Red hair spells danger... Peeping Tom (1960), BFI Restoration, Cinema Unbound

 

This screening showcased a sparkling digital screening of the BFI's new 4k restoration of Michael Powell’s controversial big budget masterwork and it was followed by a discussion panel involving Archer’s expert Ian Christie, filmmaker Carol Morley and fashion designer John Foley, hosted by Doesn’t Exist magazine’s editor, Victor Fraga. Two shibboleths were dismantled, the first by Ian and concerning Peeping Tom being the film that basically ended Powell’s career. As he pointed out, Powell’s career had already been in trouble before Peeping Tom and not just because of the Honeymooners (1959); the kinds of films Powell wanted to make were at odds with the cinema of angry young men (and women) and he wasn’t about to make a Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey or Room at the Top. The Archers had made two crowd-pleasing war films for their last two collaborations but when it came to magical realism and post-expressionism, the early 60’s were not welcoming.

Another point Christie made was that far from ending his career, Peeping Tom was an enduring statement of his talent that would be picked up in the late 1970, 80s and 90s by film studies departments. Indeed, Carol Morley remembers watching it for the first time as she screened it at St Martins. Mr Fraga seemed intent on asking about the male gaze and the film’s treatment of women, whether such a film could still be made, and Carol’s was the voice we needed to hear on this question, remining us that Peeping Tom is restrained in its violence and that so many contemporary dramas offer sexualised violence against women regularly and on mainstream television too.

Ian Christie, Carol Morley, John Foley and Victor Fraga

Her point is also that here, as elsewhere, Powell’s women have agency and are not just victims, tokens or plot devices. Anna Massey’s Helen, Redhead no. 1, is the film’s hero and, when finally confronted with the horrific crimes of Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), she doesn’t runaway, she doesn’t cower, she wants to know why he has done these things and her force of personality provides Mark with the only unconditional support he has ever experienced in a life ruined by the cruel experimentation of his father (Michael Powell… yes, of course). As Carol points out, the men are largely rubbish, the Police not enquiring enough, the film-within-a-film Director (Esmond Knight) seemingly incapable of motivating his female star, Diane, Redhead No. 3 (Shirley Anne Field, so vibrant here and sadly, now just today she has passed… what a fabulous talent and an amazing career she had) and the consumer of under-the-counter pornography who looks remarkably like a certain director (Miles Malleson, take a bow sir!).

There was some debate about whether the title was appropriate given that Mark doesn’t really fit the traditional model of a Peeping Tom but then surely, it’s the audience who are Peeping Tom’s too along with the director who, was perhaps reflecting on his contemporary from Hackney who once stated that he wanted to turn the audience into voyeurs. Carol Morley referenced the origin of the phrase, Tom the only one in Coventry who looked at Lady Godiva. Like Tom, Mark just has to “look” and, so do we.

RIP, Shirley Anne Field (1938-2023)

One of the subjects of that business, the renowned Pamela Green (don’t tell me you don’t know her…) plays a world-weary model called Milly and sees through every male gaze in her direction. Murderee and Redhead number 2. Vivian (Moira Shearer) expresses the intelligence and clear talent that have been overlooked by the film company whilst dancing for her would-be killer; yet another director who just wants her to react to his prompting, a Lermontov… a Powell. Given their history, it is interesting to see Moira dancing for Powell again and by this stage she’d decided to not only dance but live and had married and had four children. She danced here and again in the French film Black Tights (1961) and we’ll simply never know why she wanted to dance but she was an incredible talent and person.

Insert subliminal message here: go watch The Red Shoes, go read Pamela Hutchinson’s wonderful book on The Red Shoes… then go watch The Red Shoes over again and repeat.

Anyone who has already followed one of both of those instructions could see a film like Peeping Tim coming, the intensity of the men around Shearer’s character, Victoria is controlling, passionate and bordering on the indecent. You can see both films as not such much an exploitation but an exposure of the damage the obsessive male gaze can do and, if Moira ever wanted an apology from Mickey, here it partly is.

