M Spence's blog

In April and May 2017 the National Film Theatre is running a season of films under the heading'Girls Like Us: British Women and WWII Cinema'. There are some real treasures here. Some of the April titles – Went the Day Well?, Millions Like Us, In Which We Serve – are relatively well-known. But – to my enduring shame, I’m sure - I have never seen Demi-Paradise, or The Gentle Sex, or Unpublished Story. I can’t wait.

This month – March 2017 – the National Film Theatre is showcasing Ken Russell’s 1971 production of The Boy Friend, focusing in particular on the production design and costume design that gave it its particular 1920s/1960s crossover look.

The Boy Friend sits right in the middle of Russell’s purple patch, stretching from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, when he produced much of his most enduring work. In the early 1960s he was in television, producing idiosyncratic documentaries, including several on composers – Bartok, Debussy, Prokoviev - for the BBC ‘Monitor’ series. From 1967 he moved into film with Billion Dollar Brain, followed in 1969 by Women In Love which won him an Oscar nomination, and Glenda Jackson an Oscar.

In February 2017 the National Film Theatre (NFT) has been screening Robert Hamer’s 1947 classic It Always Rains On Sunday – a dark and complex domestic thriller from Ealing Studios, from a time before it became overwhelmingly associated with ‘Ealing Comedies’. (The first ‘Ealing Comedy’, Hue and Cry, was in fact produced in the same year).

It Always Rains On Sunday stars Googie Withers in perhaps her finest role. In a bleak portrayal of post-war East End working class life, she plays Rose, a woman with a past, forced to choose between a decent but unexciting husband and family, and a glamorous but dangerous old flame who turns up out of the blue, on the run from the law. I won’t say more: if you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a morally-compromised treat.

The recent re-release of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, in a new print from the BFI, has been a triumph.

When Barry Lyndon first came out in 1975 it went off like a damp squib. Kubrick’s previous films – Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange – covered a range of themes and a variety of moods, but each in its own way kept the story moving along at a brisk canter. When it was known that Kubrick was working on a screenplay of Thackeray’s novel set in the eighteenth century, one obvious point of reference was Tom Jones, Tony Richardson’s bawdy celebration of life and lust starring young Albert Finney. Of course, Kubrick was a very different filmmaker – but even so, the eighteenth century was all about frock-coats, oaths and wenches, wasn’t it?

Over recent months the BECTU History Project has been busily continuing its interviews with women and men from across the UK film and television industries. With nearly 700 recordings so far, it is one of the most extensive audio-visual archives in the world. 

Recent interviews have included:-

John Henshall 

John Henshall is an acknowledged expert in electronic photography and digital imaging. He started at the BBC in the 1960s, and left in the mid-1970s. As a DoP in the following years he helped establish the new genre of music videos, and did innovative TV work such as ‘Spitting Image’ and ‘Network 7’.