film

Nuclear apocalypse film “Threads” was ‘the most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’

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Ahead of a timely re-airing of Mick Jackson’s famously bleak docudrama, its director recalls why he unleashed a mushroom cloud on Sheffield in 1984

ne Sunday night in September 1984, between championship darts and the news with Jan Leeming, the BBC broadcast one of its bravest, most devastating commissions. This was Threads, a two-hour documentary-style drama exploring a hypothetical event deeply feared at the time and also somehow unthinkable: what would happen if a nuclear bomb dropped on a British city.

Made by British director Mick Jackson with Kes author Barry Hines, and set in Sheffield, it begins with a young couple, working-class Jimmy and middle-class Ruth, dealing with her unexpected pregnancy in familiar kitchen-sink drama surroundings. International tensions build slowly in the background as the minutes tick by, bursting in through newspaper headlines, radio and TV news, and the ominous words of narrator Paul Vaughan, known then as a presenter of BBC science series Horizon.

Then come CND protests; council officers being summoned to an emergency bunker; and animated films on TV instructing people how to survive. Forty-seven minutes in, a nuclear bomb drops. The film ends more than a decade later with Jimmy and Ruth’s baby, Jane, now an adolescent, giving birth in a world devastated by nuclear winter.

Bringing horror into the homes, shops and streets of a very ordinary world, Threads is a brilliant, terrifying film, and for anyone who has seen it (I watched it in 1999 on a dusty VHS), its effects will have been long-lasting. To mark the film’s 40th anniversary, I have examined its creation and legacy for a forthcoming radio documentary, Archive on 4: Reweaving Threads, 40 Years On, digging into the BBC vaults to show how the film has influenced writers, politicians and fans (including Jim Jupp of the brilliant Ghost Box record label, who has created an exclusive soundtrack for the programme).

The BBC has shown Threads only three times to date: in 1984; in August of the following year, to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and as part of a cold war special on BBC Four in 2003. Another – timely – showing is planned for October. When I watched the film at the end of the 20th century, Threads felt like a piece of history. Today, in a world of conflict in Russia, China and the Middle East, and expanding nuclear capabilities, it no longer does.

In a light-dazzled sunroom in Santa Monica, California, Mick Jackson, director of LA Story and The Bodyguard, is remembering the film of which he’s most proud. “You know that on the Internet Movie Database, at the end of each entry for a film, there’s a space for people to write their own comments? I’ve checked that page for Threads practically every year. It varies with the state of tension in the world, but regularly there are [new] entries there saying: ‘I saw this as a kid sitting around the door when I was supposed to be in bed’, or ‘I came to this because people had talked about it and it’s the most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’.” The latest reviewer, jotchy-14285, posted in June, saying: “Just watch it people, judge for yourselves and hope that the ones with their fingers on the buttons have seen it as well…”

A science documentary-maker in his early career, Jackson joined the BBC in 1966, soon after the corporation decided to ban another film it had commissioned about the effects of a nuclear bomb: Peter Watkins’s The War Game. Blending documentary, newsy vox pops and a cast of amateur actors and extras, it was dropped from the schedules following advice from the Home Office, but later won the 1967 best documentary Oscar after a cinema release. “So I entered a corporation where everybody felt a great deal of shame, that the BBC has somehow betrayed them,” Jackson says.

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Review: “Georgy Girl” Is No Feminist Statement

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By Mark Fraser

Viewed with a proverbial pinch of salt, Silvio Narizzano’s Georgy Girl (1966) is what UK-based media commentator Leanne Weston aptly calls “a comedy of manners turned social critique set amidst the backdrop of ‘Swinging London’”.

It is also, Weston adds in her 2018 essay on the film, “about a world and a girl in transition”, in which the titular character Georgina “Georgy” Parkin (Lynn Redgrave) is portrayed at different times as either “an object of inspiration, affection or ridicule”.

More to the point, though, she is also seen as an object of desire, and it’s this treatment of the protagonist that gives the film’s narrative a sinister undertone as it pretends – in line with The Seekers’ song on which it is partly based – to be a tale about liberation and individualism when in fact, behind its genial facade, it is really one concerning incarceration and servitude.

Or, to put it another way, there’s quite a bit of unpleasant subtext at work in this movie.