Carl Boehm and Anna Massey

Sadly Vivian – not Vicky – dies in vain as Mark is not satisfied with her demise on camera and goes off in search of another victim. It’s not that they must die but that they must die in the way he wants. He’s a relentless perfectionist, with his own rules and that cruel upbringing, guiding him ever onward to record the perfect, most cruel and terrifying death imaginable. This is what his own upbringing has brought him too and when he plays his father’s recordings of incessant cruelty to his childhood self, Helen feels pity and even love. Forgiveness perhaps not but understanding and sympathy… no wonder contemporary critics were so aghast. Is it so much to ask the audience to reach out to this murderous character at the same time?

All of which is why Ian Christie is right, how many have created so many timeless pieces of work with a supremely talented collaborator such as Emeric Pressburger and then gone on to make a film of this depth and quality? As ever, it’s about what we have seen and not what we might have seen and we are lucky that we not only have the very best of Powell but so many of his other solo efforts that only hint at what’s to come and what has gone.

"'ere mate, got any copies of Sight and Sound?"

I'm a location saddo so today I went to Newman Passage where the first murder takes place and it's pretty much unchanged, well, apart from the lack of police presence and crowds trying to glimpse the body as Mark calmly records everything...

I think the studio were up for anything.. Cert X

Off-beat… Beat Girl (1960), BFI, London After Dark Season

 

"She’s nearly always here, digs all the modern gear, cool like a lager beer… Beat Girl…”

This film was being shown, in 35mm no less, and as part of the Edgar Wright curated season of films that influenced his new picture, Soho After Dark. As our luck would have it, he not only took the chance to watch the film on the big screen and with an audience, but also to give an impromptu introduction.

He wondered how Edmond T Greville’s film was received on its initial release and guessed that then as now, it was not as well as the makers hoped… it may have done good business but it’s not cool. That said there is much to appreciate in a film of incoherent energy and dubious dialogue but which has so many notable players, genuine sleaze and some few precious location shots, one of which, looking down Old Compton Street with the Greyhound pub on the left and what is now the Prince Charles Theatre on the right, he was determined to reproduce for his film, identifying the exact window from which the shot was made – now a pizza restaurant.

The young generation: Gillian Hills and Shirley Anne Field

The film features two potential British Bardots, the main star Gillian Hills, Jennifer/Jenny, the Beat Girl, and Carol White aka The Battersea Bardot, who although uncredited, appears throughout the film, with little dialogue although clearly directed, and once or twice walking across the action as if denoting possible directions for the other blonde.

Whilst it’s easy to mock the “dated” battle of the generations between the hipsters and the squares – and the film deserves that! - there are some interesting performances and a genuine sense of threat as well as period. Christopher Lee and Nigel Green are the pick for the grownups whilst Adam Faith’s mumbling authenticity and Gillian Hills’ youthful edgy-ness stand out for the kids oh, and one youngster name of Oliver Reed already typecast as “dangerous” who was obviously under clear instruction to dance dangerous, act dangerous and, well, just be yourself.

This language, these words, what does it mean?!

"Bloggin's for squares..." Adam Faith. Smouldering.

The script from Dail Ambler, aka Betty Mabel Lillian Williams a writer of pulp fiction who also used the pen name, Danny Spade, contains lines that even the youngsters sometimes struggle to say… with more Daddios, heps and cools than are credible, to which the grown ups also respond with stilted observations, with Jennifer’s Dad(ioh) top architect Paul Linden (David Farrah) simply unable to understand her. Gillian Hills does however cut through this with a quite wonderfully vindictive performance almost as if she has some score to settle.

Without a doubt, the John Barry-penned theme tune, snarled by Adam Faith with more genuine menace than Cliff or Tommy could ever hope to muster (but not Billy or Vince…) is one of the surer steps of this odd film as is the whole score, Barry’s first and probably worthy of a whole post on its own. It’s not the polished Barry we came to expect but there’s some energetic modern jazz, powerful themes throughout and a couple of decent attempts at rock n’ roll, sung by Faith, Made You and I Did What You Told You. There’s also a song sung by Shirley Anne Field called It’s Legal which has a range of  interpretations.

