intimacy informing their work in this film. Antonioni may have been unfairly described by Bergman as an “amateur” but his films are less about conventional stories Ingmar, and more about the uncertainties of the characters to whom things may happen. He’s the Miles Davis to Bergman’s Dave Brubeck… both “modern” but with one more interested in the spaces between the notes than the precision of his playing. In Monica Vitti he found a performer who could inhabit those spaces and define them with even more uncertainty. Bergman miss-read that too...

 

 

The opening sees Vittoria finishing with her long-term partner Riccardo (Spanish actor Francisco Rabal) after an agonised all-night attempt to talk it over… The characters are shown at exhausted angles as they move awkwardly around the room, like caged animals tortured by incomprehension at their own captivity. Riccardo’s apartment is packed full of modern art, books and aesthetic artifice but is there a genuine connection with his possessions?

Breaking up is hard to do.

 

Vittoria looks through a frame and pulls out a trinket the viewer may have seen as part of a picture: but it’s not real just an illusion. The house is on a new estate on the edge of Rome – all manicured lawns and quiet, ordered streets – the future of bourgeois living yet overlooked by a menacing water tower that has the slightest echoes of the mushroom clouds so threatening the World order at the time: the age of accumulated anxiety.

 

Vittoria escapes the attentions of her new ex and goes to find her mother in Rome’s stock exchange - the Borsa. Milan was and is the main exchange in Italy but the Roman version was favoured by smaller investors. Antonioni shot over the weekend with a good many stockbrokers guesting as extras for authenticity… their work all sweaty, panicked shouting for an edge in an exchange where values may shift at the slightest rumour, miss-calculation or pronouncement from a trusted source.

 

At the Borsa with Mum, watching the money go.

Vittoria’s mother (Lilla Brignone) is a well-off widow addicted to the thrill of playing the stocks and is far too excited about her latest gains to listen to her daughter’s story. She uses an energetic young broker Piero (Alain Delon) to place her “bets” and he doesn’t seem to let her or any of his customers down so totally focused is he on winning in this frenetic, animalistic environment built, as it so happens, on the site of a pagan Roman temple with ancient columns still visible in this monument to modern greed.

 

 

Vittoria returns home and is greeted by her friend Anita (Rosanna Rory) the wife of a pilot who is away collecting a new plane. They drink and then join their new neighbour, Marta (Mirella Ricciardi) recently returned from living in Kenya. This section has perhaps the most specific meaning of any in the film as the colonial life is examined and Vittoria ends up in black face dressed and dancing as an African maid: uncomfortable viewing to modern eyes but pointedly so given Marta’s reference to Africans as “monkeys”, something Vittoria gently takes her to task on.

 

Mirella Riccadi, Monica Vitti and Rosanna Rory

Their party is disturbed after Marta’s dog escapes and they race out into the darkness to find it along with several others running free. Vittoria finds the poodle but then is distracted by the sounds of the wind blowing through the ropes of flag poles – like a child she retains a fascination with the unexpected: an almost musical noise gently pushing through the night stillness.

 

Vittoria flies with Anita and her husband over to Verona for another interlude. As she wanders the airfield taking in the unfamiliarity, she passes two African men sitting outside a café: nothing happens in the film by accident.

 

The scene shifts abruptly back to Rome as the stock market takes centre stage and we learn more of Piero. There’s a black day on the markets across Italy and Vittoria’s mother is not alone in losing millions of Lira. Piero is at the centre of things trying to limit the damage and secure his company’s clients for the recovery. There are dark mutterings about the market being rigged, political influencers and insider trading… this is Piero’s world and Antonioni doesn’t like it.

 

Millions of Lira lost, the man takes a tranquilizer and draws flowers...

Fascinated by one man’s reaction to his huge losses, Vittoria is drawn into events and from there to Piero. They begin a relationship but it’s a faltering one: they cannot seem to match their pace… He takes Vittoria to his family home and she is almost shocked by the display of art on show: either it’s too much conspicuous consumption or she cannot reconcile this cultural background with Piero’s fiscal amorality.

