Great British Films (British)

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	British
Date:	02/05/01 (207 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some very good films

Disadvantages: Why doesn't Britain make good films now?

British cinema has always been blighted by a lack of resources. Usually financial resources: there aren't many British blockbusters because they cost too much to make. More recently there seems to be a worrying lack of imaginative resource too. It seems that Britain only churns out 4 types of film these days: terrible "Britcoms", terrible wannabe-trendy gangster or drug-related movies, terrible "we're unemployed but we're quirky and eccentric and heart-warmingly funny" movies and Merchant-Ivory-style picture-postcard adaptations of authors who'd be better off left alone.

How did this happen?

As my list of ten of my favourite British movies will hopefully show, Britain has been capable of producing imaginative and varied movies of quality. I'm not going to go too far into the past, either, as I found ten choices, all made since about 1968, that illustrate my point pretty well. (I'm not entirely sure that they all count as purely "British" movies, mind you - some of them may well have had American money behind them.)

Withnail & I
Almost feels unnecessary to say anything about this one as it's been reviewed extensively elsewhere. Hilarious, fantastic acting from all concerned (especially Richard Griffiths), very quotable, and surprisingly poignant. There's a lot more going on in this film than people tend to think. And the look of the thing is absolutely perfect, all the more surprising as it was director Bruce Robinson's first film (and his only good one so far).


Performance
Weird gangster movie from the late sixties. James Fox is the vicious gangster on the run from his angry colleagues (which must have seemed pretty relevant as the Krays and similar were presumably still around at the time). He ends up in the house of dissolute rock star Mick Jagger (who's very good here - makes you almost forget Freejack). Whereupon they play weird games with each
other, involving identity and sexuality and all that kind of stuff. What could end up being very pretentious isn't (or maybe is, but in a good way). Very violent in places, quite sexy too. Another first film by directors (Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell) who never did anything quite as good again.


The Long Good Friday
Puts Guy Ritchie to shame. Bob Hoskins is superb as the London gangster trying to turn part of the (pre-Thatcherised) London Docklands into a sports stadium. This film really reminds you what a great actor he can be when he isn't doing British Gas commercials. There's an especially good scene at the end of the film which focuses on his face as he tries to come to terms with what's just happened - more or less every emotion you can think of flits across his face at one point or another. Helen Mirren is also very good as his frustrated wife. Pierce Brosnan turns up as a member of the IRA.

Get Carter
Another example of gangster films being better in the old days. Michael Caine gives a good reminder of why he's one of the best film stars Britain has ever produced. He's a London gangster who has to travel up North to investigate his brother's death. As his attempts to gain revenge escalate, so does the level of violence in the film. As with The Long Good Friday, the violence is shocking, even today. It's rarely particularly visceral, but the casual way in which Caine will turn nasty and dole out punishment to his perceived enemies at the drop of a hat carries far more impact than something more gory would have done. The film is particularly amoral. The people Caine goes after (kind of) deserve it, but he's no angel himself, and the ending is not so much shocking as inevitable. The director later went on to make Flash Gordon, which is fantastic, but for rather different reasons.

Secrets & Lies
Mike Leigh's films are always worth watching. I'm not usually a big fan of realis
m, which I don't really see as a necessary feature of cinema (or any other art form), but Leigh manages to pull it off here and elsewhere. The story is one of a dysfunctional family and a young woman deciding to track down her natural mother. The cast, led by Timothy Spall and Brenda Blethyn, are excellent as they always are in Mike Leigh films, but the reason I rate this above Naked is because it has quite a happy ending. It's heart-warming without losing its intelligence or descending to crass sentimentalism.


The Cook The Thief His Wife And Her Lover
I like Peter Greenaway's films. I know he's really pretentious, but I still like the images he presents on screen. This films stands out over Propero's Books or The Draughtsman's Contract because of the performance of Michael Gambon as the revolting thief (think Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet but with a London accent). Aside from that it's the usual parade of sumptuous colours, allusions to art, and nudity. If you like it you like it, if you don't you don't. I haven't enjoyed any of Greenaway's films since he stopped collaborating with composer Michael Nyman, which either goes to show that Greenaway isn't as good as he thinks he is, or that film composers don't receive nearly enough credit for their contributions.


Witchfinder General
Britain used to make great horror films. Hammer are still, I believe, cited as the most successful British film company of all time. This isn't a Hammer film, it was made by American International Pictures. I'm still going to count it as a British film, though, as it has a British director and (apart from Vincent Price) cast. Hammer films, which dominated the horror scene in Britain, tended to make films with a rather old fashioned view of morality. The moral standpoint of the films was basically the same as that of the Universal horror movies of the Thrities, just with more gore and cleavage. Go
od always beats evil. They also have the disadvantage of being neither scary or horrifying. There are a few British horror films of the era that try to do something a bit different, and this is both the most famous and the best. It's the story of a cynical witch-hunter, Vincent Price, in civil war England who goes from village to village accusing women of withcraft for his own financial gain and his assistant's perverted pleasure. His ability to corrupt everything he touches is well-illustrated by the virtuous young soldier hero, who has effectively brought himself down to Price's level by the end of the film. Price gives his finest ever performance, for once playing it completely straight, and the film is beautifuly shot, which adds to the disturbing quality immensely.

The Wicker Man
This is a tremendous film. On the one hand it's a very intelligent take on the horror film which manages to be genuinely macabre and unsettling at times. On the other hand it's an insane romp full of nudity and folk singing. Something for everyone, then. Edward Woodward is the uptight Scottish policeman sent to investigate a missing child case in a remote island, only to find that things aren't quite as they seem. Oh, and it has Christopher Lee in drag. Classic.

Richard III (1996)
There are two ways of filming Shakespeare. The first is to stay faithful to the text, have all the actors wearing period costumes, and try to basically do a theatrical version of the play onscreen. This often works quite well, as some of Kenneth Branagh's films show. However, I greatly prefer the other way, where the plays are updated, liberties are taken with the verse, and the whole thing is spruced up a bit. Not that I have any problem with traditional Shakespeare, it's just that I feel that films like Romeo & Juliet or Titus make more interesting use of the fact that these are film versions. And my favourite example of this is Ian McKellan and Ric
hard Loncraine's version of Richard III. Based on a stage version that starred McKellan, the film sets the play in the Thirties. Queen Elizabeth is presented as a kind of Wallis Simpson character, having got her claws into the dying King Edward, the battles are fought with tanks and planes, and Richard is a Hitler-style fascist leader. It's a very entertaining version of the play, and McKellan is both funny and sinister, as all decent Richard IIIs need to be.

Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde
Purely perverse choice, this one, as it possesses absolutely no merit whatsoever. I'm a big horror film fan, and had to restrain myself to keep it down to 3 out of a list of ten. This is a late Hammer horror, after their heyday was past. They weren't as popular as they used to be, and so started turning to predictable gimmicks (lesbian vampires, usually). However, in this film they really went crazy. When Dr Jekyll drinks his potion in this version, he turns into a foxy chick. She then becomes Jack the Ripper. Burke and Hare show up, too, despite having lived in Edinburgh almost 100 years before Jack the Ripper. In the face of such idiocy, you have to love the film. Well, I suppose you don't really. I do, though.

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