Contributors to this fascinating documentary include critic and writer Gavin Lambert; and directors Alan Parker and Michael Apted. It's a very useful introduction to Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach, Woodfall Films, Karel Reisz; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and the arc of post-war British Cinema.
One of the more interesting aspects is Gavin Lambert ranting against Brief Encounter (1945), a film that almost everybody seemed to rank as as the pinnacle of British cinematic achievement, for its repressed class consciousness. He suggests that no one actually got it, apart from the middle-class themselves. It was apparently previewed in a dockside cinema for a working class audience, who couldn't understand why Trevor Howard didn't just sleep with Celia Johnson and get it over with. ('When's 'e going to 'ave 'er orf?' someone reportedly called out during the screening).
For Lambert, the killing of PC George Dixon by Dirk Bogarde in The Blue Lamp (1950) seemed to be more about the desire to kill off the cinema of smug middle-class values and bring in a grittier, more working-class approach. (He was a few years too early, and George Dixon, played by Jack Warner, was resurrected for television; 432 episodes of Dixon of Dock Green which ran between 1955-1976.)
Typically British was made shortly after Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) had become a global hit. I often wonder what Gavin Lambert, who passed away in 2005, made of the the 'middle-class-ness' of the series of Richard Curtis films like Four Weddings, Notting Hill and Love Actually.
Between Alan Parker, Michael Apted and Stephen Frears at that time, there remained a general vibe of pessimism. They acknowledged the innovation of non-conformist directors like Lindsay Anderson, but looked more to Granada Television and the BBC's Wednesday Play, including Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home, as the gold standard for British drama and the ability to create something a little different reflecting the social and political changes in Britain during the 1960s. Alan Parker says that he later wrote Bugsy Malone (1976), a huge international hit, because his desire to produce movies reflecting British experiences and themes were being rejected on the grounds of being 'too parochial'. The most globally successful British directors had ended up working for a significant part of their careers in Hollywood. Stephen Frears concludes on a slightly downbeat note, commenting on the plight of a British film director by opining that, in spite of their best efforts, 'people want to see American films'.
In the years since the documentary was made, it was Stephen Frears who arguably had the most successful run with 'British' themes, and perhaps negated his own argument, with films like The Queen, Philomena, Mrs Henderson Presents, and some high quality television drama as well. Alan Parker made only three more films and chaired the BFI and UK Film Council. He passed away in July 2020. Michael Apted continued to manage a career encompassing Hollywood blockbusters (The World is Not Enough) and smaller socially conscious documentaries, with great success, including the long running 'Up' series.
