Smile… Kennington Bioscope Silent Laughter Weekend 2022, Day One, Cinema Museum

 

Sitting in the Cinema Museum, it’s like we’ve never been away and yet… those communal laughs feel fresher, the films more visceral and the accompaniment, richer and more poignant than ever. There were tears as well as laughter and a fulsome amount of surprises… reputations restored to living memory as well as reanimated shadows on screen. A reminder also that even films you are familiar with carry additional weight when viewed on the big screen with an audience and with live accompaniment.

 

Buddy and Mary

My Best Girl (1927) with Costas Fotopoulos

Mary Pickford’s last silent film, My Best Girl, is also one of her best and, famously, features her romancing future husband Charles “Buddy” Rogers. It’s romantic comedy of the highest order, pulling at the heartstrings as one of the masters of cinema runs through her gears form slapstick to the most intensely dramatic closing sequence that, as I fully expected, brought a tear to my eye. Can you see Mary falling in love with Buddy during this film? Maybe… but it was also her day job and to see her in her mid-thirties, playing her age, is a delight.

My Best Girl’s cinematographer was Charles Rosher who deservedly received an Academy Award nomination for his cinematography, he lost it for this but won it for Sunrise and, there were moments such as the opening montage and the emotional scenes amongst the traffic when you were reminded of the earlier film.

Costas Fotopoulos provided spirited accompaniment of his own tapping into rich romantic and dramatic themes as well as tripping the comedy lightly and fantastically through the pots and pans, family rows and cultural clashes as the poor little shop girl wins the heart of the poor big rich boy. Peak Bioscope!!

Walter and the runaway tank... plus two pigs.

 

Would You Believe it? (1929) with Lillian Henley

Walter Forde’s last silent film is packed with inventive routines: a baby and a doll mix up in the toy store, serving up toy soldiers just like chips on newspaper with oil for gravy and trying to wrap balloons in brown paper for a bespectacled Rees-Mogg-esque junior toff. Forde’s an inventor, he’s not sure what of, but it seems to work until it blows his landlord’s house up. He gets a job in a toy shop and meets a rather attractive young woman Pauline (Pauline Johnson) who just happens to work for the War Office, he invites her for dinner cooked by his uppity roommate, Cuthbert (Arthur Stratton) who, in a constant battle of wills, refuses to act the role of his butler.

Walter’s invention of a remote-control tank could be a game-changer but a group of spies finds out and set’s off to stop him demonstrating the kit to the Minister for War. Their leader is modelled on a similar mastermind in Fritz Land’s Spies and sits at a huge desk, pushing buttons for everything he needs, drinks, photographs, cigarette and lighters… the first but not last time, I was reminded of Wallace and Gromit on the day’s programme.

A super spy and his target

There’s a very funny bit of business on the Underground as the baddies chase Walter up lifts and down emergency spiral staircases in scenes reminiscent of Keaton in The Cameraman and elsewhere. The gags are mostly good and Forde controls events enough to not interrupt the broader narrative.

He gets his chance to demo for the Minister but the enemy agents kidnap him and Pauline, and, as Walter pushes his pal Cuthbert too far, the real-life tank runs amok to comic effect. The filmmakers were clearly delighted to get the loan of kit and crew and it shows with crushed cars, walls and buildings to show for it.

Forde later went on to direct the legendary Arthur Askey in The Ghost Train, his sense of comic timing and seamless story advancement was to stand him in good stead in his long career behind the camera.

 

Rediscovering Roscoe with Steve Massa and Lillian Henley

The second programme was a video essay from film historian Steve Massa who gave an overview of the unfairly maligned Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle based on his recent book. Roscoe was an exceptional talent who understood cinematic comedy better than most using his expressive wit, supernatural timing and extraordinary athleticism to become one of the leading players in the 1910s. Steve discussed numerous examples of Roscoe’s comic invention, quick fire physical comedy which exhibited his grace and timing and his ability to fall headfirst and backwards in a 180-degree flop.

Roscoe enjoyed a successful run of seventeen films with Mabel Normand at Keystone and worked with Chaplin, Lloyd and his nephew, Al St John before setting up his own production company, Comique Film Corporation, with Joseph Shenk (Mr Norma Talmadge) in 1917. Steve showed a clip from the company’s first film, The Butcher Boy (1917) which also introduced a young vaudeville performer by the name of Keaton.

Of course, Roscoe’s life was turned upside down by his unjust prosecution for the death of Virginia Rappe, but even before he was completely exonerated, he carried on working with Buster in Sherlock Jr and other films. He stayed active and made a successful series of shorts in the early thirties that as Steve said, left his life on the up…

There was a full screening for His Wife’s Mistake (1916), one of Arbuckle’s best starring shorts, with Al St John. There was swinging piano accompaniment from Lillian Henley who caught the mood as always and syncopated perfectly with the pandemonium on screen.