 

Piero is lightning quick at calculating opportunities on the markets but he can’t “play” Vittoria and can't absorb her fluctuations in the way he can company data. For her part, Vittoria doesn’t understand his fascination with making money… she’s more interested in working out the world around her and – at the very least – finding something different, something real?

 

Vittoria is unsettled by Piero's family wealth

The relationship the two develop is stop-start in the most heartbreakingly familiar of ways… they’re struggling to connect even though the chemistry is right – Delon and Vitti!? – but too often Vittoria slips from Piero’s embrace as he tries for confirmation of her feeling through physical contact. Vittoria is a woman fresh from one unfulfilling relationship and here we see someone unwilling to make the same mistake on the rebound.

 

Gradually Vittoria is being persuaded and we assume we know how this all ends but, as with Piero, are constantly put on our guard by Vittoria’s uncertainty. No lo so… is a phrase she utters so often at one point Piero tells her not to say she doesn’t know in answer to his questioning but she can’t tell him what is lacking or what she wants.

 

The male gaze... Alain Delon

Spoilers in the next paragraph!

 

By the end their words mean literally nothing and they engage in a farewell that has all of the right words – see you tonight, every night – with all intention adrift.  Having agreed to meet once more at their regular meeting place, we wait for some six minutes for them to turn up as Antonioni focuses on the finer details, the water butt – now burst open and flooding the pavement – the building works, the regular passers-by – the nurse with baby – as the city makes its way oblivious to the significance of the empty space on the corner of the street and of the unbridgeable gaps in human understanding: the spaces between us all.

 

 

Antonioni regular, Gianni Di Venanzo, provides superb cinematography and allied to the director’s choice of locations presents an other-worldly view of a progressive Italy that still looks modern half a century later. These new suburban vistas are almost empty and with nary a car in sight whilst near silence provides an almost ever-present soundtrack to Vittoria’s un-spoken reconnaissance as she slowly walks the streets.

 

Vitti’s self-control is supreme (sorry Mr Bergman) and she manages to convey so much with expressive economy – her face a picture of studied neutrality and her eyes giving away only the possibilities of her thoughts. By contrast Delon’s Piero is impulsive and cock-sure: the unreality of monetary gain being its own reward: an end unto itself and the irrational refuge of many a modern careerist.

 

I’m not sure if L’Ecclise ranks higher than L’Avventura or La Notte but my response evolves with each viewing, especially on that big screen. This is not just the director’s knack for avoiding too much narrative certainty but also the immense detail in his work and its enduring integrity. This week I watched the film and my certainties shifted in new ways… that’s the wonder of cinema!

 

L'Eclisse is showing again on 5th and 15th June - details of that and all the new BFI programmes can be found on their website. See you there!

Gilberto Perez' essay can be found on the Criterion website here. 

On the road… Radio On (1979), BFI blu-ray, out now

Roadrunner, roadrunner

Going faster miles an hour

Gonna drive past the Stop 'n' Shop

With the radio on

 

Listening to writer and director Christopher Petit talk about the making of his debut film, you get the feeling that he went with his gut feel and rode his luck but he had a lot going for him and it’s what makes this film so enduring and worthy of repeated views. Whatever he says, the former Time Out film critic must have charm to burn as he not only persuaded Wim Wenders to get involved in the project as Associate Producer he also got the notoriously hard to pin down Kraftwerk to allow him use of their songs for something like £50 each.

 

The piece de resistance was also getting David Bowie to let him use all of the Anglo-German Heroes/Helden for the gloriously murky yet revealing opening single take; one that still sends shivers down the spine and sets the tone for the entire work. Petit also deserves huge credit for his choice of music that is both of its time and of the future (of its time) as well as having emerged over the last four decades as a large part of the actual present. Kraftwerk and Bowie are not just of importance to mine and Petit’s generation but also to the artists that came later – it’s hard to think of hip-hop, IDM, techno and so on without the former but also the latter (his work with Eno in Berlin) whilst the Thin White Duke set the template for every Madonna, Gaga, Monae and other progressive pop artistes were to follow.

