The Most Over-rated British Film

[GRAEME]

Originally Posted by penfold I have a problem with "Agitprop. Upper class English style." (And I couldn't have put it better myself).....it's just another intellectual pose, isn't it !!?? At least Fred Kite's dreams of all them wheatfields and ballet in the evenings was a genuine, if wrong, hope for an improvement in his and his fellow workers' conditions.... When referring to The St.Trinians films, I was of course, if you reread my post, referring to the satire aspect....hatred?? try Unman Wittering and Zygo. Yes, the film was 1971., but the TV and radio plays were 1965.....

I guess we're getting down to a matter of taste. I think Anderson's vision is genuine. Just because he approaches the subject from a privillidged position doesn't make him less of a Marxist than Kite (or less deluded?). Who better to lambast the sysytem than an insider?

I was referring to the satiric qualities of the St Trinians films too. There are different degrees of satire. St T's is gentle. If's is not. And If.. is also a film about pain, disillusion and disgust.

But you pays your money and takes your choice. I think it is LA's best fim. More focussed than O Lucky Man, less conventional than This Sporting Life.

[penfold]

Oh, I agree, each to his own....but I do think his career was massively helped by the little clique he joined - the Close Up/Sight and Sound/Free Cinema crowd were pretty self-supporting and incestuous....I thought Karel Reisz the most interesting one of the bunch, to be honest, by a country mile.

[Cheeky Bob]

Originally Posted by penfold Let alone the silent, yes silent, French-made Zero De Conduite ??

I love that emphatic "yes, silent".

But why did you watch Zéro de Conduite with the volume turned down?

[penfold]

Originally Posted by Cheeky Bob I love that emphatic "yes, silent". But why did you watch Zéro de Conduite with the volume turned down?

That's my memory playing tricks....I remebered it as being a silent!!!! Apropos De Nice I saw much more recently, Zero not for twenty years or more...still, bizarre mistake!!
As we say in these parts, Old Age Don't Come Alone....

[mrs tiswas]

Anything with Hugh Grant, esp 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'. Was it supposed to be a comedy?

[scholes]

Originally Posted by mrs tiswas Anything with Hugh Grant, esp 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'. Was it supposed to be a comedy?

Four weddings was a corking film.

[CaptainWaggett]

I was surprised at how well it stood up when I recently rewatched it for the first time. Charlotte Coleman's badly subtitled conversations with the deaf guy cracked me up.

[batman]

Originally Posted by mrs tiswas Anything with Hugh Grant, esp 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'. Was it supposed to be a comedy?

A very funny film. I am not a particular fan of Grant but he is good in this, as are the entire cast, especially James Fleet.

[nandywell]

I completely disagree with the first post, A Clockwork Orange is a mighty fine film and I'll challenge anyone who disagrees to a duel

[GRAEME]

Originally Posted by nandywell I completely disagree with the first post, A Clockwork Orange is a mighty fine film and I'll challenge anyone who disagrees to a duel

It's not a patch on the book.

[nandywell]

It has become very cliché to say that but I partially agree with you; I doubt however that the film could have been bettered.

[m35541]

I think If is a great film but the idea that it was somehow outrageous to attack the establishment in 1968 is way off the mark.

As another poster has commented this is about 5 years later than TW3 and post Beyond the Fringe etc.

It also needs to be seen in context with public protests in the USA (civil rights, Vietnam) and France which were going on at the same time.

Plus anti-public school films go back as far as Tom Brown's Schooldays !!

[CaptainWaggett]

Is Tom Brown's Schooldays meant to be anti-public school? The book certainly isn't and I don't think the Robert Newton version is, ghastly though Rugby might seem to normal people.

[penfold]

Originally Posted by CaptainWaggett Is Tom Brown's Schooldays meant to be anti-public school? The book certainly isn't and I don't think the Robert Newton version is, ghastly though Rugby might seem to normal people.

It's a pro-reform tract, so it's anti the fagging system (Someone else can explain that to our American posters) and the worst excesses of the punishment regimes and pro the more enlightened - for the times - regime of Arnold at Rugby.
For a Victorian anti-public school rant, try Dickens' Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby.
Part of my antipathy towards if... may be because the place I went to, the location of the film Unman Wittering and Zygo...was, in the seventies, yet more horrendous. I thought Tomkinson's Schooldays was a documentary...

[scholes]

The only Rugby person who was perhaps depicted as anti-public school was old Flashy himself. This came from the pen of George MacDonald Fraser though not Thomas Hughes.
Brown, scud East and George Arthur were depicted as righteous and sober individuals, who played cricket and eventually defeated Flashman's bullying ways.
George MacDonald Fraser uses this to good effect in the cleverly written autobiographical novels which trace the path of Flashman's later career as a soldier, in which continuous sneering references to Thomas Arnold are made and all that Rugby stood for.


"Another Country" is a good film which is based on Guy Burgess' (the Soviet spy) experiences at Eaton, and leads us to believe that his Public school upbringing was the reason for his eventual exile to the Soviet Union.
See the "Cambridge spies."

I only recently acquired "If" on DVD and hope that I have the same feelings towards it now as I did when I was a teenager.