 

Almost Lost Laughs… Charley’s Bowers and Chase plus EE Horton, Meg Morley

 

Charlie Bowers' house...

Many a Slip (1927) The Non-slip Banana

This was the inventive Charley Bowers at his most surreal, struggling to invent a non–slip banana peel at the behest of a potential rich benefactor. As with Walter Forde, Bowers is an inventor in search of a cause and he finds it when offered the seemingly impossible task of removing that staple slippiness from Slapstick’s most valuable fruit.

This being Bowers, the cause of the slippiness was not the texture of the skin but tiny bugs only viewable through one of his “Pat Pending” tele-microscopes. Cue a series of Bower’s amazing stop-motion animations along with repeated efforts to go the long way round in order to test the solution. As Matthew Rose, who runs The Lost Laugh digital magazine and website, pointed out Bowers may not have been the best comedic performer but he was an extraordinary animator and film director. Many a Slip is great fun and it’s good news that more of Bowers’ work is being found and released on home media by Lobster Films.

There’s an article on Charley from Matthew on his site here.

 

Stan is the best lawyer Charley can afford...

Now I’ll Tell One (1927) when Ollie met Stan and Charley

Before they were officially a team, Laurel and Hardy feature in a few films together including this one, which features more of the former as Charley Chase’s lawyer in an outlandish divorce case. Charley’s wife is played by Edna Marion who accuses him of all kinds of outrageous crimes against her, including having shot her dead. Quick as a flash Stan the Lawyer asks how this could be given that she is still alive, only to provide her with an unlikely explanation; “perhaps the bullet hit a bible you kept over your heart. It’s typical Chase, fast paced, comedically vindictive and stylishly silly. In addition to being a legal loose cannon, Stan also dismantles clocks and watches… and I still don’t know why. Every lawyer needs a hobby.

Horton hopes for a honeymoon?

 

Dad’s Choice (1928)

Edward Everett Horton (forgotten until recently as a silent star) made a series of highly polished two reelers at the end of the silent period before establishing himself in talkies for the next two decades. He’s another class act and plays it earnestly deadpan through this comedy of manners, as he tries to elope with his sweetheart (Sharon Lynn) whose father (Otis Harlan) certainly does not approve of the match. There’s a lovely confusion between Charlie and his girl’s mother (Josephine Crowell) who keeps on been presented with accidental winks and other signals that she’s the one he’s after.

It's very polished and Horton shows all the comic calm that made him a staple of such later classics as Top Hat, Arsenic and Old Lace and The Ghost Goes Wild. Again, there’s a set of his comedies out on Blu-ray this time from Ben Model’s Undercrank Productions - link here!

 

Meg Morley accompanied all three films in slightly different styles, responding with an effortless range of themes and tempos to suit the rhythms of the comedy on screen. A jazz player perfectly suited to the jazzed action on screen.

 

Unfortunately, I was then called away by a prior appointment at the Royal Albert Hall and so I missed the Harry Langdon in Frank Capra’s The Strong Man (1926) – his first film as director - with more Meg and then the headlining Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! (1923) accompanied by John Sweeney.  One of the all-time classics of silent comedy and the Fourth Musketeer of twenties male comedians. I’ve seen the Lloyd film and will catch up with the other Harry later on… he made some great films with Capra writing including Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) with Joan Crawford, and was on a roll to rival even the Big Three… the more the merrier.

 

Good to have the laughter days back at the Bioscope and, as the Cinema Museum’s future now looks assured in Kennington, here’s to many more!

 

AND, this is why bananas are so slippy...

And why mice truly are the smartest species on Earth... Charley Bowers was there first!

Hearts in darkness… Cries and Whispers (1972), BFI Anniversary Release, Liv Ullmann Season

 

 

Today I feel that in Persona—and later in Cries and Whispers—I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover… Ingmar Bergman

 

There’s no doubt that Ingmar Bergman sought out the inconvenient truths of our existence and, unblinking, showed us at our weakest and most human. As he sat beside Sven Nykvist’s camera, he looked at his performers straight in the eye as they acted to interpret his writing in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined, sometimes and perhaps often. For all the talk of authorship, he needed actors he could trust to rise to the occasion and go beyond whether through instinct, training or dazzling natural ability.

 

In one of his most stunning works, he brought together three of his acting muses and created a four-hander of such force that it’s more than capable of bruising audiences today. This restored Cries and Whispers is being released across country to mark its 50th anniversary as well as forming part of this month’s season of Liv Ullmann films, which, launched by the great woman herself, dominates April on the Southbank. Ullmann talked of the joys of our being able to, once again, experience film collectively and, in the case of this one, it’s good to have people you care about with you.