 

As a musician turned actor, I’m not sure Petit would include Sting in that bracket, but his contribution here is not only completely on point, a garage attendant riffing beautifully on Three Steps to Heaven, but also a talent that would endure. Like him or not – and come on he’s worked with Miles Davis and written Every Breath You Take, one of the most misunderstood stalker songs in pop history – Sting has endured and reached the top of the pops at European Super League levels. Something else here, now and then.

That's Robert's 1960 Rover 80 P4 next to Gordon Sumner...

Radio On feels fresh too as it’s unconventional and lose narrative still defies easy categorisation and there’s a question in my mind at least, of how much actually happens and how much is actually in the mind of the main protagonist, Robert (David Beames) as he travels from London to Bristol, via the more picturesque and, indeed picaresque… A4, listening to Radio-Aktivität, Die Mensch-Maschine and Trans Europa Express on his cassette.

 

The tapes are a present from Robert’s brother who, we gradually learn has killed himself, leading Robert to make the trip from Camden to Bristol to find out more. He’s making a journey of mourning but also at a time when he knows his life must change. Robert is a late-night DJ, for the United Biscuits Network, broadcasting to their factories and taking requests for Help Me Make it Through the Night, only to replace it with something “better”, Sweet Gene Vincent by Ian Dury and the Blockheads. He soundtracks his life as he does his programme and musical threads tie everything together from the autobahn hypnosis of Kraftwerk to the plaintive desolation of Wreckless Eric and his classic, Whole Wide World and Devo’s magnificently dislocated version of (Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.

On the Westway 

As a score, it doesn’t get much better for those of us who grew up on the new wave NME, Melody Maker and Sounds. But it’s not nostalgia that holds it up but the freshness of the conception and what feels like a largely improvised script. Shooting in 35mm black and white using Wender’s cameraman Martin Schäfer, gives the story a timeless feel as you focus on unknowable interior worlds, bleak surroundings often in the darkness, leading you for clues in the faces of the actors. There’s a theme of miscommunication throughout that reflects Robert’s inner state and as odd things keep on happening to him, he takes it all in his uncertain stride. He’s breaking up with his girlfriend (Sue Jones-Davies, always so strikingly frank) who when asked by him what is wrong, shakes her head and simply says, “nothing, only you…”

 

Driving out to Bristol, he pops into a pint and some Wreckless Eric on the jukebox only to find a Scottish squaddie (Andrew Byatt) who, seemingly without asking, has decided he’s coming for a lift. Gradually he reveals his story from Glasgow dole to the army and then the two four-month tours of Northern Ireland that see him suffering what would now be diagnosed with PTSD. He gets increasingly unreasonable and, as they drive past Silbury Hill, demands that Robert stop the car and drive off road, Beames knew nothing about this at the time and looks visibly unnerved. Robert makes good his escape after a lot of screen bashing before driving on to his meeting with the Eddie Cochran fan.

A discomfort break at Silsbury Hill

Eddie and Gene Vincent both died in the same taxi crash after gig at Bristol Hippodrome in 1960 and, apparently Dave Dee – of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich fame – was one of the policemen that attended the crash. He later said that he started learning the guitar by using Cochran's impounded Gretsch over several nights at the station… this story just keeps getting weirder.

 

Back on the road, Robert makes it to Bristol where he finds his brother’s ex-girlfriend, Kathy (Sandy Ratcliff) in their flat. Again, very little is said and we get no closer to any answers. Robert than forms the most constructed relationship of the entire film when he meets two German women outside a Bristol disco – which is playing Lena Lovich’s single Lucky Number. He gives them a lift and begins to bond with one, Ingrid, played by the luminous Lisa Kreuzer who, a frequent Wenders collaborator, was in the film on his request. She’s a class act, and easily the star performer here as a woman in search of her two-year old daughter, now living with her ex-partner.

Lisa Kreuzer

For a long time this sub-plot looks like it may well provide the film’s closing direction but Peter is not done journeying yet and as so neatly summed up in the innovative video essay in the extras from Wire’s Bruce Gilbert, The Journey itself is often more important than arrival with every new tank of gasoline bringing promise as you simply move away and in between your problems.

 

In Antonioni’s The Passenger, Maria Schneider’s character asks Jack Nicholson’s, “…what are you running away from?" As they drive south through the country roads, he replies, "Turn your back to the front seat..." and she swivels around, throws out her arms, flings her head back and beams as the open road recedes behind them. I think the ending of Radio On leaves a lot more questions to that answer and that’s why it remains an important film about the period and about our approach to grief and life in general.