City of Future Past... Hills, Adam and Farrar

In Vic Pratt’s excellent booklet essay for the BFI’s Beat Girl Flipside Blu-ray, he points out that Adam Faith became more popular as a singer after this film but his rough charm was polished pretty quickly thereby preventing an outbreak of British Elvis-ism before Liverpool smuggled it in two years later, craftily disguised by Brian Epstein’s favourite tailors.

The Beat Girl herself certainly cuts a rug in the basement discotheque, even if Oliver Reed doesn’t, yet authenticity if provided by some of Soho’s finest exotic dancers who show just a little of what they can do in the strip club scenes. This is surely one of the film’s most startling choices… even now this is raunchy stuff recalling scenes from Primitive London plus West End Jungle (also screening as part of this series) and other sexploitative documentaries of the period. These performances are not edited by much and you wonder that 62 years or so probably hasn’t changed the watchers or the watched… the drinks are just more expensive… I should imagine.

Pascaline performing - one of the less revealing shots

Gillian Hills was a sixteen-year-old actress playing a sixteen-year-old rebelling against her strait-laced, radical architect father and his pretty new Parisian trophy wife Nicole played by Noëlle Adam who also gives a very good performance as the woman with a troubled youth of her own to deal with. Her battles with Jennifer are spiky affairs with Hills showing what she’s got in the most pointed of ways, there’s a visceral edge to the women’s relationship that probably says more for Adam’s generosity as a performer than script or direction.

Jenny has undoubtedly been neglected by her work-aholic father and having divorced her mother; he has spent months in Paris romancing his Nicole. That said, no one understands Jenny and even though she is studying art at the respectable St Martins, she would prefer to be out dancing with her beat friends in their Soho coffee shop basement.

Jenny and her stepmother do not get on

Her friends include Dave; a bit of rough with a guitar (Faith), Dodo (Field – a good actress whose remarkable clean features make her seem forever posh, even though she’s from Bolton...) and Tony (Peter McEnery, in his first film), who is constantly swigging from a cough mixture bottle filled with gin… Jenny is not alone in having generational difficulties: Tony’s father is aloof, a war hero without the courage to be a full-time parent, whilst Dave’s had to bring himself up spending so much time playing on bombsites, a world away from post-war regeneration.

Alcohol is not yet “cool” for these guys and it is interesting what they do think is uncool – these beats are passionate about Dave Brubeck, rock and their own means of expression… even if you cringe at some of the self-conscious slang. “He sends me…” says Dodo describing Dave’s singing… yes, but probably not too far from the Home Counties. There’s a nice moment at a party in Chislehurst Caves where both the lads share their feelings about the war, loss and their hopes. They open up but essentially via two intersecting monologues… maybe that’s cool, I don’t know.

Whadya mean maybe that's cool?

 

Jennifer was always going to go to war against her new stepmother partly because of her growing alienation from her father and his obsession with his city 2000 project a model of which fills their sterile living room. See, the fault’s not just youth but career-centric middle age… but the city looks a lot like Brasilia and hey, we’ll need more housing by 2000.

Nichole reaches out to Jennifer and seeks her out in her coffee bar haunt but things go awry especially when she bumps into an old friend, Greta (Delphi Lawrence) who she feigns not to recognise… The kids know Greta as one of the strippers in the club across the road and Jennifer starts digging deeper trying to find a way to antagonise Nichole. She goes into the club to quiz Greta and sees more than she bargained for on stage - an obviously well-practiced, sensuous routine from one Pascaline (actual stage name…) involving innovative use of a long shawl… The seediness looks all too real, especially in the longer cut on the BFI’s Blu-ray, and is frankly disturbing.

S-Lee-zy does it Chris.