 

Bergman asks, are familial ties enough, does love come unconditionally and even at the end, can we still pull away from totally committing to others. The story was inspired by a persistent dream the director had of four women dressed in white in a red room and there’s a striking use of colour with each character framed in close-up saturated with red light. Red for love and fear; fight or flight, denial, anger and acceptance? All of these things, for those caught in the most difficult moment of their lives. Bergman wrote in his book Images that “red represents for me the interior of the soul. When I was a child, I imagined the soul to be a dragon, a shadow floating in the air like blue smoke—a huge-winged creature, half bird, half fish. But inside the dragon, everything was red.”

 

Ladies in red... (oh, come on!)

Bergman also wanted to write a tribute to his mother yet the lead character who carries the most grace, is called Agnes, and her eldest sister Karin – his mother’s name – is full of confusion and regret. All of the women represented parts of his mother’s character though so, as is usual with Bergman, nothing is black or white.

 

Agnes is played by the wonderful Harriet Andersson, one of the director’s earliest collaborators and almost twenty years after Summer with Monica, in early middle age and offering a quite terrifying portrayal of a woman confronting her imminent death. Karin has cancer and not long to live, and Anderson’s performance is intense, her eyes wide with the adrenal certainty of her certain demise, she cries out but is far braver than she could ever know. If you’ve reached an age of morbid understanding, something you can only live through, it’s impossible to not respond without being mindful of your own fears, your own enduring grief.

 

Harriet Andersson

Agnes is cared for by her maid,  Anna wonderfully played by Kari Sylwan, who’s interior responses provide some of the more comforting moments of the story in which Agnes’ sisters are both constrained by an inability to commit to their sister’s final moment. This of course is wonderful grist to the mill for actors of the quality of Ingrid Thulin as “uptight” Karin and Liv Ullmann as “immature” Maria… things are far more complicated than those two operative words suggest and the watched hangs onto their every word and action looking for the simple truths most other directors would use to flavour this narrative.

 

The story is told in past and present tense as well as fantasy so it is very much like a dream floating gently off the screen, especially with those anchors of emotional certainty removed and these two sisters struggling to connect with each other and themselves. There’s no doubt their love for their sister, they wait in the red room adjoining her bedroom, concerned at every cry as the doctor assures them that Agnes is getting close to the end but they’re held back by denial and grief. There’s nothing unnatural, it’s important to say that as this is film for thought, the cinema of self-reflection as we all have to confront this reality once life resumes outside in the night and daylight.

 

Ingrid Thulin

In silent film there was an obsession with “photographing thought” with few greater exponents than Bergman’s mentor Victor Sjöström, and indeed Ingmar himself with the aid of his incredible performers. There’s an intimacy that reflected the fact that three of the leads were long-term collaborators with the director and there’s also the presence of two of his daughters, who both play Maria’s daughter at different ages, Linn Ullmann and Lena Bergman. Liv Ullmann also plays Maria’s mother in flashback, adding to the compressed family feeling… what was it Philip Larkin said about parents?

 

 

As Maria faces the end, her sisters face each other and their failed relationships with two thoroughly inadequate husbands, Karin’s Fredrik (Georg Årlin), an officious older man and Maria’s Joakim (Henning Moritzen) who is emotionally disconnected too. Karin is so repulsed by Frederik she mutilates herself to avoid having sex with him whilst Joakim tried to kill himself after learning of her affair with Doctor David (Erland Josephson). Needless to say, both are still around as their wives face the family crisis.

 

As the priest (Anders Ek) says when Agnes finally succumbs, she had more faith than him and as the truehearted Anna reads her mistress’ diary, she learns of her capacity for happiness which, as for us all, maybe only fleeting but is life’s greatest achievement after all.

 

Ingrid Thulin and Kari Sylwan

Cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, captures every thought and whisper and the film is beautiful to view. He deserved his Oscar and this film deserves to be seen on the big screen so, I urge you to head to the Southbank and elsewhere for the full experience. Few films are this heartfelt or as richly rewarding.

 

Details of the 50th Anniversary re-release screenings are on the BFI site.

Liv Ullmann

Marlene's Black Bottom... Café Elektric (1927), with John Sweeney, Ciné Lumière

This film is so well restored/preserved with a crispness that gives an impression that the performers have only just left the room and so it is a surprise to find that the last reel is missing. Even though we find out what happens from a closing intertitle it is sad that what remains is in good enough quality to make the whole enterprise appear so vibrantly extant.