 

Approaching an inspired shot of David Beames and Lisa Kreuzer in the Grosvernor Hotel, Bristol

There is the usual booklet packed with informative essay goodness as well as interviews and commentaries from the main players. There’s an essay from music writer Ian Penman – ex-NME etc – discussing the “seriously excellent soundtrack” (and he’s right!) He reiterates the importance of the music as “one of the several reasons Radio On hasn’t dated, isn’t a cringe to watch, of merely gossipy or ‘historic’ interest, is that it wasn’t a ‘punk’ or ‘post-punk’ film in any too-obvious way. It works because it isn’t overloaded with date-stamp signifiers of some supposed 1970s, or punk ‘time’, or England.”

 

There’s also a lovely short film, Coping With Cupid (1991) written and directed by the most excellent Viv Albertine, former Slit and now writer extraordinaire.

 

Radio On is released on sparkling Blu-ray and you can order it now from the BFI Shop online and even in person!!

 

This review was written to the sounds of Kraftwerk’s German language version of the three cassettes in the film plus, Autobahn. Das Ist Ein Groovy Beat, Ja?

There are so many clues in the opening take of which this is the most specific... a quote from Kraftwerk.

Superb composition throughout, natural lighting...

English cassettes but German versions...

Back in the DHSS… Play for Today Volume Two, BFI box set

 

I was angry then and I’m bloody angry now. Tony Garnett

 

I was lucky enough to see Tony Garnett talk after a screening at Elstree of The Boys (1962) in which he acted, a few years back. Tony decided that he would never be as good an actor as he wanted to be and set about forging his career as a ground-breaking producer for Ken Loach and others. He still retained his passion for social justice as the above quote reveals; said with a smile but with a steely glint.

 

His production of The Spongers (1978) still provides the fiercest of gut punches and not for nowt has Jimmy McGovern described it as ‘the best television programme ever made’, and he wouldn’t have been the only one influenced by its realism and raw power. All of the plays in this new BFI set reflect discussions on social care, education, race and employment relations that are very much ongoing and none more so than disability rights.

 

Cheeky messaging at the play's start

The Spongers is based on an actual case in Salford in which council support for a child with Down’s Syndrome was withdrawn for the usual reasons of cost and the child ended up in a hospital where the care was hopelessly inadequate rather than in the expert and supportive environment she needed.

 

There are more than three classes in this country and the “Disability Class” cuts across them all in its own silent way, whole families impacted by circumstances not of their making and desperately trying to pull social, medical and educational support together under their own steam. You’re very lucky if you have income but you better hadn’t be poor.

 

Here Christine Hargreaves features as Pauline, a mother on benefits with four children including Paula, a child with Down’s. Paula McDonagh’s performance is very affecting even now especially when she has a meltdown which feels all to real to be comfortable but she is at the heart of the family and supported by loving friends as well as relatives.

Paula McDonagh and Gertie Almond

Times are hard and as the play opens the bailiffs arrive to reclaim a few hundred pounds worth of debt, a fortune for Pauline who, despite the attempts of a well-meaning social worker, has to sign off her possessions. Whilst she’s in a downward spiral of debt so too are local authority cuts removing the support for Paula and she is placed in unsympathetic environments that start to impact her mental health.

 

This all happens under a Labour government and with a Labour council – led by Councillor Conway played by Bernard Atha who had been a Labour councillor in Leeds and gives the debate between what is possible and what can be afforded extra grit. There are social workers and a dedicated support worker for the estate called Sullivan played by PFT ever-present Bernard Hill with passionate subtlety – he’s as helpless as Pauline to channel events.

Bernard Hill and Christine Hargreaves

Directed by Roland Joffé – his first film, Tony Garnett who “threw him in the deep end and he swam…” - the play mixes a good deal of natural humour and local warmth amidst the gloom. We’re setting up for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and there are street parties, singalongs and working men’s clubs in which Auntie Gertie (Gertie Almond) sings in the Northern way and is always ready with a quip and The Last Word!