Jenny doesn’t get much out of Greta but then she is noticed by the club’s shady manager Kenny (Christopher Lee) who also happens to be – just about – the older woman’s boyfriend. He takes a shine to Jennifer and makes Greta tell her about her life in Paris with Nichole… There’s more but she has to return to learn it all. Nichole goes to meet Greta to try and put a cap on things yet, despite her standing up to Kenny he threatens to reveal more if Jenny is not allowed back to the club. He’s looking for fresh blood and already has a trip to Paris planned with side-kick Simon (great stuff from Nigel Green given a rare chance to be a geezer).

Get out of it you jiving, drivelling scum, get out of it!

Adam Faith about to get slapped

Jennifer starts to go wild, encouraging Dave to drive too fast in a race with other hipsters and inviting a party round to her parents’ house.  She performs a striptease mimicking Nichole’s past and Dad arrives just in time to kick out the beats… All is revealed and yet David is willing to forgive and forget Nicole’s burlesque past – not such a square after all! Hey kids, the Old can learn!

Unaware and angry, Jenny has run off seeking adult refuge with Kenny. As we’re shown another expert routine from a woman in a white negligee (Diane D'Orsay), the seedy club owner attempts to persuade her to come to Paris with him even though he knows she’s under-age… and has no formal dance training. As the Linden’s race to try and find their daughter. Will the Beat Girl be corrupted for good or is there still a chance for her to re-connect with family and knuckle down to her studies??

The great Nigel Green shares a moment with Delphi Lawrence

Beat Girl is pacey and packed with so many moods it’s bound to feel uneven yet it’s a wild ride redeemed by so many interesting performers and its moment in time.

As Edgar Wright says, Gillian Hills may not have become the British Bardot but rather a Zelig-like figure in key films of the period, cavorting with David Hemmings and Jane Birkin in Antonioni’s Blow Up (1968) and then again in a speeded-up threesome with Malcolm McDowell and Barbara Scott in A Clockwork Orange (1971). She even became a pop star in France for a while, scoring the first hit with Zou Bisou Bisou. She’s also in the strange British horror, Demons of the Mind (1972) which may or may not be cool.

There’s a fascinating interview with her from 2016 as part of the extras on the BFI Flipside Blu-ray/DVD and, in addition to looking pretty much ageless, she’s very articulate and revealing about the film and her approach: “I was quite courageous as I knew absolutely nothing…” It barely shows and she still makes the film worth watching.

Gillian Hills now! Stories of hanging with Catherine and Francoise... and so much more!

The release has three versions of the film, one restored from the BFI 35mm we watched and two others of slightly longer length which include more exposition of the newly married couple and then Jenny’s initial confrontation with them in which she places a photograph of her mother in a book on blues and jazz. There are also different takes of the two strip actual strip routines.

The soundtrack LP is also essential and can be found on Cherry Red CD with extended cuts! Personally I really dig the original mono release but I'm just hep to vinyl's scratch and sniff.

“That’s the Beat Girl, feeding the coins into the juke box…long black stockings and no makeup… she makes like she’s not over concerned about this extravagant attention: keeps given’ me the look like I’m supposed to rate this chick high or somethin’…”

Gratuitous location spotting!!

Bar Italia is still there in Frith Street

Berwick Street Market

The Greyhound Pub is still on Old Compton Street: look for a copy of this shot in Last Night in Soho!

Gratuitous dancing shots:

Diane D'Orsay - Soho pro dancer

On the verge of fame:

Carol White later in Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow etc

Oliver Reed, later in everything...

The BFI Flipside Dual Format set you must buy:

Look at life. Peeping Tom (1960), BFI, Edgar Wright’s London After Dark

Michael Powell did live long enough to see the reputation of this artfully disturbing story rise like the reanimated but skewered remains of the far-too-likable-and-lovely-to-kill, Moira Shearer, Peeping Tom’s third murderee. He never saw Rotten Tomatoes which has the film ranked at 96% - 2% ahead of Avengers Endgame and level with Black Panther – but his art transcends their populist appeal and I'm pretty sure Stan Lee would agree. This is a film you can watch over and again, still finding new details, new meanings and cinematic resonance and I'm delighted that the BFI allowed us to view it on the big screen.