 

Café Elektric is one of those many silent films Marlene Dietrich said she couldn’t remember making – she claimed just three at one point but it’s at least 19 – and whilst she’s not the main star she stands out not just for all tomorrow’s parts but for the visceral beauty that would lead to those future opportunities. Here she’s a spoilt rich girl who wants a walk on the wild side only to find she leads others into a world they can’t simply buy their way out of. We see her now through the afterglow of her unique star power and here, all foresight aside, is one special energy being displayed.

 

She’s far from alone in this film with Willi Forst displaying presence of his own as the petty criminal, Fredl. At the start of the film his character is shown stealing a woman’s purse and then makes light of the police chase through the streets of Vienna as he’s no doubt done many times before. Forst and Dietrich were appearing in the musical Broadway at the time which was her entre to this film and, apparently, she was almost dropped from the role until Forst insisted she stay*.

Willi Forst

We then switch to young Erni (Marlene) dancing rumbustiously to a jazz band with one of her many suitors, she’s got some moves and as her partner quips, dances very fast. Meanwhile her father, rich industrialist Göttlinger (Fritz Alberti), is flirting with his much younger lover (Anny Coty) which may be a comment on his hypocritical attitude – and yes, all men - to his daughter’s sexuality. He is interrupted by his architect Max (Igo Sym) who has the look of a man weighed down by the burden of working all the hours so that his boss can indulge himself.

 

Forst goes to spend his ill-gotten gains at the jazz club where, glancing around the room, his eyes chance upon a pair of stunning legs and there’s some in-camera trickery to give us his focused response to these shapely pins, just to emphasize the point. The limbs in question belong, naturlich, to Erni, and as Fredl instructs the band to play the Black Bottom, we see a faster and more furious display than the previous turn… and this time it is Erni’s turn to remark on the speed of the dance. Forst is, indeed, a quick mover and he gets a big tip and Erni’s phone number for his troubles.

 

Fredl heads off to the Café Elektric where he pimps off a number of women, including the experienced Paula (Vera Salvotti) and the innocent looking Hansi (Nina Vanna). Hansi’s very popular and there’s the sweet middle-aged Dr. Lehner (Wilhelm Völcker) with a soft spot for her… who may represent her potential for another life. Hansi’s tough and tries to shortchange Fredl but she’s still too young for this place, and not old enough for the possibility of escape…

 

Guess who?

Erni is supposed to go out with Max but can’t resist the chance to cheat by seeing Fredl. Telling Max she’s off to see a sick friend, she’s unfortunately spotted by the disconsolate designer leaving with Fredl. There’s a fascinating juxtaposition of the ex-couple’s evenings as Erni proceeds to get drunk on champagne with Fredl and Max meets Hansi and there’s a lovely exchange of chaste glances across the table before he finally cracks seeing a drawing she’s made on the table of them talking.

 

Fredl and Erin – shockingly – go back to his place but Hansi and Max go to see a Rin Tin Tin film at the Kino. As Erin gets dressed – no chance wasted to show Dietrich’s body in lingerie – Hansi and Max glance at a hotel before she tells him good night. A contrast in courtship you wouldn’t expect in a Hollywood film, especially one with Rin Tin Tin, although I’m sure Lubitsch could cover the same ground with cups and saucers…

 

Nina Vanna and Igo Sym

The contrasts in the relationships grow starker as Fredl asks Erni to get him money to cover his ill-gotten debts… she steals a ring and some money from her father’s safe. And now things get complicated… as the rich girl’s folly leads to Max being suspected of the theft when Göttlinger, in the midst of a drunken pass, notices the missing ring on Hansi’s finger after Fredl has gifted it to her in an attempt to win her affection, clearly as far as Erni goes, he's only in it for the money. The police are called and as things look bleak for Max, Hansi points the finger – literally – at Fredl, who is duly arrested and sent down.

 

Despite his innocence, Max is fired by mean old Göttlinger and lives with Hansi as he fruitlessly searches for a job as a journalist – I’m not sure why he chose not to continue with architecture… Will the couple go under before Hansi has to return to her old profession, can they survive together and will old scores be settled?

 

Café Elektric (1927) is thoroughly entertaining drama with Gustav Ucicky directing what could be an over-loaded narrative with clarity of purpose. He certainly gets the best out of his cast and the performances are of a high level, whilst we get some choice location shots and a real feel for the night life. The dance sequences are energetic and Erni and Fredl’s Black Bottom is Tik-Tok ready if you want to slow down the steps at the start. I think we need to see this on Strictly Come Dancing.

 

Of course, there’s few more accomplished accompanists for dance and John Sweeney did a spectacular job for the Black Bottom and the club scenes whilst illustrating the drama and comedy with a firm grasp of period as well as his practiced way with musical narrative. I love the space at the Cine Lumiere and John’s piano being also up on the stage gives the sound the chance to fully fill up the room.