 

But there’s no escapism left for Pauline who, having been married on a dual income for sixteen years, has slipped into debt following her husband’s departure and is now faced with agonising decisions if she wants to keep her family together. Her father, played by scouser Peter Kerrigan, tries to help and can’t believe as a child of thirties depravation, that his country is in such a state. It’s that feeling of helplessness that resonates still, even in this most prosperous of nations. Disability and ill fortune can condemn so many even as we find billions for failed track and trace systems and even more nuclear weapons that we will never need.

 

Frankie Miller and Ken Hutchison

Things are tough in Glasgow too and the two Peter McDougall plays, both directed by John Mackenzie show different aspects of the area, “Greenock Industrial and the Greenock Pastoral” as termed by David Archibald in his booklet essay on these most Scottish of plays. Martin Scorsese reportedly described Just A Boys’ Game (1979) as a Scottish Mean Streets… and it’s not hard to see why with this no holds barred vision of working-class brutality. Singer Frankie Miller is perfect as cock of the walk Jake McQuillen reminding me so much of the lads in seventies’ Liverpool, you’d cross the road to avoid. Jake doesn’t need to put out as he never backs down and has the cold-eyed certainty of a fast gun; he knows he can take anyone on his day.

 

His supremacy is about to be challenged by a “young team” (Mogwai were watching…) led by the razor blade toting McCafferty. In the pivotal battle Jake moves towards the gang telling him that “your tea’s oot’ and local catch phrase was born. The rules of the street pass on from generations and Jake’s Granda (Hector Nichol), even in extreme health is a hard-boiled bastard and his Grannie (Jean Taylor Smith) gives better than she ever gets. Tough love or just survival… there’s so much nuance in performance and players that you’ll be left thinking about the visceral actuality for days.

 

Jon Morrison and Billy Connolly

Another musician also features in The Elephant’s Graveyard (1976), this time banjo-player/comic and former shipyard worker, Billy Connolly who plays poetic postie, Jody who meets up with a bored IBM worker Bunny (Jon Morrison) up in the Greenock hills as they both bunk off work for the day. Jody is pushing 40 whilst Bunny has just started work and, over two bottles of stream-chilled fortified wine – you’re heads the next day!? – they start to set their worlds to rights and amidst the macho bluster and boyish “dares” start to establish a bond of sorts. The barriers come down and they even share a vision of cowboys being ambushed by Indians over a brook.

 

Despite their ages they have the same concern with how to live their lives and perhaps look back to the childhood freedoms of days in the woods for some clues. I like the robustness of the dialogue and the humour too. In the end you’re still wondering… what was really being exchanged and is Jody a vision of Bunny’s future or, maybe, just a smart-arsed postman.

 

Lovely music from young Carl Davis by the way, whatever became of him?

 

Get your hair cut Davies!

No less than Daniel Day-Lewis described Phil Davies’ astonishing performance in Barrie Keefe’s Gotcha (1977) as one of his early acting inspirations. He plays an unnamed fifth former who, on his last day at school finds his gym teacher Ton (Gareth Thomas) and another teacher Lynne (Clare Sutcliffe who is also to be seen in eth BFI’s new release of I Start Counting) embracing in a storage room. Disaffected by his lack of consequence and Ton’s slaps, the kid holds them hostage by holding a lighted cigarette over his motorbike. Even the threat of immolation can’t help them remember his name and when the head (Peter Hughes) joins them, we see the three try to talk him round with only Lynne genuinely concerned with the boy and not the situation.

 

As someone who attended comprehensive school in the Seventies, I remember some dramas but, again, under a Labour regime, it was clear that not all schools were equal and that success was elusive. As with social care, you need to ride your luck with education especially if you can’t pay for it. Keefe went on to script The Long Good Friday and if you know that you’ll recognise this.

 

Gotcha was presented with another short school play, Brian Clark’s Campion’s Interview, in which a head teacher (Julian Curry) attends an interview for another headship and uses it to inform the gathered mix of educationalists exactly why they are failing his current school. It’s a smart script and well played by Curry who maintains an almost matter of fact calm as he lines up each and every failure of policy and leadership. The two plays together stir and shake.

