Directors

Mike Leigh, Bill Forsyth, Terrance Davis

A clifftop Ferrari crash, an affair and a mental unravelling – the bizarre troubles that plagued Ryan’s Daughter

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

Sarah Miles says that after a few months, Ryan’s Daughter started to become a “way of life”. And the lines between reality and fantasy weren’t just blurring for this free-spirited young actress: the village on the hill outside Dingle which David Lean had built out of solid stone had a pub serving proper beer and a real peat fire. Visiting entertainment writers flown over first-class from Los Angeles and New York by MGM passed horse-drawn milk-carts on the road from Shannon, and wondered, although this was then 1969, whether Ireland had moved on from the First World War period in which Ryan’s Daughter was set.

The sense of blurred lines in what quickly became a cloistered film community in and around Dingle quickly gave rise to one of the more titillating pieces of gossip, as Miles, then 27, seemed irresistibly drawn towards co-star Robert Mitchum, who turned 52 that summer. In the film, Rosy Ryan, played by Miles, is prepared to cheat on her husband, played by Mitchum, in order to take up with Christopher Jones’s British army officer. Jones was then considered to be the new James Dean, but it became clear on set that Miles only had eyes only for Mitchum. She was attracted to his “bear-like proximity”, and eventually admitted to having an affair with him, but only years after Ryan’s Daughter, when she and her husband had split. Continue reading →

Gregory’s Girl: the sweet teenage love story set in Scottish new town turns 40

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

The sweet coming of age film, written and directed by Bill Forsyth and set in the new town of Cumbernauld, was released four decades ago on April 23, 1981.

Then, it felt like a story of our times and gave Scottish life a lighter, more modern feel. A dreamy synth soundtrack unfolded over scenes of fresh housing, concrete walkways and wide open spaces shaped by the promise of a new way of new town living.

The sun always seemed to be shining – or setting – on this place where pretty girls in cool clothes played football and did science experiments at a gargantuan comprehensive, the real-life Abronhill High. Boys were gangly geeks, children were more grown up than the teachers and little sisters were the boss.

Dee Hepburn as Dorothy and John Gordon Sinclair as Gregory in the 1981 classic movie, Gregory's Girl. It was released 40 years ago today. PIC: Contributed.
Dee Hepburn as Dorothy and John Gordon Sinclair as Gregory in the 1981 classic movie, Gregory’s Girl. It was released 40 years ago today. PIC: Contributed.

For those who saw the film as a kid in the early 80s – possibly on one of the first VHS tapes to come into the house – it seemed to mark a moment. Forty years on, the same still seems true.

Dr Jonny Murray, Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art, said: “For many people from a certain generation there is an undying affection for Gregory’s Girl mainly because, for many of us, it was everyday Scottish life as we recognised it put on a cinema screen.

John Gordon Sinclair as Gregory, the gangly schoolboy who got his girl in the end. PIC: Contributed.
John Gordon Sinclair as Gregory, the gangly schoolboy who got his girl in the end. PIC: Contributed.

“You have the pleasure of watching the film and being able to recognise this incredibly imaginative and humorous depiction of how we lived our lives.”

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Gregory’s Girl: the little British film that charmed the world

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

It’s 40 years since the Scottish romcom, starring a cast of unknowns, became a surprise hit – and paved the way for talents like Danny Boyle

By Tim Robey

“The British are coming!”. With these infamous words at the 1982 Oscars, Colin Welland collected his trophy for the Chariots of Fire screenplay. Perhaps surprisingly, though, he lost the Bafta that year to a proudly Scottish success story.

That film was Gregory’s Girl, the tale of a shy, lanky schoolboy (John Gordon Sinclair) and his hapless attempts to woo the girl (Dee Hepburn) who has taken his place on the football team. This unassuming romantic comedy, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this month, is a classic example of a low-key production which could have disappeared, but won such enthusiastic word-of-mouth acclaim that it ended up becoming a far bigger hit than its Glaswegian director, 34-year-old Bill Forsyth, ever dreamed of.

Cast largely with unknown 18-year-olds plucked from Glasgow’s Youth Theatre, it was shot in 35mm over the summer of 1980 in Cumbernauld, the 1950s New Town best-known as an administrative base for the Inland Revenue. From a budget of £200,000, Gregory’s Girl would end up grossing £25.8 million around the world (not that far off the worldwide take for The Shining the previous year), and played in some London cinemas for an astounding 75 weeks.

In fact, Forsyth had intended it as an even smaller, 16mm venture when he first wrote it in 1977. But when another of his films, a larky teen heist movie called That Sinking Feeling, was a hit at the Glasgow Film Festival, he was able to put together Gregory’s Girl on a fuller scale.

John Gordon Sinclair, an apprentice electrician, had appeared in That Sinking Feeling, but was amazed to be offered the all-important role of Gregory, especially opposite Dee Hepburn, a charismatic blonde bombshell and pin-up-in-waiting who already had some acting experience on television.

“Everyone was a bit in awe of Dee,” Sinclair has admitted. Forsyth, who had noticed Hepburn in an advert, arranged for the actress to have six weeks of intensive football training at Partick Thistle FC, so that her character, Dorothy, could believably come bounding onto the pitch and leave Gregory’s dreams of being the star striker in tatters.

Ironically, despite the attention she gained here, Hepburn’s later acting career was the shortest-lived of the three main players. As well as establishing Sinclair as a familiar face on film and TV, the film launched the career of Clare Grogan, who plays Susan, the other lass waiting on the sidelines while Gregory’s infatuation with Dorothy sputters out. Susan, as anyone who has seen the film knows, is the real Gregory’s Girl.