 

I came to see Marlene but, as is always the case, there was so much else to enjoy. Merci beaucoup Ciné Lumière et l’ Institut français!

*As per this fascinating article at StummFilm Archiv.

Igo Sym, who taught Marlene to play the musical saw*...

An Audience with Liv Ullmann and Persona (1966), BFI Liv Ullmann Season

 

It was because my face could say what he wanted to say. That made me the one he wanted to work with ... because it was my face and I also understood what he was writing…

 

The very last audience question for Liv Ullmann came from a French woman who had written a dissertation on her work with Ingmar Bergman to earn her Baccalaureate, “you made so many films with Ingmar, how did you manage to stay happy?” The answer was simple and got the biggest laugh of a very enjoyable conversation between film writer, Christina Newlands and the revered Norwegian actor and director; I’m a happy person, all my friends could tell you that. Over and again Ullman has stressed that the secret to her “method” was indeed, acting and the art of pretending; using your dreams and emotional back catalogue to drive your characters.

 

She described herself, a Norwegian, directing an Australian actress, Kate Blanchet, in an American play, A Streetcar Named Desire and witnessing her embellish the ending in a way she’d never seen before, as Blanch looks forward to the next stage in her life with strength and not resignation. Before that she’d given numerous examples of the power of her own imagination enabling her to play an experienced woman aged 19 or a middle-aged actor in Persona, an older woman with a younger man in Cries and Whispers (both she and he were 35) and other roles Bergman realised he could fulfil through her even , perhaps, if he couldn’t write the character to fulfilment on his own.

 

Liv in Persona

Very occasionally she went against his instruction such as in Faithless (2000) the film he scripted, allowing the old man in this partly autobiographical story, to forgive his younger self’s cruelty to a lover by having him look directly at younger actor during the harrowing reveal. Bergman refused to forgive himself but Liv Ullman, not for the first time, gave him what he deserved even when he was so specific as to call the main character “Bergman”.

 

One suspects that it was this very ability to give the director what he didn’t always expect or think he wanted that made him describe them as “painfully linked” after directing her for the first time in tonight’s feature Persona. Initially she thought he was proposing and they did have a relationship for five years which led to his fathering of writer Linn Ullmann with Ullmann, but what he meant was that the two of them were intertwined in term of creative imperatives. He’d had this feeling before perhaps, having relationships with actresses Harriet Andersson (1952–1955) and Bibi Andersson (1955–1959) who, in addition to being a close friend of Liv’s by this point, was also her co-star/other-half in Persona…

 

Live Ullman live… and utterly charming, self-depreciating and yet full of honesty and wisdom. The comments she made about the performance of her star in Faithless, Lena Endre, are very similar to those she made about the star of Sofie (1992), Karen-Lise Mynster: “I was thinking to myself, ‘try not to think what you would have done!’ … then suddenly she was doing so much more that I had never even thought of… it was the first time in my life that I was proud to be an actress. Because I saw that it didn’t come from make believe, it came from feeling.”

 

Persona

This was “a once in a lifetime opportunity” said the person introducing from the BFI and she was not wrong. This felt not just like a masterclass in acting and cinema but also in life and how to live it. A standing ovation all round reflected the warmth in the room and there may just have been something in my eye.

 

I think you should play this part until it’s played out, until it’s no longer interesting. Then you can drop it, just like you eventually drop all your other roles.

 

Liv introduced Persona in the evening’s main (screening) event this time in conversation with series programmer Sara Lutton. She had met Bergman who had told her he wanted to cast her in his next film but then Ingmar pulled a sicky which he often did when he’d changed his mind about a project. After some time in hospital, he emerged with the script for Persona which was also to star Liv’s best friend, and former Ingmar lover, Bibi Anderson. The result remains a disturbing classic, as likely to make the top-ranked films of all time Liv quipped, as her “musical” Lost Horizon is a contender for the worst – she is nothing if no humble and funny.

 

Liv and Bibi Anderson. Those high heels?

Persona is still striking with fierce, conflicting and bare-knuckled emoting from Bibi and Liv all masterfully captured by Bergman with the aid of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography and Ulla Ryghe’s pin-point editing – absolutely amongst the MVPs as the personas start to move across the screen between and around the players… There’s also an experimental score from Lars Johan Werle that certainly impressed members of Pink Floyd for far less successful experimentation on Ummagumma. His music creates an atmosphere of disturbance and is used sparingly alongside more deliberate visual avant-gardism which punctuates the film, cut up and montage, flash frames of silent film, erotica, burning nitrate… the fourth wall takes the occasional battering.