 

Tom, as Powell obsessives do not call it, was being screened as part of the new Edgar Wright curated season of London films and others that influenced his latest retro fun-pack Last Night In Soho, including Beat Girl, Sammy Lee and Primitive London. Peeping Tom shares those film’s fascination with the sleezy side of old Soho and even features Pamela Green who my Uncle Harry assures me was the sexual superpower of late 50s/early 60s Dad’s mags and “art films” such the saucy travelogue Naked as Nature Intended (1961) and who also made films for the deaf along with George Harrison Marks her partner and director. Pam plays Milly the model and adds authentic glamour in some outrageous flimsy lingerie and is thoroughly believable as the bored model waiting to be clicked at.

 

Carl Boehm: Mark is a camera

Retro porn is of course "perfectly harmless"… but Powell has a deeper point to make (literally, etc.) given that his tripod-wielding murderer, Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is obsessed with documenting fear in the most coldly calculating way after being brought up by a father (played, of course, by Michael Powell himself) who experimented on him and recorded the results on film and tape. There’s a comment here on the nature of filmmaking and also the obsessive-compulsive collation of experience in a manner that is now commonplace thanks to mobile phones and social media. We’re all of us “Peeping Toms” now, recording content every day and sharing it good or bad… are we reduced as the subject and is our capacity to just experience hindered by our urge to collect and collate?

 

Powell clearly had in mind the driving force of directors like Hitchcock and not excluding himself, who were drawn to the extremes of human behaviour not to mention the audience that enable their films through watching. Hitchcock made voyeurs of us all and his P.O.V. killer Psycho was released mere weeks after Tom… Powell was also worldly enough to not sensationalise but send up the burgeoning sex industry just as much as he does the film industry here.

 

Pamela Brown as Milly the Model

Powell’s casting of Carl Boehm is crucial to the film’s strangeness with the German actor not looking or sounding English but rather something alien much like the character in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Peter Stillman, whose father kept him in isolation as a child expecting him to emerge speaking the one true language. Mark has been thoroughly twisted by his upbringing and the film opens with his murder of a prostitute called Dora (Brenda Bruce) in Newman Passage, Fitzrovia, which he films before, during and after as the Police arrive to investigate. Dora’s face is shown as he thrusts the blade hidden in his camera tripod and it’s the most unpleasant of deaths even compared to the modern “slasher” films supposedly influenced by this film.

 

Mark has a side-line in taking dirty pictures – in the old vernacular – over a newsagents on the corner of Rathbone Street and Percy Street, Bloomsbury, which sells soft porn as well as under-the-counter “views” if the dirty raincoat brigade are brave enough to ask for them – there’s a lovely cameo from Miles Malleson as “Elderly gentleman customer”, one of a number of humorous episodes that lighten the film and offer you sweet before the sour.

 

The uneasy lensman oozing queasy need

He has a session there with Milly who introduces a new model, Lorraine (Susan Travers) who has a disfigured upper lip which immediately makes Mark very sweaty… he’s a creep, he’s a weirdo and I know exactly what the hell he’s doing there.

 

Powell is typically counter-intuitive, selecting the right players for his characters and Anna Massey is arguably more important that Boehm as Helen, who lodges on the ground floor of the house Mark has inherited. Massey’s a great technician – I once saw her imperious as Queen Elizabeth to Isabelle Huppert’s Mary in Schiller’s Mary Stuart at the National, darling - and she gets through a lot of the emotional narrative as the wholesome, determinedly faithful Helen who only sees the best in her painfully shy new friend. She’s the one who will be left to find Mark guilty but with extenuating circumstances, understanding the painful reality of his situation in ways the police, good as they are, won’t comprehend. Helen experiences the horror in the same way as the audience in a typical thriller, we know from the start that Mark is the killer but she must find his bloodied dark side through his innocence.

