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Posts Tagged ‘British’

The British Film Industry has seen many peaks and troughs since it began around the turn of the 20th century. Cinema began in the UK with William Friese Greene’s producing the first known projected moving image on celluloid film. In the following 119 years there have been many successes and failures that have influenced not only the film industry but British culture.Film fans will have their only favourites that have thrilled, inspired and entertained them throughout various times in their lives and this list is exactly that. I have been watching British films for nearly thirty years now and have seen the likes of Gandhi (1983), The Full Monty (1997) and The Queen (2006) impact world cinema while various others have just tasted success in the UK.

There is no particular formula to a successful British film, although my choices for the ‘Five British Films That You Must See’ do tend to have a distinctively British feel. Whether it is the location, accent, dialect or cultural references – each of my top five British films is a quintessentially British production.Directed by Stanley Kubrick and set in a futuristic London, A Clockwork Orange is based on the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess. The film received critical acclaim on its release including gaining four nominations for Academy Awards. However, following a string of so-called copycat crimes, Kubrick withdrew the film after receiving several anonymous death threats.
It was only on the film’s re-release in 1999 that the British public were legally able to watch this celluloid masterpiece in almost 27 years. The film appears timeless as the futuristic setting hasn’t aged at all in almost three decades on the shelf. The characters speak in a blend of cockney and Russian that adds additional dimensions to the dystopian reality. Heavily influencing pop-culture from a Blur music video to Bart Simpson’s halloween costume, A Clockwork Orange remains one of the most influential and controversial films of all time.

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Beginning with Carry On Sergeant in 1958, the Carry On films were a long-running series of low-budget British comedy films made at Pinewood Studios. Still often cited as examples of classic British humour, the Carry On films involved fairly simple plots that were then fleshed out with bawdy jokes, farcical situations and slapstick. The Carry On series proved hugely popular with the British public and there were twenty-nine original films and one compilation film made between 1958 and 1978.As well as spoofing popular films of the time (Carry On Cleo, for example, being a send-up of Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), the Carry On films frequently took inspiration from archetypal British institutions and customs, such as the National Health Service, the monarchy, the empire and the behaviour of Brits abroad. Key to the success of the Carry On films was the roster of actors and actresses who made regular appearances in the films, frequently playing the same kind of character.

The films’ humour was in the British comic tradition of the music hall and seaside postcards.. The stock-in-trade of Carry On humour was innuendo and the sending-up of British institutions and custom. Although the films were very often slated by the critics, they were popular.The series began with Carry On Sergeant (1958), about a group of recruits on National Service and was sufficiently successful that others followed. A film had appeared the previous year under the title Carry On Admiral although this was a comedy in a similar vein (with Joan Sims in the cast) it has no connection to the series. There was also an unrelated 1937 film Carry On London, starring future Carry On performer Eric Barker.The cast were poorly paid — around £5,000 per film for a principal performer. In his diaries, Kenneth Williams lamented this and criticised several of the movies despite his declared fondness for the series as a whole.