Sure – the awkwardly individualistic Georgy has undergone something of a transformation by the end of the film as she achieves what appears to be a form of compromised marital bliss.

But how she gets there does, at times, touch upon the highly dubious.

During the first third of the story, for instance, Georgy’s father’s rich employer James Leamington (James Mason) – a childless businessman who insists he always looked upon her as a daughter while she was growing up in his house – suggests they enter a written contract whereby she becomes his mistress (this while his wife Ellen, played by Rachel Kempson, is dying). Oddly, despite balking at this generous offer to effectively be his whore, by the movie’s conclusion she has ended up marrying the man – an act which allows her, in the words of The Seekers at least, to become “a new Georgy girl”.

Meanwhile, Georgy’s in-residence butler dad Ted (Bill Owen) more or less pimps her off to his boss (admittedly this is only suggested in a brief exchange of dialogue; nevertheless the implication is there), reaffirming his and his wife Doris’ (Clare Kelly) fear that their lone offspring is an awkward loser whose only real hope in life is to attach herself to some well-to-do gent.

And, before she eventually ties the knot with Leamington, the hitherto virginal heroine has an affair with Jos Jones (Alan Bates), who has just married her roommate/best friend Meredith (Charlotte Rampling) after the latter becomes pregnant.

To complicate matters, following the baby’s arrival a bitterly post-natal Meredith – who has already aborted previous pregnancies with Jones – decides she will adopt the infant out, at which point Georgy steps in as the surrogate mother. In effect this not only allows her to strengthen her connection with the soon-to-be divorced father, but also forces her to lie to the UK Government’s social services agency in order to keep her “daughter” Sara (actor unknown).

But when her happy-go-lucky lover irresponsibly throws caution to the wind by quitting his stifling job at the bank, Georgy has to reassess everything and, it’s at this point, she decides the lecherous old Leamington (who’s actually only 49) is the better option. Unfortunately, this development looks like it too may eventually be fraught with difficulty when – just as the newly-weds are being driven away from the church ceremony – her husband’s face seriously drops as it dawns on him that he hasn’t just secured a new (and much younger) squeeze who he has known since she was a baby, but will now have to compete with someone else’s child for his bride’s affections.

Thus, how their life of marital bliss will pan out becomes one of the story’s big unknowns as it’s here that the end credits roll. If anything, it is likely much of the above-mentioned unsavouriness dogging Georgy’s existence will continue as she embarks on what is in no way a certain future.

Mixed message

Georgy Girl

While this might sound like a grimly sanctimonious interpretation of a movie which, in many ways, tries to pass itself off as a melodramatic comedy, the conclusion is still inescapable – the ugly duckling heroine may have become something of a swan, but she ultimately looks set to remain stranded in the same stagnant pond. Or, to put it bluntly (and contrary to what the plot might otherwise be suggesting), it’s highly unlikely there will ever be a completely satisfactory existence for this woman.

In her above-mentioned essay on the film, which is included in the promotional material accompanying Powerhouse Films Ltd’s Blu-ray release of Georgy Girl, Weston acknowledges it does not treat its leading character “with warmth or hold her in such high regard” as audiences of the day did. Rather, “she is side-lined in her own story”; an interesting observation given Redgrave, in real life (and, one might add, quite unfairly) received third billing behind Mason and Bates.

“From today’s vantage point, Georgy just seems like an ordinary girl: vivacious, flawed, yet lovable – someone we could be friends with,” the critic says. “And that’s what makes the film so interesting.”

Perhaps. However, it’s also arguable that much of the movie’s intrigue stems from the fact its outlook is decidedly brutal. No one in the film, for instance, seems to have a particularly strong moral compass. Furthermore, at the end of its cinematic day, Swinging London is portrayed as a dead end; a place where wanton hedonism may be commonplace, but the privileged class still gets what it wants so long as it’s willing to pay the price. Thus, as a commentary about what was then the emerging youth culture’s attempt to distance itself from a stuffier (read older) generation, Georgy Girl actually turns out to be quite pessimistic.

This begs the question: is this what the film makers – particularly screenwriters Margaret Forster (who wrote the novel on which the movie is based) and Peter Nichols – set out to do?

