Not a single film by one of the great directors and director/writer teams of all time – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Powell, in his 70’s and 80’s was ‘adopted’ by the Hollywood ‘Brat Pack’ [Scorsese, Spielburg, Coppolla] as their muse. Coppolla installed him in Zoetrope Studios as ‘Honorary Director in Residence’ or somesuch title, just to be around and be inspiring.
Superior, in my opinion, to all the films in this list are Powell/Powell & Pressburger:
‘Black Narcissus’. ‘The Small Back Room’. ‘The Red Shoes’. ‘The Canterbury Tales’.’ One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing’. ‘I Know Where I’m Going’. … and others.
It was a tragic loss to cinema, particularly British cinema, when ‘Peeping Tom’, a solo effort by Powell, was released. It created such a furore that it even had MPs on their feet in the HoC complaining about it.
It was a film made 15 years too early. Nobody was ready for it. Now, it is regarded as a classic but it completely ruined Powell’s career. He never worked as director on a movie again. It’s a difficult watch …
Fortunately, seasons and festivals of Powell/Pressburger films were and continue to be shown on TV and cinemas all over the world. As film maker he was finished but financially he survived.
If you venture to watch “Peeping Tom” you will see what was the forerunner of the “slasher” movie combined with psychological intensity far in excess of anything by Hitchcock. Not till Nick Roeg made “Don’t Look Now” was there anything like it.
Nick Roeg – nothing of his. Another supreme British film maker. After shooting films such as “Fahrenheit 451” for Truffault and “Far From The Madding Crowd” for Schlesinger, as DoP, he made “Performance”, a stunning film about identity, laced with sex, drugs and rock’n roll – Mick Jagger and James Fox, with Anita Pallenbur, and a fantastic rock sound track.
World class films followed. ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ [David Bowie] ‘Don’t Look Now’ [Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie] ‘Walkabou’t [Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil]. ‘Bad Timing’ [Art Garfunkel]
John Schlesinger – nothing? ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’ [Peter Finch, Terence Stamp, Julie Christie] ‘Billy Liar’ [Tom Courtney, Julie Christie] ‘Darling’ [Laurence Olivier, Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde]
Schlesinger went to Hollywood and made ‘Midnight Cowboy’, ‘Marathon Man’,’ Day Of The Locust’. Maybe they, along with all Ridley Scott’s movies, don’t count as British.
Absent above is one of the greatest movies of all time, ‘The Third Man’ made by British director Carol Reed.
Roman Polanski made three films in Britain, two of which, both BAFTA nominations, ‘Cul-De-Sac’ and ‘Repulsion’, are psycho-horrors. I saw both these on a late night double bill. Not a sensible thing to do the third. ‘Dance of The Vampires’ however, is an hilarious spoof on the vampire film. Great fun.
Lindsay Anderson, director of ‘If’ also made ‘This Sporting Life’, with a wonderful performance by Richard Harris.
I think Stephen Frears’ ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ should be listed.
Ken Loach represents the difficult-to-inhabit side of cimema, being a committed left-winger. But ‘Kes’ and ‘Land and Freedom’ are as good as cinema gets, as far as projects on a modest scale go.
Tony Richardson made two excellent films that deserve to be in this list. ‘The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner’ is a gritty them-and-us social commentary [Tom Courtney, James Fox, Michael Redgrave] and the rollicking ‘Tom Jones’ [Albert Finney] includes one of the sexiest eating scenes in the movies.
I’ll finish with David Lean. Before going on to make monster epics like ‘Dr Zhivago’, ‘Laurence of Arabia’ and ‘Passage to India’, he made what many would consider the quintessential British repressed-love story, ‘A Brief Encounter’ [Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard].
I am a lapsed movie buff. Starting when I was 4 y.o in Singapore, when we lived across the road from the largest cinema in S.E Asia. Whatever was on, me and my mum and dad went and then had steak and chips at The Stamford Steak House afterwards.
There were movie nights at The SIngapore Swimming Club, where I worked out for myself why the Malays watched the films from the back of the screen by climbing into the trees outside the walls – because they were brown.
There was a period when I went to 5-6 late-night double-bills per week, in the days when The Electric Cinema Club, Portobello Rd. W11 was in it’s ’67’s/’70’s flea-pit era.
I have to admit I haven’t been to a cinema for many years. I loathe the ambience – the foyers with popcorn trodden into black carpet, the smell of hot dogs … I buy discs now.