The White Bus – 1967 | 41 mins | Drama | B&W Colour

Plot Synopsis

The White Bus was originally commissioned by producer Oscar Lewenstein to be part of a feature called Red, White and Zero, comprising of three short films based on Shelagh Delaney stories and directed by ‘Free Cinema’ icons Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson. When Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) was turned into a feature, Reisz’s place in the trilogy was occupied by Peter Brook, but their three contributions were never released together. Delaney’s script looks forward to Anderson’s blurring of the fantastic and the naturalistic in If…., and benefits from the poetic eye of the same Czech cameraman, Miroslav Ondricek. Fitting no conventional genre, the offbeat humour and visual metaphors often hit the mark as a non-specific satire on British society and the establishment.

An impassive young girl (Healey) heads out of her suicidal London office and back to her Northern home town, on a journey consisting of a strange, surreal and disturbing bus tour. Along the way the hustle of bustle of city life falls quiet as the young officer worker is passed by an iron lung on the railway platform, views an apparent abduction, a visit to a steel mill, a trip to a science museum, a civil defence display, until all her fellow passengers ultimately turn into mannequins.