Anna Massey arrives bearing cake

Mark’s social interactions are painful to watch as he first meets Helen as she greets him on the stairs outside her 21^st birthday party, he’s the shyest of serial killers but she only sees his vulnerabilities and fascinated by his innocence and creativity wants to know more about the “documentary” he is working on. There’s a strong cameo from Maxine Audley as Helen’s mother, she is blind – therefore incapable of being another Peeping Tom – but hears more than other’s see and is always suspicious of the man she can hear moving around on the floor above in his dark room.

 

Mark’s main job is as a focus puller at a film studio and this is where the film adds some slapstick, at least initially…  Esmond Knight is Arthur Baden, a director of nervous disposition who is exasperated by his young star Diane Ashley (Shirley Anne Field - also in Beat Girl!) and her inability to faint just as he wants her, there’s take after take until she collapses from exhaustion and that’s the shot. Any relation to Director Alfred is probably accidental.

 

Vivian/Vicky/Victoria - Moira Shearer gets ready for her close up...

Diane’s double is Vivian played with cheerful ethereality by prima ballerina Moira Shearer, Vicky/Victoria in The Red Shoes and, here again, thank you Mr Powell, we do get to see her dance for a little while at least. This is one of several self-referential points in the film and to see a “character” from the Powell extended universe, an earlier more earnest one, throws the horrors of this film into sharper relief. Vicky dies for her art in her film whilst Vivian – all light and joy – is despatched as a meaningless bit player in Mark’s greater scheme, she even gets left on the cutting room floor as the death isn’t captured well enough to meet his vision. So, he goes in search of another victim…

 

The police are now involved, with Chief Insp. Gregg (Jack Watson) and Det. Sgt. Miller (Nigel Davenport) assigned to Vivian’s case, and the dots start to connect around Mark. It’s all as he planned though, part of a greater picture of which even he is a player to be sacrificed in the name of film.

There’s endless fun to be had with pulling out the hidden meaning Powell smuggles into the film, as always, and whilst the film has been described as “horror” it’s rather more than a thriller which is why it has outlasted the opinion of the contemporary critics. For me it’s far less obnoxious than Psycho and once you accept it as a kind of very high comedy the action leads to self-examination as much as revulsion with the director keeping the violence as much in our minds as on screen.

 

Very pleased to have seen this on screen so thankyou BFI as always and for this season of seedy Soho swinging… next up, Beat Girl and in 35mm!.

 

Miles Malleson asks for the latest issue of Sight and Sound...

Fierce creatures… Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

 
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down. What I want is a good time. All the rest is propaganda.”

From reading Allan Sillitoe’s book on my pre-English O Level reading list onwards, I have always regarded Arthur Seaton to be the angriest of the angry young men. Here, after all, is a not unintelligent individual, a superior technician in the factory in which he works and who has the good sense to ultimately form balanced opinions and yet… if not out of control, he’s certainly full of the agitated need to fully express himself as and when he wants.

He just wants more, better than his parents got and their generation who fought in the Second World War and better than his workmates as they relax into compromise and the easy routines from which they never escape.

But can Arthur break the chain and escape his own future or is he doomed to make the same mistakes as everyone else?

Collective bargaining?

Produced by Tony Richardson and directed by Karel Reisz, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning formed one of British cinema’s most convincing adaptations of an Angry Young Novel, even if the Nottingham accents affected by the stars was a little askew… filtered through the native tones of Finney’s Salford,  Field’s Bolton, Robert’s Llanelli, Baker’s Manchester and Rossington’s Liverpool. Still at least it weren’t Received Pronunciation, by ‘eck! and, at least they were genuine regional accents from genuinely working class people.

Albert Finney – just 24 at the time, makes an excellent Arthur, coiled like a tightly wrung towel wrapped round his auntie’s mangle and always ready to give better than he gets. He doesn’t want to be told anything by anybody and actively courts enmity as a substitute for predictability.