 

The story concerns a famous theatre actress Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) who is suddenly struck mute during a performance of Electra and is in hospital for assessment by a doctor played by Margaretha Krook, who can find nothing wrong with her physically or mentally. From the doctor comes the above quote, as she sees Elisabet as play acting for whatever reason… is the nature of the play significant, does she have deeper issues with parenting and her father? Her husband, when he makes a brief appearance certainly seems much older… but the film is so rich in possible interpretation we’re all like the boy at the avant guard opening, reaching out to a bright and blurred image of Elisabet, or is it someone else?

 

Bibi Anderson

The doctor assigns the friendly nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) to look after Elisabet as she sends her to her house on the island of Fårö (locations included Bergman's property there at Hammars). Alma gently fills in the gaps in the silence and is ostensibly a more straightforward personality – well she’s still talking and introduces herself in plain terms at their first meeting, 25, engaged, interested in film and theatre but not going to either as much as she’d like… an open book apparently

 

But, amongst the atmosphere of rocky seaside calm, Alma and Silent Lis develop a deeper entanglement with Alma falling into the unfathomability of the actresses’ state of being. They are more than just face to face, and are beginning to connect beyond the surface, intermingling I unspoken ways beyond the mask of flesh and feature…

 

Is it possible to be one and the same person at one time – I mean two people? God, I’m being silly.

 

There’s so much interpretation of the film, as with Antonioni’s L’Avventura, there’s no definitive narrative based on the evidence of the film, the “meaning” as illusive as a lost woman or, indeed, a lost identity. That secrets endure after 57 years says much for the film’s continued popularity, a puzzle still and one that retains significance. Persona has certainly impacted David Lynch, with Mulholland Drive most obviously owing a debt and many more, although I was surprised that Abba were among the influenced with Knowing Me, Knowing You (aha!) profiling Anna and Agnetha just like Bibi and Liv.

 

Liv said that as they worked, Bergman would always sit right next to the camera making him another unspoken partner in the action. The three friends who made this picture operated on a level of open connection few of us experience in our working lives… the results are extraordinary and mark that rare film which means exactly what you want it to if you’re willing to push yourself inside the screen. Go on, take off your mask.

 

 

The Liv Ullmann series runs until the end of April and more details are on the BFI site.

 

 

The tremendous cry of our faith and doubt against the darkness and silence is the most terrifying proof of our abandonment.

 

Down but not out, in Britain… Play for Today Volume 3, BFI Blu-ray Box Set out on 11th April

Does your mind get clouded sometimes? All clouded up…

Adopts film trailer baritone: In a world in which social security is on the verge of collapse, centuries old religious bigotry defines our boundaries and government is undermined by self-seeking cynicism… and that’s just the first three plays on this vibrant new set that are as relevant today as they ever were.

I was just turned ten years old when the family watched Edna the Inebriate Woman and I still remember the reaction from my parents, the debate and the agreement that things were not right. Even as a child I knew what were called “tramps”, people, mostly men, who were wrapped in huge coats who’d walk from Liverpool up and down as far as Preston in one case, eking out a living, finding shelter where they could. It was part of the everyday and, whilst it seemed almost romantic to younger eyes, this play removed all idea of a life on the open road being anything other than hand-to-mouth rough.

With this play and others on the BFI’s stunning box sets, you wonder how much of a part the Play for Today series had on forming my opinions and politicizing the nation. Sure, a decade of such plays preceded the victory of Thatcher, but people were still more aware of society’s problems, just differing in their view of what needed to be done. The legacy of these plays is, perhaps, not a purely political one but in raising awareness and developing consensus around the faults in our society. That these persist, is undeniable and Brexit, no matter how misguided some of us may feel, was in many ways, an attempt to reach for a bigger solution to problems we all of us accept.

Patricia Hayes

Edna the Inebriate Woman by Jeremy Sandford

First broadcast 21^st October 1971

Jeremy Sandford, who co-wrote Cathy Come Home (1966) with its director, Ken Loach, slept rough for two weeks in preparation for writing this play and at times it feels as though the dialogue has come straight from the road. The narrative is far from straightforward and we feel the same dislocation and confusion as Edna does as she searches for support and the home she has barely known. As Sandford later noted: “…the style of ‘Edna’ is intended to be impressionistic since I aimed to represent the world as seen through Edna’s disorientated perceptions…”

As Katie Crosson notes in her excellent booklet essay – the quality of these has been exemplary – the play is very didactive in addition to being authentic, funny and heart-wrenching, but Sandford had a point to make and an hour and a half was barely scratching the surface. Edna is an example, one of so many who fell through the cracks at a time when were less sophisticated, more judgemental, in the response to traumatic vagrancy. Then as with I am Daniel Blake in 2016, some critics probably felt the scenarios were “unrealistic” but having been through modern PIP assessments for my son, the bureaucracy of “care” is seemingly indifferent to actual fact.