 

Bryan Marshall and Gareth Thomas drink to a common cause?

In terms of production values and cinematic entertainment, Stocker’s Copper (1972) is the pick of the bunch not that this tale of industrial action and police suppression goes any easier on the viewer. Based on events in 1913 when a squad of specially trained policemen were sent from Glamorgan to break a strike at a Cornish clay mine. As the silent bobbies sit grimly on the train approaching their destination only one turns and remarks on the huge creamy mountains of china clay, Herbert Griffith (Gareth Thomas) who with the out of context innocence, remarks that it looks like snow.

 

Herbert – played so well by Thomas – is able to encompass a whole range of contradictions without crumbling under the weight of conscience. A former steel worker, he became a policeman for a steady wage and the “special training” his particular force offers; he understands the process of industrial action and even the need for it but he knows he has the right to beat down on it once the law is beached.

 

Jane Lapotaire and Gareth Thomas

He stays with the family of one of the strike’s leaders, Manuel Stocker (Bryan Marshall, excellent here as he is in I Start Counting…), with Stocker’s wife Alice (Jane Lapotaire) putting the need for income over the awkwardness of the arrangement. Tom Clarke’s screen play is canny and uses this device to explore the relationships between labour and the law as well as the many things the two working class men have in common. He pits Manuel’s stern resolve against the openness and seeming honesty of Herbert and the relationship is fascinating as you know all too well how things may end up.

 

The labour movement was on the rise across Europe and strikes were to be of increasing concern. The Home Secretary Winston Churchill sent troops to put an end to the Liverpool Transport Workers Strike in 1911 – including my tram driving great grandfather – and he also sent a battle cruiser up the Mersey for good measure. Yet these unions we ultimately to prevail. Not without many heads being broken and when the push comes to shove, Stocker’s Copper is unsettling viewing.

 

There’s another a splendid score from young Carl Davis along with the magnificent Treviscoe Male Choir and St Dennis Silver Band reminding us of the solidarity and comfort music can bring.

 

Victims of Apartheid

Lastly, we have Victims of Apartheid (1978), scripted by Tom Clarke and directed by Stuart Burge which feels the most of it’s time (I generally hate the concept of dated, how can any work of art know how it needs to be viewed in future?) but, for all that, still disturbing in this era of “All Lives Matter” relativism and denial.

 

South African actor John Kani plays George an anti-apartheid campaigner itching to return to the fray in his home country but also suffering what we’d now term as PTSD after being tortured by the authorities who drove a nail through his foreskin and made him stand on tip toe to avoid tearing his flesh. Kani is jobless and having been dumped by his wife, is being supported by various well-intentioned British activists including Canon Caper of Christian Underground (Peter Jeffrey) who offers him money to look after Henry (John Matshikiza) another supposed refugee from South Africa.

 

George’s life is chaotic and he has a new girlfriend, sex-worker Carrie (Coral Atkins) which says much of his position in this new society. The question is raised early on as George takes Henry on a bus ride and talks to the black bus conductor about his new friend conceding that whilst there is “racialism” in Britain there is no colour bar. The bus conductor’s response says it all: You got racialism, who needs a colour bar.

 

So, how “dated” is the vision of domestic racialism we see in this play exactly? It would be well over a decade later that Apartheid legislation was finally repealed in June 1991, pending multiracial elections held under a universal suffrage in April 1994. It was only then that Kani would tell the Financial Times that he felt ‘liberated from the responsibility of relevance’. The case continues…

 

The BFI are to be congratulated once again for making these works available and the Blu-ray transfers are top notch. The booklet is packed with high-quality essays commissioned by the tireless Vic Pratt and add so much context to films that still present as fearless. They were certainly challenged at the time with Gotcha shouted down for a repeat by Mary Whitehouse and her league of complainers and other’s such as Peter MacDougall’s Just Another Saturday – about Orange Day marches, rescheduled.

 

These plays put fear into the hearts of some in the establishment. Shall we ever see their like again on the BBC?

 

You can pre-order Play for Today Volume 2 direct from the BFI shop, in person (hoorah!) or online. It’s out on 17^th May and is an absolute delight! Rated: *****