Saturday night...

He still lives at home with his mam and dad (a TV zombie even with black and white and only two channels…) to whom he dutifully pays his weekly food and lodgings before going out and blowing the remains of his weekly wage on beer, girls and clothes.

Arthur’s one of the better paid workers at his engineering factory: he could work faster but that would only get them to increase his targets. He lives for the weekends and those slices of happiness in between one of which is Brenda (Rachel Roberts) the wife of one of his co-workers, the compliant and easy going Jack (Bryan Pringle).

We see Arthur and Brenda in the pub of a Friday night, the former engaged in a drinking competition with one of the locals: Arthur wins, but only long enough to collapse down stairs... Binge culture? It was invented a long time ago.

Arthur share some more reflective moments with his cousin Bert (Norman Rossington) as the two continue their childhood fascination with fishing but it’s only “half-time” in Arthur’s mission to wind-up almost everyone around him from co-workers to local busy-bodies.

Arthur's enemies...

At times he seems amoral such as when he tries to help a drunk who has smashed the windows of a funeral parlour, make his escape as the locals hold him waiting for the police. It seems an act worthy of some legal retribution but Arthur’s firmly on the side of the minority and of confounding expectations : “whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not…” now, where have I heard that line recently?

But life’s about to get a whole lot more interesting all round…Arthur spots a beautiful lass called Doreen (Shirley Anne Field) and starts to court her, in spite of her mother’s resistance. She’s the real deal and as quick with a quip as Arthur is, she knows her own mind and isn’t intimidated by him.

But then Brenda reveals that she’s pregnant and there’s no way it’s Jack. Now we see the strength of Arthur’s mettle, he wants to do the right thing but this situation is too complicated for him. He enlists the aim of his favourite Auntie Ada – the force of nature that is Hylda Baker – but her “remedy” fails to work.

Things proceed with Doreen as Hylda gets desperate and then resolves to having the child, whatever the storm it’ll cause. Jack’s squaddie brother is in town with his mate, and the two of them exact bloody retribution on the wayward engineer: the rough justice he knows he’s had coming.

But life carries on… Arthur heals and is visited by a sympathetic Doreen to whom, surprisingly, he reveals the truth or most of it… for most of the film he’s been lying to most of the other characters and now he’s finding respect for Doreen.

He remains restless, worrying Bert as they fish, “I’ve never heard you like this…” but, whilst he can concede that Jack is soft but not that bad, he seems to have a more balanced view. He also knows his feelings for Doreen are more significant than anything he’s had to contend with.

The film finishes with the two discussing the future overlooking some smart new developments… it seems that marriage and lower middle class comforts await Mr Seaton, but he swears he hasn’t lost his spirit and we believe him… up to a point.

The power of this story and of this film is poorly served by my synopsis, Finney is a force of nature and his character is just as unsettling now as he was then: at least he wasn’t just purely selfish he knew what he was fighting for and against. His character is unpredictable, loutish and dishonest but through it all he has his own code of honour even if he reaches his limits with Brenda.

Rachel Roberts is every bit as good - her Brenda is besotted with Arthur but enough of a realist to know she can never have him. She played safe with Jack and he’ll not let her down.

Shirley Anne Field is sort of like a British Heddy Lamarr: sometimes it’s difficult to see her acting beyond her beauty. But the lass is from Bolton: she’s not as posh or as soft as she looks and she can act (consistently well and with range Heddy dear...). This was her breakthrough film even though she and Albert already had The Entertainer under their belts: “that was our screen test” she said in her interview before the recent BFI retrospective.

All contributed to make a landmark of British film that many feel stands the test of time better than some from this period. That it remains so powerfully resonant is down in no small part to this marvellous cast and their genuine touch of class.

I watched the BFI restoration which is available direct in a DVD/BluRay pack.  53 years old and still packing a punch: just be sure you don’t run into an Arthur Seaton next time you go down the pub.