What is without question is the sheer excellence of Patricia Hayes performance as Edna, making light of the grotesquery injecting fierceness and spirit into a character that would be hard to love. Edna is aggressive, constantly rude, often inebriated – drinking turpentine – and unreasonable in the face of authority and the terrifying certainty that she is, as she always has been, alone and unloved. Later in the play we find out what made her so and we can appreciate that she has to fight when there is simply no reason to trust. Edna is also funny and she is also wise, there is just a glimpse of the role she could play in helping others when she walks with Teresa (Kate Williams) a young woman on the start of a similar path.

 

Edna’s restless journey must forever continue though, flitting, as she says, always flitting and the play has a large cast reflecting the journey from roadside to battles for income support, a bed for the night and a system that presents prison as the better option. At one point Edna is put in a mental hospital where she is drugged and given involuntary electric shock treatment despite not having a mental illness… the things that could happen if not necessarily did happen. The dosshouse in Blackfriars Road, grim as it looks, was an actual dosshouse whilst Edna’s refuge at the Jesus Saves home, is an ideal of the kind of tolerant support she needed and even this is taken away as local residents’ complaints force it to close. Care in the community…

 

Sandford later chaired the National Homelessness Alliance and worked on many projects both on and off screen to tackle the issues of this play and, as Katie Crosson notes his legacy is measured not by Edna alone, but in his wider contribution to the causes. For this play alone, this box set is worth your time and money.

The band march down "Fenian Alley"

Just Another Saturday by Peter McDougall

First broadcast 13 March 1975

I was ordered to stand at the brother’s command, To receive the bright orange and blue...

 

To Glasgow and the continuing celebration of King William III’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690… I remember an Orange Day walk in Liverpool as a child, still England’s most Catholic city, the sectarian divide was real enough with separate schools if not strictly separated communities. It took me years, for instance, to realise that the King Billy painted in big white capitals on a wall in Walton near my grandparents, wasn’t just some local scally with a spray can. Far different in Glasgow though, where the first Catholic to play for Rangers wasn’t until 1989.

Football is the entre to this play’s sectarian divide as we open with seventeen-year-old John (John Morrison) waking up in his bedroom with a Rangers FC poster on the wall next to a No Surrender rosette. John is the “stick swinger”, the mace thrower who will lead Muirhill Flute Band who today will join with many others to celebrate the victory of the Dutch protestant king over the deposed catholic King James II of England and Ireland, VII of Scotland.

John’s nervous but sings the words of Orange Order songs as he prepares to join a ritual he does not entirely understand. Directed by John Mackenzie, there are superb scenes of the marches around which part of the play were filmed and with which the writer, Peter McDougall used to walk as a teenager like John. The two collaborated on The Elephants’ Graveyard (1976) and Just a Boys’ Game (1979), both of which have already been included on the BFI’s PFT box sets but this was McDougall’s first script and one that was deemed too incendiary in the early part of the decade.

 

The words presage the violence that will erupt during the march when the band leader Rab (Ken Hutchison) leads them through “Fenian Alley” and as the Irish flags hang angrily form windows the two sides come to blows. John is shaken and disgusted by what he sees, are these folk not as Scottish as he after all. Later he shares a drink with catholic mates including Paddy (Billy Connolly) when the brother of one of the injured Catholics comes looking for revenge. Will the cycle ever be broken?

 

The play packs a visceral punch and we only have to look across the water to see how easily hatred still stirs.

 

Adrienne Posta

Bar Mitzvah Boy by Jack Rosenthal

First broadcast 14 September 1976

Jack Rosenthal’s play is rich with characters from his Jewish heritage. It’s another clash of modern sensibilities versus centuries old tradition told with a lighter touch than Saturday, so much humour even as our hero Elliot – a superb turn from 14-year-old Jeremy Steyn – does the unthinkable. Director Michael Tuchner, brings out the best in an excellent cast and this just may be the best performance I’ve seen from Adrienne Posta who is so calmly centred as Elliot’s older sister and the smartest person in the room, hotel reception or the synagogue, where she allowed to attend at this point in time…

 

The pressure is on for Elliot as his, and more importantly, his parents’ big day approaches. He has to learn his speech and the recital from the Torah, but his mother Rita (Maria Charles) must get her hair right and his father Victor (Bernard Spear) lazily expects this right of passage to confirm his own manhood. This latter point is the problem for Elliot as not only is he not convinced that he is about to become as man, he’s not sure his role models are either… His grandfather Wax (Cyril Shaps) and potential brother-in-law, Harold (Jonathan Lynn, a legendary writer in his own right) are both overly sentimental and wimpish, especially when measured against the forceful women.