Clare Grogan
Clare Grogan

Perhaps the freshest conceit of Forsyth’s script is that all this basically happens over the course of a single day, as Gregory dons a borrowed jacket in a nervy state to meet Dorothy, but gets stood up, and winds up having an impromptu date with Susan instead. As the afternoon fades, they find themselves lying on the grass, swapping favourite numbers, and arm-dancing at the base of a tree. It feels very true to the whimsical, slightly makeshift quality of teenage dalliances and the pains of growing up.

“I think it worked because it didn’t patronise anyone; there was a level of honesty that you don’t normally get in teen films,” Forsyth has said.

Grogan, now 59, was a part-time waitress at the Spaghetti Factory in Glasgow, when the director spotted her, mentioned he was casting a new film, and asked for her number. “My mum had warned me about strange men, so I said no! But then he contacted my manageress, who convinced me I should think about it,” she says.

She would go on to have a rambunctious performing career, not only as a stage and screen actress, but as the lead singer of the 1980s new wave band Altered Images, who got signed by CBS Records while the film was in production. Her role in Gregory’s Girl is smaller than the other two leads, but she’s the ace up its sleeve, because of Susan’s wise-beyond-her-years demeanour and her magical chemistry with Sinclair, with whom she has remained close friends over the years.

Her Louise Brooks-esque bob was a convenient way to conceal a recent facial wound, but also – like her beret – sprang fully formed from Grogan’s own precocious aesthetic. Essentially functioning as her own costume designer, she created an iconic look.

“I was really quite fond of silent movie stars,” she tells me. “I mean, I had delusions of grandeur beyond belief, even at that age! So I was quite into the style.

“I didn’t realise what an incredibly privileged position I’d ended up in until afterwards, when the reality of having a career in this business suddenly hits you. When you’re that age, and you think, ‘When I leave school, I’d like to be a film star and a pop star’? That’s what happened. And I will never understand that.”

Despite her self-confident style, Grogan, for many years, was unable to watch herself in the film and, in fact, only watched the full thing in 2015, when the BFI included Gregory’s Girl in a special Love season. She saw it with her then-ten-year-old daughter Ellie, realising that opportunities to catch it on a big screen might not come along too often again, with a child who was “just old enough to get it.”

Idyllic though Cumbernauld looks in Gregory’s Girl, 1980 was actually the worst summer in the area since 1907, and the colour of the football pitch kept changing in the rain. Nevertheless, the cast have fond memories of filming.

“Shooting never felt like work,” Sinclair told a journalist in 2015. “You knew you were getting it right because you’d see Bill’s shoulders shaking with laughter behind the camera. I had to ask him to move out of my eyeline, because it would get quite distracting.”

Grogan says she remembers a lot of it “really clearly.” “I particularly remember the part with me sitting on a bollard whistling, waiting for John Gordon to arrive. Bill had been determined that I had to be a whistler. And of course I couldn’t whistle. I was a seriously crap whistler! So I had to practice considerably.”

As for lying on the grass, trading pet integers with her co-star as they waved their hands in the air, “that very much came from Bill. I’ve been asked to do that in many places, by many different people, to recreate that moment. Including on the Tube.”

It was thanks to Gregory’s Girl’s success that a number of Scottish financing bodies sprang up in the 1980s, paving the way for the first features of Danny Boyle and Lynne Ramsay, among others. The film, as Grogan once learned, is a firm favourite of Martin Scorsese, and the influence of its quirky humanism on the likes of Wes Anderson and Shane Meadows is obvious.

Forsyth would become a critical darling with the likes of Local Hero (1983), Comfort and Joy (1984) and the sublime Housekeeping (1987), but would never again reach these heights at the box office.

With its mischievous first scene of Gregory and pals ogling an undressing girl through her bedroom window, the film’s formula is that it starts out as the Scottish, small-town equivalent of a Porky’s-esque adolescent sex comedy, and then, with an ever more tender trajectory, gets real.

Source: Gregory’s Girl: the little British film that charmed the world

Michael Apted’s Flawed but Brilliant Epic of British Social Life

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

The Up series was meant to investigate inequities of British class. It also ended up telling a different story as well.

By Susan Pederson | November 2020

Michael Apted’s great Up series, about a cohort of English children, wasn’t conceived as a series at all. In 1963, fresh out of Cambridge and as a trainee at Granada TV, Apted was asked to find a group of talkative 7-year-olds for a 40-minute special about the children who would be Britain’s barristers and businessmen, factory workers and housewives, at the century’s turn. Directed by Paul Almond and screened in 1964, Seven Up! was to have been a one-off. But when someone at Granada suggested revisiting the children at 14 and again at 21, Apted jumped at the offer to direct. Even after his career took off and he moved to Hollywood, he made time to make a new installment every seven years.

With the release of 63 Up last year, the series spans nine films and six decades. It is Apted’s most important work and one of the most revelatory documentaries about social change ever made. It has attracted imitations, scholarly articles and comment, and hordes of passionate fans—though perhaps this is the case as much in spite of as because of Apted’s direction.

From the outset, he imagined the project as an indictment of class inequality. He wanted to make, as he put it, “a nasty piece of work about these kids who have it all, and these other kids who have nothing.” Drawn to children (mainly boys) at the sharp ends of the class divide, he recruited five of the 14 children from elite private schools and six from London’s working-class primary schools and care homes but only two from a middle-class Liverpool suburb and one from rural Yorkshire. In their interviews in Seven Up! these 7-year-olds unselfconsciously performed the hierarchies of class—theater all the more devastating for its actors’ innocence. Who can forget the now-canonical clip of Andrew Brackfield, Charles Furneaux, and John Brisby (the “three posh boys”) obligingly recounting their reading material (“I read the Financial Times”), their plans (“We think I’m going to Cambridge”), and their view that the public (that is, private) schools were a very good thing indeed, since otherwise, their schools would be “so nasty and crowded”?

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