Ted Holmes

I'm keen to know which films people consider to be the most loving love letters to the English countryside. I suppose I'm thinking about films where the English landscape is a theme in itself, rather than just the odd pretty shot of fields and hedgerows. I can't think of any but surely I'm missing out?

Nick Dando

Jude, but it's not England.
Gone to Earth.
A Canterbury Tale.
Tawny Pipit.
Went the Day Well?

Nick

Steve Crook

I was just about to mention 3 of those :
And, if you extend it to Scotland, you can include I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)

You might also include Withnail & I as that has a fair amount of countryside that is quite important to the plot.

Steve

Ted Holmes

This could turn into an Archersfest! I'd thought about Gone to Earth and I agree Canterbury Tale should be included. Now I'm thinking more bout this, it seems Ken Russell's various D.H. Lawrence adaptations should be mentioned. It's only appropriate bearing in mind the books themselves.

Sorry, I know Where I'm Going is right out. Ther are so many gorgeous scenes of the Highlands on film, that's why I specifically limited it to England.

Steve Crook

But how many of them were actually filmed on location, in Scotland? :

The Archers were well known for their location work. This started with Powell himself. One of his early films, The Phantom Light (1935) was made on location in North Wales. Very unusual for a feature filom in the 1930s

Steve

batman

A Boy, A Girl and A Bike

a charming film about a world long gone

"Boom boom a baby .... Banham Zoo .... Banana pants! Hahahaha"

Ted Holmes

Steve, you're very naughty. Stop hijacking this thread!

(But as a matter of interest, where in N. Wales was The Phantom Light shot? Most intereting!)

Steve Crook

Hijacking? Moi?

There were a few distance shots of the Eddystone lighthouse in Devon. But most of the lighthouse filming was done at the South Stack lighthouse on Anglesey. There are also some shots of the hero arriving by train (on the Ffestiniog Railway) and in the village before they go out to the lighthouse. I'm not 100% sure which village but it is a very North Walian fishing village, probably on Anglesey.

Powell wanted to use Roger Livesey for that film. But some genius at the studio didn't like his voice!

Steve

spinalman

Rogue Male....starring Peter O'toole.

When inteviewed recently he admitted that he regarded it as his best work.

and of course..Titfiled Thunderbolt

Paul

penfold

Ted, if you live near or are visiting London, do go to the Mediatheque and see East Is East, a 1916 rom-com with Henry Edwards, Florence Turner and a young Edith Evans, if you can imagine....anyway, filmed on location, partly East End, but mostly in the hopfields of Kent....it's a cracker. Also Edwards directed a 1924 version of Owd Bob, which was gorgeously filmed on location in Northumbria, and there are Guy Newall's films The Lure of Crooning Water, and Fox Farm, again beautiful evocations of rural England, and truly great films.
My favourite though, apart from A Canterbury Tale, is a short made by Humphrey Jennings in 1937 called English Harvest. What makes this unusual is it was filmed in Dufaycolour, a process that gives a similar appearance to a colour photo in a fifties magazine....it's the recording of one of the last peacetime harvests (little did they know) and the end of the era when mechanisation meant horse-drawn harvesters. If you know Jennings' later films, you will know how poetic and personal a filmmaker he was...this is one of his least known, and finest short films.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

DB7

Conflict of Wings is about the protection of a bird-friendly conservation area.

Sgt Dudfoot

Along the same lines of bird protection, Tawny Pipit is another film which shows the countryside well. It was filmed in the Cotswolds (I think!)

smudge

Of course some of the most reverential pieces on the British countryside were committed to celluloid by Edgar Anstey and the British Transport film crews...



Smudge

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

david_dsmedia

Far From The Madding Crowd (1967), filmed in Panavision by Nick Roeg, almost entirely on location at over twenty sites in Dorset and Wiltshire.
" the pleasures and pains of rural England .... there has never been a better film about the British countryside." --David Shipman, The Story Of Cinema
Production details: Far From The Madding Crowd, 1967

Harleybloke

'A Month in The Country', would that count?

.....You couldn't hear it, if they were shooting at me with howitzers!