 

Dr Julia Wagner’s booklet essay explains the play’s impact in portraying Jewish culture and the skill of Tuchner’s direction and Rosenthal’s words in enabling the play to overcome potential stereotyping just as it creates a surprisingly intense family drama with only Lesley and Elliot keeping their heads in the Green’s sitting room as all around are losing theirs’.

 

Thora Hird not suffering fools...

The Mayor’s Charity by Henry Livings

First broadcast 29 November 1977

 

And so, to the legend that is Thora Hird in this heavily spiked comedy of Machiavellian local governmental manners. Livings’ script is a gift to Thora and the likes of Frank Windsor as the ambitious Ex-W/O Higham, Terence Rigby, the old school manipulator Mr Brabazon and Roy Kinnear as Roderick Major, the brother-in-law of Thora’s Olive major, the newly appointed mayor. Director Mike Newell moves the plot forward at speed and there’s a lot of detailed plotting, both in and around the play as Higham looks to sweep all before him by playing off different factions after being Olive’s choice as Mace Bearer, a master of ceremonies.

 

Some of the humour is broad, with a farcical French visit then a NSFW Scottish cabaret singer but there’s a serious point about local politics at a time of unrest in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. There’s a union dispute to deal with and petty politicking from people who ought to put their constituents first; as Higham cries out what about service?! Some folk are only in it for themselves whilst most feather their own nests… plus ca change eh Thora?

 

The Portrait of Nigel Havers...

Coming Out by James Andrew Hall

First broadcast 10 April 1979

 

“Nigel Havers… father was the attorney general at the time and was really upset that his son was appearing in this TV play which garnered all these headlines in the papers like 'Gay sex shocker' and things like that…” James Andrew Hall, Bournemouth Echo, 2017

  

Directed by Carol Wiseman, Coming Out is not quite the tentative closeted story you might expect form its vintage, the main characters are completely secure in their sexuality and the debate is more about whether that should be a matter of public record. Anton Rodgers plays Lewis Duncan, a hugely successful writer of very macho detective fiction who is living with his younger lover, Richie (Nigel Havers) just not in an open way. He doesn’t consider his sexual preference to be big news although is well aware that it might damage his marketability.

 

He writes a sensational magazine column under the pen name of Zippy Grimes, suggesting that homosexual encounters are more prevalent than society allows, he receives a flood of confessional letters from a pained populace still hiding its secrets. His publisher Harry (Hywel Bennett) is ecstatic and encourages him to meet with some of the respondents and reluctantly he does with a number of vignettes exposing the sadness of seventies repression. But he won’t revisit his Zippy persona…

 

Cue the dinner party from Hell with his painter friend Gunnar (Michael Byrne) and his belligerent other half Gerald (Richard Pearson) who relishes the chance to challenge Lewis’ complacency with all the means at his disposal not forgetting his own struggles having survived the era of illegality with the blackmail and suicides that went with it. There are home truths and a betrayal that will any of this change Lewis’ position?

Archie Pool, T-Bone Wilson and Trevor Thomas

A Hole in Babylon by Jim Hawkins and Horace Ové

First broadcast 29 November 1979

 

Last, but not least, is a play based on the 1975 Spaghetti House siege that took place in Knightsbridge, London. Three black gunmen attempted to rob the restaurant late at night after being tipped off that some £40,000 of takings would be on the premises. One of the workers escaped to alert the police leaving the men to hold the rest hostage from 28^th September to 3^rd October. During that time the event became politicised as the men claimed to be acting on behalf of Black Liberation organisations.

 

Directed by Horace Ové, from a script he co-wrote with Jim Hawkins, the play attempts to examine how the three men ended up in the raid as well as detailing the course of the hostage situation. T-Bone Wilson plays Frank Davies the leader of the group, an apparent recidivist offender who may well be more sinned against than sinning. Then there’s a university drop out with a dream to teach black kids, Bonsu Monroe (Trevor Thomas), and Wes Dick (Archie Pool) a would be poet.

 

Ové’s flashbacks of their lives was based on interviews conducted for over a year with the main protagonists and the black community of Ladbroke Grove especially. The result gives the men their due and, to the horror of The Daily Mail, cast doubt on the official version of events and the idea that the political elements were just an attempt to change the nature if the crime. Who can say for sure but there is so much room for doubt given the structural issues confronting men forced into this kind of risk?

 

In his booklet essay, film writer Kaleem Aftab, puts it more authoritatively than I can: By using Jamaican patois in the title, Babylon being not just the police but the white establishment, Ové knew what he was up against, and in many ways, still is.

Perhaps the hardest hitting of the BFI’s Play for Today volumes, you can pre-order Play for Today Volume 3 direct from the BFI shop, in person or online. It’s out on 11th April and is an absolute delight!

Rated: ***** and with much gratitude; these releases continue to be essential.