Possibly, but it is quite difficult to ascertain as the quirky and upbeat feel of the whole narrative doesn’t seem to have an overtly ironic (or tragic) bone in its bubbly celluloid body.

Interestingly, Redgrave more or less agreed that the film’s portrayal of her character was not exactly positive when being interviewed by journalist Howard Maxford back in 1996.

“George (sic) is quite ruthless really,” she said. “So it is an immoral story, but George was such a survivor that people identified with her.”

Survival, though, comes at a cost – something, it seems, which may have been lost on progressive audiences of the day. As for contemporary viewers who embrace the values of the Me Too movement, they no doubt will find very few redeeming values in this ultimately sexist tale.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Leanne Weston: “Good Girl, Bad Luck: Morality and Performance in Georgy Girl”, Powerhouse Films Ltd promotional booklet, 2018, pp 5-13

Howard Maxford: “Making Georgy Girl”, Powerhouse Films Ltd promotional booklet, 2018, p 28

Source: Review: “Georgy Girl” Is No Feminist Statement

Why people talked funny in old movies

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This speech pattern isn’t completely British or completely American.

By Todd Perry

There’s a distinct accent that American actors and broadcasters used in the early days of radio and in pre-World War II movies.It’s most obvious in old newsreel footage where the announcer speaks in a high-pitched tone, omits his “Rs” at the end of words, and sounds like a New Yorker who just returned from a summer holiday with the British royal family. This speaking style is also heard in the speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt and just about any performance by Orson Welles.

But today, this accent is all but nonexistent, prompting the question: Did Americans speak differently before the advent of television?

The video below, “Why Do People in Old Movies Talk Weird?,” reveals the secret of this distinct inflection known as the Mid-Atlantic accent and why it was so prominent in early 20th-century American media.

 

Source: Cool video reveals why people talked funny in old movies – Good

Kind Hearts and Coronets: Ealing’s Shadow Side

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Alec Guinness
Alec Guinness

Robert Hamer’s witty, ironic tale of calculating serial killer breaks the beloved mold of the Ealing comedy.

By Phillip Kent | 2006

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) is an Ealing comedy in name only. True, it’s undeniably a comedy and was made by (though largely not at) Ealing. But in virtually every other respect, it deviates startlingly from the commonly accepted stereotype. Ealing comedies, it’s widely agreed, are cozy, even complacent; Kind Hearts and Coronets is callous and amoral. The humor of Ealing comedy is essentially good-natured and folksy; Kind Hearts and Coronets is cool, ironic, and witty. Sex in Ealing comedies is mostly avoided or, if inevitable, treated with embarrassed jocularity; several scenes in Kind Hearts and Coronets carry a potent erotic charge. In Ealing comedies, the criminals—even the lovable ones, like Alec Guinness in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)—eventually pay for their crimes; the hero of Kind Hearts and Coronets is a calculating serial killer who, in the final reel, stands a good chance of getting away scot-free.

None of which is so surprising, given that Kind Hearts and Coronets was created by the maverick Robert Hamer, of all Ealing directors the one who found it hardest to conform to the studio’s upbeat, wholesome ethos. And unlike Alexander Mackendrick, Ealing’s other great maverick director, Hamer never had the patience—or the cunning—to slip his subversive notions into his work under the guise of innocuous comedy. Hamer openly fought for his ideas and, in the cautious atmosphere of post–World War II British cinema, usually lost.

The prevailing mode of filmmaking at Ealing—still, half a century after its demise, the most famous of all British film studios—was largely the creation of production head Michael Balcon, who ran it as a benevolent autocracy. The son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Balcon was fervently patriotic, left-liberal in politics, and prudish in sexual matters. When, in 1955, Ealing was sold to the BBC, Balcon had a plaque placed on the studio wall that read: “Here, during a quarter of a century, many films were made projecting Britain and the British character.” What he most likely had in mind was Ealing’s bent for realism, much influenced by the number of senior Ealing personnel—Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Charles Crichton, indeed Hamer himself—who had joined the studio from the British documentary movement. But more than that, the kind of film that Balcon always preferred, and that he held to be typically British, was essentially conciliatory, with a plot that moved toward final-reel consensus, for the good of the community—an outcome reflected in such mainstream Ealing movies as the drama The Blue Lamp (1949) and the comedy Passport to Pimlico (1949).

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