Tag: working class

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Features Live Action Movies

Get Carter
(1971)

Director – Mike Hodges – 1971 – UK – Cert. 18 – 111m

*****

A London gangster takes the train to Newcastle to find out who killed his brother… and why… in a defining film for both Michael Caine and British cinema – back out in cinemas on Friday, May 27th

Fifty years old, Hodges’ first feature has aged well in the main. Viewed today, this gangster film has a lot going for it. It reduces London to seedy, windowless rooms where men watch pornographic slide shows or their unfaithful wives service their lovers’ sexual fantasies over long distance phone calls. After the opening London to Newcastle train journey to the strains of Roy Budd’s memorable score, It quickly settles into its Newcastle milieu of pub interiors, terraced houses, rented rooms, back to back streets, pedestrians, cars, harbours and ferries. It has a memorable finale in which one man pursues another across a beach to a coal heap.

There’s a background about prostitution which turns out to be highly significant to the plot, with histories of men luring girls into pornographic movies. Few of the women (Britt Ekland, Rosemary Dunham, Petra Markham) seem happy – they are sex objects to service the men, or prostitutes, or victims of male trickery.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Duke

Director – Roger Michell – 2020 – UK – Cert. 12a – 96m

**1/2

A man steals Goya’s painting of The Duke Of Wellingon from the National Gallery in 1961… Based on a true story – out to rent on PVoD on Monday, April 11th

1960s Newcastle. Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent) wages a one-man war against pensioners paying the licence fee. He removes the BBC coil so that the set will only play ITV. His wife Dorothy (Helen Mirren), a cleaner for the wife of a local councillor, just wants him to behave like every else and try and fit in. Seeing the nation pay £140 000 to stop Goya’s painting of The Duke Of Wellington being sold abroad, he can only think of how much better the money could be spent – how many pensioners’ TV licences it could cover, for example.

Thus, he takes a trip to London to deliver an unsolicited manuscript of a play to the BBC, then lobby both Parliament and the press (The Daily Express) about free licences. All of which endeavours meet with failure. However, a plan to steal The Duke from the National Gallery works and the painting is soon in his back bedroom, where son Jack (Fionn Whitehead from Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, 2017) bills a false wall in the wardrobe to help him hide it. … Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Belfast

Director – Kenneth Branagh – 2021 – UK – Cert. 12a – 98m

*****

1969, Belfast, Northern Ireland. The life of a young boy and his family is impacted by The Troubles as Christian sectarianism explodes into violence on their street – out in cinemas on Friday, January 21st

Bookended by colour images of contemporary Belfast, Northern Ireland, this swiftly traverses a colour montage to pan up a wall to the black and white photographed 1969 beyond. The closing moments also feature the genuinely touching legend, “For the ones who stayed, For the ones who left, And for the ones who were lost.”

Elsewhere, apart from family trips to the cinema to see the likes of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Ken Hughes, 1968), where the clips from the movie and light reflected from it onto the black and white audience are in colour, everything else (including other aspects of the family cinema-going experience) is entirely in black and white.

The first ten minutes are a particularly tough watch, as images of kids playing footy, hopscotch or knights in armour (wooden swords and dustbin lids) in the streets give way to nine-year-old Buddy (ten-year-old Jude Hill) returning home to find men with clubs breaking windows on his street, hurling Molotov cocktails and shouting, “get these fockers off your street.”… Read the rest