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Boy and dove on barge yield to an invocation of Vidor's The Crowd, the typist dwarfed in a vast London office after hours. (A flash has her dangling over her desk and unnoticed by the cleaning crew, it might be a dream or it might be the last real moment before the dream.) At the train station she (Patricia Healey) gets accosted by a breathless, bowler-hatted admirer, "I'm definitely not class-conscious," It Happened One Night's singalong scores the ride North. "See your city," says a banner on the titular vehicle, she sits next to the Mayor (Arthur Lowe). "Do you mind not feeling my leg, please?" Prosaic observation streaked with dry surrealism, in other words Shelagh Delaney filmed by Lindsay Anderson. Factories, smokestacks, a land "deeply stained by the rust of industry." Pale green fields, abruptly adorned with recreations of Goya and Manet and Fragonard. A certain doleful Czech air courtesy of Miroslav Ondrícek, whose cinematography periodically switches from monochrome to give the molten orange of a roaring furnace or the red brick wall behind a Kendo match. School hall, cathedral, "combining great business acumen with real Christianity." Echoes in the library, a song by Brecht sung by Anthony Hopkins. His Worship has little use for books, "mere tracts condoning homosexual practice disguised as literature," he's last glimpsed as one of the If.... dummies. "Doesn't this thing work?" "No, sir." "Oh." The anticipation of Buñuel's Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie ends with fish and chips and loneliness. With Julie Perry, John Sharp, John Savident, Fanny Carby, Stephen Moore, and Barry Evans. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |