Colpeper does receive a blessing in A Canterbury Tale after all

I think I've gained a new understanding of my favourite film. Most commentators take their mark from Mr Colpeper's answering to a question at his lecture:

"These ancient pilgrims came to Canterbury to ask for a blessing or to do penance."

They observe that, while Alison, Peter and Bob travel to the city to receive their blessings, Colpeper goes their to do penance.

As it turns out, Colpeper doesn't have to do penance because Peter, having rediscovered his vocation as a musician, loses interest in his plan of reporting him to the authorities.

I now believe that Colpeper receives a blessing too. And to see it we have to go back to the two scenes that run beneath the films closing credits. (If you click play in the video above, you'll be taken to the very end of the film.)

Last month I blogged about the second of them: 

But right at the end of the film, the closing credits play over another scene of the boys who fought a battle on the river. It may be significant that they are no longer playing war but football.

But what about the first of them?

In it we see men and women, some arm in arm, going to an event at the Colpeper Institute. And, though it's hard to read the poster advertising the event, it's similar in typograph and layout to a poster we see clearly earlier in the film. And that is the poster advertising Colpeper's own lecture there.

So Colpeper has been given his heart's desire too: an audience for his opinions on Kent and its history. And he has found it because he met Alison and realised that he should welcome women to his lectures - rather than pour glue on their hair to keep them at home.

I looked again at these closing titles because I read Deconstructing the Imagined Village: A Canterbury Tale, a long post on the film by Paul Banks.

He writes about the these final scenes:

After a series of increasingly distant views of the exterior of the Cathedral, the closing credits appear over a shot of the Chillingbourne boys paying soccer with the new football paid for by Bob. In fact this closing section was originally planned as being rather longer, with striking visual recapitulations and an explicit concluding message:

We see the bells, great and small, shaking the timbers of the roof with their clamour.

We see the towers of the Cathedral, the Angel Steeple, the mass of the building. The bells are still ringing. There is no sign to show whether the time is 600 years ago or today.

We see the Cathedral, far away across the valley of the Stour, the houses of Canterbury huddled round it.

The bells sound faintly, but the Organ is still playing.

High up white clouds are sailing in the wind. A small black speck appears in the sky. It’s familiar hum breaks through the organ music. It is a Spitfire.

The camera sweeps down from the sky, down to Chillingbourne Camp.

A new battalion of SOLDIERS are marching in to take over.

This time they are Americans.

We see their faces as they march: faces not very different from the faces we left in prayer at Canterbury. Only the uniforms are different.

Here the story ends.

As the usual Credit Titles appear at the end we glimpse a little bit more:

A brand new football! There they go! Leslie, Terry and the other boys, one side, with berets, fighting unequal odds.

Here is the ‘Colpeper Institute’.

There is a new poster up, advertising a series of lectures.

And – believe it or not! – soldiers and girls are going in.

The shots of the Cathedral (a few of which do appear in the released version) and the recapitulated Spitfire sequence reinforce the atemporal symmetrical structure of the film, and seem to be designed to close off the narrative, but the last two images behind the closing credits  – the boys and the poster – for all their ambiguous status both within and outside the ostensibly completed chronicle, seem to be intended as glimpses of an imagined sequel and the last would have suggested that Colpeper’s penance was genuine and that for him the pilgrimage had indeed been a significant learning experience after all. 

However, by omitting that final image (which would have revealed what the outcome would be) Powell and Pressburger encourage viewers to make up their own minds about the character’s ultimate spiritual fate.

But the shot of the crowds going to Colpeper's lecture did make it to the final film, though it is shown before the boys playing football. So Colpeper did receive a blessing after all.

The Wilfred Pickles School for Spastics, Rutland

No, the name's not something out of Lord Bonkers' Diary: as this video shows, it really existed. The school was at Tixover Grange, which is near Stamford but in Rutland.

I have seen something of Wilfred Pickles lately, because Talking Pictures TV repeated the situation comedy For the Love of Ada. I watched it on the grounds that anything with Irene Handl in it was worth seeing.

It proved to be gentle and likeable - I can see why it ran to four series and a cinema film. Pickles himself strolled through it rather like a North Country Kenneth Horne.

Pickles (1904-78) had a remarkable career. As a young man in Halifax in the 1920s, he was a keen amateur actor and a friend of another actor from the town, Eric Portman. He joined the BBC North Region as an announcer, and was to become the first national BBC newsreader with a regional accent.

According to an old BBC page:

This was not an early attempt at appealing more to the general public, but actually a move to make it more difficult for Nazis to impersonate BBC broadcasters!

After the war he acted in the West End and on television and radio. He found greatest fame as the compere (with his wife Mabel) of the quiz show Have a Go. In the Fifties it attracted an audience of 20 million for each episode, making him a national figure.

You may remember Pickles playing Tom Courtney's father in Billy Liar, and he seemed to be a jobbing television actor through the 1960s. For the love of Ada ran from 1970-1 and the film came out in 1972.

Dreadzone: A Canterbury Tale

With the BBC holding a miniature Powell and Pressburger festival these past few days, there's no better choice than this.

It did feature here some years ago, but my excuse for choosing it again is that this version has Eric Portman's monologue at the start. (Besides, two tracks - Paint it Black and Bryan Ferry's version of A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall - have appeared here twice without my noticing at the time, and the world didn't end.)

A Canterbury Tale comes from Dreadzone's second album, Second Light, which was a favourite of John Peel's.

Reviewing it in the Independent, Phil Johnson wrote:

A scholarly regard for the treasures of the British film industry is not the first thing one associates with the British dance music scene, but Dreadzone's excellent album Second Light incorporates dialogue samples from Powell and Pressburger's classic A Canterbury Tale, as well as the song from Thief of Baghdad and the headmaster's spoken vision of the future from Lindsay Anderson's apocalyptic If. 

There's even a spot of Derek Walcott's epic poetry and sundry ironic messages from the channel-hopping trawl of a stoned viewer's late-night television habit, like the opening track's ancient cheery documentary voice-over of This is Britain!, immediately subverted by the onset of a deep reggae bass-line. 

Second Light is ... a big ideas album, deconstructing received notions of Britishness with the kind of multi-cultural perspective to be expected from two survivors of Big Audio Dynamite and the post-punk Notting Hill scene, plus their fiendishly clever knob-twiddling third partner, Tim Bran. 

The effect is - largely because the music itself is so good - enthralling, and it runs counter to the current renaissance of guitar-driven bedroom angst posing as serious pop. 

Reader's voice (resignedly): Haven't you written a post about A Canterbury Tale and why it's not a film to be taken lightly?

Liberal England replies: Why, yes! So I have.

Eric Portman proposes a murder in West 11

Before Michael Winner became awful he was rather good. West 11, the postal district of Notting Hill at its seediest, tells the story of a drifter, played by Alfred Lynch, who falls under the influence of a criminal played by Eric Portman.

Lynch is persuaded to travel to Dorset to murder Portman's aunt, so that Portman will inherit her money. What could possibly go wrong?

Diana Dors plays Portman's moll and Lynch's landlady is played by Freda Jackson. In an ideal world, all films would star Eric Portman and Freda Jackson.

That's what I wrote when choosing West 11 as one of my 10 British films that should be better known. I should have mentioned that there's also a walk-on part for David Hemmings.

Here you can see Eric Portman first proposing the murder to Lynch. Portman did seedy wonderfully well later in his career.

10 British films that should be better known

Here are some notes on 10 British films that are not as well known as I think they ought to be. It's not a top 10 - they are in chronological order - and I'm sure there are plenty more, particularly from recent years decades, that could fairly be included in such a list.

With those caveats entered, let's go.

No Room at the Inn (1948)

Inspired by the death in Shropshire of the foster child Dennis O'Neill, the same scandal that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap, this had already been a huge success as a stage play. The star of the play was Freda Jackson as the voracious Mrs Voray, who took in war orphans for the money and abused and corrupted them. So hated was she by audiences, the story goes, that she needed a police guard.

Jackson repeats the role in the film, and her skill at playing monsters was so great that she became rather stuck with them later in her career. Before No Room at the Inn, she had played Mistress Quickly in Olivier's Henry V and Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations.

The tragic Joan Dowling, who was to take her own life at the age of 26, is notable among the children. A word too for Dora Bryan who, in her first film appearance, steals both Freda Jackson's date and the scene.

This dark film ticks so many of this blog's boxes that it has its own label.

Gone to Earth (1950)

The Shropshire hills filmed in Technicolor by Powell and Pressburger? There's no way I was going to dislike this one. Gone to Earth was a novel by Mary Webb, who had the misfortune to be deeply obscure in her lifetime and become hugely popular soon after her death. In the 1930s you would see coaches in these hills with 'Mary Webb Country' on the front.

Gone to Earth is melodrama whose plot has similarities with Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Jennifer Jones brings Hollywood glamour to the role of the tragic heroine and makes a brave attempt at a Shropshire accent, while David Farrar makes a splendid wicked squire. Look out for George Cole in his first adult role.

The 'Maggie' (1954)

The greatest Ealing comedies are still widely known, but there are some that have been all but forgotten. The Maggie is the best of this second group, and in its dramatisation of an encounter between wily Scots and American big business it looks forward to Bill Forsyth's Local Hero.

An American millionaire makes the mistake of hiring a decrepit Clyde puffer to carry furniture to his holiday home in the Hebrides. He ends less happily than Burt Lancaster in Local Hero.

Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957)

The disorganised Yvonne Mitchell considers herself happily married to Anthony Quayle, but discovers that he is having an affair with the stylish Sylvia Syms.

Because this is a British film from the Fifties, the family has to defeat all threats to it. But the scene in Mitchell tries to change her image to compete with Syms, only to find that everything goes wrong, is horribly painful to watch.

Innocent Sinners (1958)

Ignore the title, which makes it sound like a particularly tacky porn film, this is the most interesting of the children and bombsites films I have yet found. Unlike the others, it has a girl at its centre, and the enemies the children encounter are not the murderers they encounter in those other films but snobbish residents and unsympathetic officialdom.

Here, bombsites are not a place of danger but somewhere working-class children can express themselves and find the privacy they lack in their overcrowded homes.

Tunes of Glory (1960)

Alec Guinness playing a red-haired Scottish officer who has been promoted from the ranks in wartime may sound ridiculous, but he is wholly believable here. Tunes of Glory reminds us what a peerless actor he was.

The film is about the lethal clash between Guinness and John Mills, who plays the upper-class officer who is appointed over his head now that the war is over. Both are flawed but appealing characters, and their tragic battle takes place in front a remarkable supporting cast: Susannah York, Gordon Jackson Dennis Price, Duncan MacRae, Allan Cuthbertson.

You'll recognised the last-named from gourmet night at Fawlty Towers.

West 11 (1963)

Before Michael Winner became awful he was rather good. West 11, the postal district of Notting Hill at its seediest, tells the story of a drifter, played by Alfred Lynch, who falls under the influence of a criminal played by Eric Portman.

Lynch is persuaded to travel to Dorset to murder Portman's aunt, so that Portman will inherit her money. What could possibly go wrong?

Diana Dors plays Portman's moll and Lynch's landlady is played by Freda Jackson. In an ideal world, all films would star Eric Portman and Freda Jackson.

Our Mother's House (1967)

A fatherless family of children hide the death of their mother from the authorities by burying her in the garden because they fear being sent to an orphanage. 

Among the children are Pamela Franklin, Mark Lester, Phoebe Nicholls (immediately recognisable as Cordelia in the famous television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited) and Louis Sheldon Williams, whose mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the Sixties, as I did for Liberal Democrat News 40 years later.

If all this sounds tacky or exploitative, the wonderful score by George Delerue - innocent, lilting, compassionate - lifts the film to a wholly different level. Add in Dirk Bogarde in a very atypical role, Yootha Joyce and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and there's lots to enjoy.

Comfort and Joy (1984)

This is the film Bill Forsyth made after Local Hero and for some reason it appears to have been forgotten. Bill Paterson, who play a local radio DJ, is left by his girlfriend just before Christmas and then finds himself sucked into the Glasgow ice cream wars after witnessing an attack on a van.

I saw this in a cinema when it came out (which is a worryingly long time ago) and have never seen it again, yet I still remember it.

The Last Resort (2000)

Another one I saw in the cinema - the Renoir at Brunswick Square near St Pancras, since you ask. It taught me that Russian is the sexiest accent in the world and that Paddy Considine is a brilliant actor.

Dina Korzun plays a Russian woman who arrives at Heathrow with her young son, expecting to be met by her English fiancé, He doesn't show and, panicking, she asks for political asylum. As a result, she and her son are sent to a rundown resort and forbidden to leave it.

There they meet a bingo caller, played by Paddy Considine, who goes out of his way to help them. He is surely a good man, yet somehow we don't know whether we should wholly trust him. According to the reviews, he and Kozun improvised much of their dialogue.

Eventually Kozun decides she must grow up and return to Russia, a task in which Considine regretfully helps her.

In which I scoop Channel 5's documentary on Leonard Rossiter

Channel 5 recently screened a superior documentary on the career of Leonard Rossiter - you can watch it on its catch-up service My5.

If features a few clips from what it bills as a "never seen before interview" with Rossiter. Except that readers of this blog may well have seen the interview before, because I linked to it last year. Maybe that's how the documentary's researchers found it?

In that post I suggested Rossiter had a talent for turning up in films where you don't expect to find him, and the video above - from a 1967 Michael Caine thriller - is another example. There's even a little bit of Eric Portman in the middle as a bonus.

The documentary does not shy away from Rossiter's reputation for being a perfectionist and thus difficult to work with. But I suppose that depends on who you were.

I got talking with the theatre director Braham Murray at a Leicester event marking the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's death. Murray had rescued the reputation of Orton's play Loot with a production in Manchester after it had flopped in the West End.

He mentioned Rossiter for some reason and said what a wonderful man he was. I referred to his reputation, saying something like: "They say he turned up word perfect on the first day and expected everyone else to be too."

At which Murray, always the director, bristled slightly and demanded: "And what's wrong with that?"

The Canterbury premiere of A Canterbury Tale

I've been looking at the contemporary reviews of A Canterbury Tale and it's fair to say they are not enthusiastic.

But the Faversham News and East Kent Journal has a nice account of the film's premiere, which took place in the city:

The Friars Theatre, Canterbury, was crowded out on Thursday afternoon, last week, when the new film "A Canterbury Tale" had its first showing. Incidentally, the occasion was a historic one in the film industry, for it was the first time a world premiere had been given in a provincial theatre. 

Music was played by the Band of The Buffs prior to the curtain going Up on the picture, in which, by the way, they appear.

To Kent people the film has a particular interest inasmuch as it was largely filmed in Canterbury and district and some beautiful glimpses are given of the countryside in the neighbourhood. There are also "Village pageant" sequences of Chaucer's pilgrims. 

For the rest, the story concerns the detection of a mysterious night assailant who resorts to throwing gum on girls' hair if he sees them with soldiers! 

Eric Portman figures as a magistrate bearing the name of a one-time prominent East Kent family—that of Culpepper. It will be recalled that it was while parts of this film were being shot ,in the Canterbury district that the famous screen actor paid a visit to the Odeon theatre at Faversham sortie months ago. Other leading figures in the cast are Sheila Sim, as a Land Girl, and Sergeant John Sweet, of the U.S. Army. and Dennis Price, as two soldiers. They are the three pilgrim "detectives." 

Mr. Michael Powell (who, with Mr. Emeric Pressburger, produced the film) was, at the conclusion of the showing, introduced by Mr. R. C. Overs, the , manager of the theatre, and had a great reception. lie apologised for the absence of Mr. Emeric Preasburger, his co-producer, and Mr. Junge, co-designer, and explained that they were aliens. There could not, he thought, be a finer tribute to the brotherhood of man, than that those two men, although aliens, should have collaborated in the making of this film. 

Mr. Eric Portman and others of the cast were afterwards introduced and received ovations.

The clip above shows Sheila Sim going to work for Freda Jackson, who is currently this blog's favourite actor.

West 11: Another early Michael Winner film

Last time I praised an early Michael Winner film the post was quoted in a book. So here goes again with one he made when he was only 28..

If it had no other virtues, the street scenes of Notting Hill would make West 11 interesting. When the film was made in 1963, this was an area of poverty and racketeering landlords.

And beneath the opening titles we see Alfred Lynch walking past 25 Powis Square, where Performance was to be filmed a few years later..

For me the glory of West 11 is its cast, which might have been chosen with me in mind. Not the leads, Alfred Lynch and Kathleen Breck, who are a little underpowered, but the supporting players. Eric Portman. Freda Jackson. Even David Hemmings in a bit part.

There are other faces to look for: Diana Dors in her best era, Kathleen Harrison, Patrick Wymark. The Mosleyite agitator at the street meeting is the unlikely figure of Brian Wilde.

The cast could have been even more impressive. According to Flashbak, the film's producer Danny Angel turned down the idea of casting Julie Christie, Sean Connery and Oliver Reed because they were "nothing more than B-picture artists".

West 11 is available cheaply on DVD, and Talking Pictures TV has shown it too. There's plenty in it to enjoy, notably Eric Portman's turn as a seedy confidence trickster who leads Alfred Lynch astray,

"I feel I've only to turn my head to see them on the road behind me"

Eric Portman's great speech from A Canterbury Tale.

It's a powerful film. I once got a train derailed by taking it lightly..

Eric Portman and Leonard Rossiter

A couple of years ago I wrote about the 1967 British film The Whisperers:

Besides Edith Evans there is a late performance by Eric Portman. He even shares the screen in one scene with Leonard Rossiter - two of my very favourite actors together ...

Rossiter steals any scene he appear in, and how ever good he is there is always a note of Rigsby in there somewhere too.

That seen has now turned up on Youtube...

Brit Noir season in New York

Should you find yourself over in New York over the next few weeks, you may be interested in the Brit Noir season at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street.

Maybe it's stretching a bit to call all these noir (why Tiger Bay and not Hunted?) but the stills on the webpage are great and a gratifyingly high proportion of these films star Eric Portman.

TV Film of the Week: Lost

Though really I should rename this feature Obscure British TV Film of the Week You Probably Won't Have Seen That May be Better Than You Expect.

A woman leavers a child in pram outside a chemist's shop and goes in. The woman behind the counter is Joan Hickson. You relax, knowing that you are in safe hands. Add to that the fact that the other customer in the shop is a teenaged Barbara Windsor, and you have one of the most appealing aspects of this film.

Because Lost features an extraordinary cast of faces that are familiar from other British films or televison - at least to us now, even if they were not so well known when it was made. As well as Hickson and Windsor, there are Joan Sims, George Woodbridge, Dandy Nicholls, William Lucas, Glyn Houston, Shirley Anne Field, Eleanor Summerfield, Meredith Edwards and Thora Hird.

The star is David Farrar, who was once one of Michael Powell's favourite actors. Think of him galloping his horse over the Long Mynd in Gone to Earth as the wicked squire on his way to ravish Jennifer Jones, or of his manly knees sending the nuns mad with repressed lust in Black Narcissus.

Like other Powell stars - Roger Livsey, Eric Portman - he was more vital than the Johnny Mills types who were favoured by other British directors of the period. Perhaps because of this, Farrar was to give up acting soon after Lost and emigrate to South Africa.

The other notable thing about Lost is that it uses quite mundane London and Home Counties locations, giving you the chance to see the 1950s in colour. The cosy picture of Britiain it presents was probably wishful thinking even when it was made, but there are enough twists in the plot to keep you watching.

Lost is being shown on Monday 29 September at 1.40 p.m. (Channel 4).

Powell and Pressburger week on Channel 4

Channel 4 is showing a Powell and Pressburger film every afternoon next week.

The details are:

Monday 1 September 13:00 - The Spy in Black (1939)

Tuesday 2 September 13:30 - One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942)

Wednesday 3 September 13:30 - A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Thursday 3 September 13:30 - Black Narcissus (1947)

Friday 4 September 13:15 - The Battle of the River Plate (1956)

I have written about A Matter of Life and Death before, but I also have a soft spot for One of Our Aircraft is Missing.

In it a British bomber crew, including Eric Portman, bales out and is aided by the Dutch Resistance, played by Googie Withers. Look too for a young Peter Ustinov.

TV Film of the Week: Millions Like Us

Made in 1943, Millions Like Us shows life on the home front during World War II and the contribution made by women to industrial production in particular. The action is centred on an aircraft factory where women from a wide variety of backgrounds learn the ropes under the steely eye of the foreman Eric Portman.

Patricia Roc marries an impossibly youthful Gordon Jackson, while there is a blossoming romance across the class barriers (tentative, because no one then knew what Britain would be like after the war) between Portman and Anne Crawford.

Add to this several appearances by Charters and Caldicott and a running gag about "the man from Market Harborough", and no admirer of the forties heyday of British film can fail to enjoy this one.

Millions Like Us is on at 1330 on Monday 14 April (Channel 4).

The Colditz Story

I watched The Colditz Story on your behalf, but I shall not remember it as one of the highlights of the BBC season.

There was little shape to: people turned up at the start of the film and immediately started trying to escape. And the presence of John Mills and Bryan Forbes made it seem just another British war film.

I am sure I have seen an escape attempt made during a theatrical performance - putting the camp into prisoner of war camp - many times before. Here Richard Wattis and Ian Carmichael provided the comedy double act. And to one who remembers the 1970s television series, even the castle looked wrong.

There were compensations: the unexpected sight of a youthful Lionel Jefferies and, as the Senior British Officer, the peerless Eric Portman.

Summer of British Film: War

So it's on to the penultimate week of the festival, which looks at war films. And there is a lot of pleasure to be had.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is simply magnificent. As ever, Powell and Pressburger managed to lift their wartime films high above the simple pieces of propaganda they might have been in less skilled hands. Here they tackle the moral dilemma implicit in total war. In order to defeat Nazi Germany, did we have to become more like it? Yet an Anglo-German friendship lies at the centre of the film too.

Another Powell and Pressburger film, Ill Met by Moonlight, has Dirk Bogarde at his most dashing as Patrick Leigh-Fermor - later a celebrated travel writer. It tells the true story of the kidnap of the German general in charge of occupied Crete. It is altogether a lesser work than Blimp, but still fun.

King Rat is a powerful tale of survival in a prisoner of war camp. And no film which has a scene with James Fox, Denhom Elliott and Leonard Rossiter sitting in a row eating stewed dog can possibly be bad.

A film I may tape are The Colditz Story, if only because I so enjoyed the Colditz television series as a boy. It went out before Monty Python and made Thursday evenings something to look forward to. And there is also Anthony Asquith's The Way to the Stars - if nothing else it was directed by the son of a Liberal prime minister.

But the film of the week has to be yet another Powell and Pressburger offering: A Canterbury Tale. It tells the story of three wartime pilgrims to the city. Sheila Sim (now Lady Attenborough) has lost her fiance in the war. The American Bob Johnson has lost his girl and Denis Price has lost his vocation as musician. By the end of the film, they have had what they desire restored to them.

Presiding over this is Eric Portman as Mr Colpeper, a patrician Puck who worries that servicemen would rather go out with girls than come to his lectures on local history. He takes extreme measures to put this right.

A Canterbury Tale is that rare thing, a work of English mysticism. Look for the cut from a hawk to a Spitfire, which long predates Kubrick's bone to spaceship cut in 2001. And listen for Colpeper's spine-tingling words:

There is more than one way of getting close to your ancestors.

Follow the Old Road and as you do, think of them; they climbed Chillingbourne Hill just as you did. They sweated and paused for breath just as you did today.

And when you see the bluebells in the spring and the wild thyme, and the broom and the heather, you're seeing what their eyes saw. You ford the same rivers, the same birds singing. And when you lie flat on your back and rest, and watch the clouds sailing as I often do, you're so close to those other people, that you can hear the thrumming of the hoofs of their horses, and the sound of the wheels on the road, and their laughter, and talk, and the music of the instruments they carried.

And they turned the bend in the road, where they too saw the towers of Canterbury. I feel I have only to turn my head to see them on the road behind me.

A Canterbury Tale is on BBC at 11.50 p.m. on Wednesday 5 September.

The Whisperers

A dotty old lady imagines that all sorts of crimes are taking place in her neighbourhood and dutifully reports them at her local police station, where the officers smilingly humour her. Then she comes into some money - the proceeds of a robbery.

But it's not The Ladykillers. It's the film I taped from this week's Social Realism section in the BBC British film season.

The Whisperers is dominated by the central performance of Edith Evans, at once riveting and painful to watch. It is a revelation to those of us who remember her only as Lady Bracknell and as a game old girl on Parkinson. To those who do not remember her at all it is an education.

Taken as a whole, the film is another condemnation of those who dismiss British films as irredeemably cosy. It is one of the bleakest I have ever seen. Bryan Forbes did direct some extraordinary films in this era. You can almost forgive the mandatory appearance by Nanette Newman in every one of them.

Besides Edith Evans there is a late performance by Eric Portman. He even shares the screen in one scene with Leonard Rossiter - two of my very favourite actors together (see the picture in this posting). Rossiter steals any scene he appear in, and how ever good he is there is always a note of Rigsby in there somewhere too. Other good minor performances here come from Avis Bunnage, Gerald Sim and Robin Bailey.

Finally, to continue my new theme of the connections between realist films of the 1960s and On the Buses, you should note the appearance as a bad lot of Michael Robbins, who went on to play the long-suffering Arthur - the husband of Olive.

Summer of British Film: Social realism

Let's keep this brief. Another week in the BBC Festival.

Am I the only person to dislike Billy Elliot? It was one of my 10 most overrated films:

Scenes were stolen from other films, it showed the miners' strike without saying anything useful about it, the locations in London and the North East were all over the place, half the songs came from the wrong era.

Worst of all it patronised the working class. When newspapers set out to find "real Billy Elliots", they found several and each had received tremendous support from his family.

I might have added that it has ludicrous sexual politics. In order to show he is not gay Billy has to have a best friend who is not only gay but looks and dresses like a girl.

The one I am looking forward to is The Whisperers. It does not sound a barrel of laughs, but it features one of my very favourite British film actors: Eric Portman and Leonard Rossiter is in it too.

There is a full listing of the Social Realism films on the BBC website.

The Whisperers is on Monday 13 August at 1 p.m. (BBC2).

A Canterbury Tale

There is more than one way of getting close to your ancestors.

Follow the Old Road and as you do, think of them; they climbed Chillingbourne Hill just as you did. They sweated and paused for breath just as you did today.

And when you see the bluebells in the spring and the wild thyme, and the broom and the heather, you're seeing what their eyes saw. You ford the same rivers, the same birds singing. And when you lie flat on your back and rest, and watch the clouds sailing as I often do, you're so close to those other people, that you can hear the thrumming of the hoofs of their horses, and the sound of the wheels on the road, and their laughter, and talk, and the music of the instruments they carried.

And they turned the bend in the road, where they too saw the towers of Canterbury. I feel I have only to turn my head to see them on the road behind me.

The film of the week on television has to be Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale. It is on BBC2 on Tuesday, starting at 1 p.m.

As Mark Duguid writes on screenonline:

The film is structured as a mystery story, but its real purpose is to add a spiritual dimension to the propaganda message of earlier films like 49th Parallel (1941) and "...One of Our Aircraft is Missing" (1942). There are no Nazis in A Canterbury Tale and, although the war provides its backdrop, the focus is on identifying a distinctively moral and spiritual English identity, in direct opposition to the harsh material objectives of fascism.

The film offers a vision of an England with its spiritual roots in the countryside exemplified by the beauty of Kent - the county of Powell's birth - an England which its increasingly urban population have neglected for too long. Evoking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the film charts the progress of a select band of modern pilgrims. As the trio of land girl Alison (Sheila Sim), American officer Bob (John Sweet) and British officer Peter (Dennis Price) converge on Canterbury Cathedral, each receives a 'blessing', bringing his or her most fervent wish to life. The film's peculiar power owes much to Eric Portman who, as the enigmatic Thomas Colpeper - local Justice of the Peace, prophet and one of Powell's many screen alter-egos - delivers an intense and complex performance, just as he had in 49th Parallel three years earlier.

There are links to all sorts of review and articles on The Powell & Pressburger Pages, but really I suggest you just tape it or watch it. It is an extraordinary film.