Favourite "British" film

You should watch it, I was the same as I thought it would be dreadful but my OH convinced me to watch it and I loved it, it does not try to replicate the original, rather pays homage to it with its own story :sunglasses:

Saturday night and Sunday morning?

Anything with Michael Caine. Or the one with David Niven, the two con men in the South of France that had a wonderful twist at the end

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Are you married to a thesp then John?

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The man in the white suit starring Alex Guiness

Sorry to be a nurd but you have struck one of my favourite film genres.

Full of post war optimism

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Marvellous Alec Guinness esp as all the ghastly d’Ascoynes in Kind Hearts and Coronets :grin:

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Bedtime Story I believe, later remade as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and again, more recently, as The Hustle

I don’t think I’d count any of these as British though - just that the original starred David Niven but it was an American production (says Wikipedia, I’m not that   much of a movie buff).

Yes I am. :grinning:

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Death at a funeral. The British version obviously.

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Ah, but it’s Bond, not really necessary to have a complicated or intricated plot :sweat_smile:

I’m not convinced it counts as British either.

But it’s Bond, it must be…

I guess Bond is “complicated”, it features British actors in the lead roll, Eon productions is incorporated in the UK and it is filmed typically in the UK (normally Pinewood I believe) and on location.

However Broccoli and Schultz were American (well one of them was Canadian) and Schultz sold his share to UA (an American company) so it’s at best British-American.

Of course several films in my list probably come under that heading, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Not a single film by one of the great directors and director/writer teams of all time - Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Powell, in his 70’s and 80’s was ‘adopted’ by the Hollywood ‘Brat Pack’ [Scorsese, Spielburg, Coppolla] as their muse. Coppolla installed him in Zoetrope Studios as ‘Honorary Director in Residence’ or somesuch title, just to be around and be inspiring.

Superior, in my opinion, to all the films in this list are Powell/Powell & Pressburger:
‘Black Narcissus’. ‘The Small Back Room’. ‘The Red Shoes’. ‘The Canterbury Tales’.’ One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing’. ‘I Know Where I’m Going’. … and others.

It was a tragic loss to cinema, particularly British cinema, when ‘Peeping Tom’, a solo effort by Powell, was released. It created such a furore that it even had MPs on their feet in the HoC complaining about it.

It was a film made 15 years too early. Nobody was ready for it. Now, it is regarded as a classic but it completely ruined Powell’s career. He never worked as director on a movie again. It’s a difficult watch …

Fortunately, seasons and festivals of Powell/Pressburger films were and continue to be shown on TV and cinemas all over the world. As film maker he was finished but financially he survived.

If you venture to watch “Peeping Tom” you will see what was the forerunner of the “slasher” movie combined with psychological intensity far in excess of anything by Hitchcock. Not till Nick Roeg made “Don’t Look Now” was there anything like it.

Nick Roeg - nothing of his. Another supreme British film maker. After shooting films such as “Fahrenheit 451” for Truffault and “Far From The Madding Crowd” for Schlesinger, as DoP, he made “Performance”, a stunning film about identity, laced with sex, drugs and rock’n roll - Mick Jagger and James Fox, with Anita Pallenburg, and a fantastic rock sound track. Waiting to go in to see it, for about the fifth time myself, one of my friends reckoned that this was his nineteenth …

World class films followed. ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ [David Bowie] ‘Don’t Look Now’ [Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie] ‘Walkabout’ [Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil]. ‘Bad Timing’ [Art Garfunkel]

John Schlesinger - nothing? ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’ [Peter Finch, Terence Stamp, Julie Christie] ‘Billy Liar’ [Tom Courtney, Julie Christie] ‘Darling’ [Laurence Olivier, Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde]

Schlesinger went to Hollywood and made ‘Midnight Cowboy’, ‘Marathon Man’,’ Day Of The Locust’. Maybe they, along with all Ridley Scott’s movies, don’t count as British.

Absent above is one of the greatest movies of all time, ‘The Third Man’ made by British director Carol Reed.

Roman Polanski made three films in Britain, two of which, both BAFTA nominations, ‘Cul-De-Sac’ and ‘Repulsion’, are psycho-horrors. I saw both these on a late night double bill. Not a sensible thing to do the third. ‘Dance of The Vampires’ however, is an hilarious spoof on the vampire film. Great fun.

Lindsay Anderson, director of ‘If’ also made ‘This Sporting Life’, with a wonderful performance by Richard Harris.

I think Stephen Frears’ ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ should be listed.

Ken Loach represents the difficult-to-inhabit side of cimema, being a committed left-winger. But ‘Kes’ and ‘Land and Freedom’ are as good as cinema gets, for projects on a modest scale.

Tony Richardson made two excellent films that deserve to be in this list. ‘The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner’ is a gritty them-and-us social commentary [Tom Courtney, James Fox, Michael Redgrave] and the rollicking ‘Tom Jones’ [Albert Finney] includes one of the sexiest eating scenes in the movies.

I’ll finish with David Lean. Before going on to make monster epics like ‘Dr Zhivago’, ‘Laurence of Arabia’ and ‘Passage to India’, he made what many would consider the quintessential British repressed-love story, ‘A Brief Encounter’ [Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard].

I am a lapsed movie buff. Starting when I was 4 y.o in Singapore, when we lived across the road from the largest cinema in S.E Asia. Whatever was on, for three years every Saturday me and my mum and dad went and then had steak and chips at The Stamford Steak House afterwards.

There were movie nights at The SIngapore Swimming Club, where I worked out for myself why the Malays watched the films from the back of the screen by climbing into the trees outside the walls - because they were brown.

There was a period when I went to 5-6 late-night double-bills per week, in the days when The Electric Cinema Club, Portobello Rd. W11 was in it’s '67’s/'70’s flea-pit era.

I have to admit I haven’t been to a cinema for many years. I loathe the ambience - the foyers with popcorn trodden into black carpet, the smell of hot dogs … I buy discs now.

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‘The Iprcress File’ is far superior to ‘Funeral In Berlin’ and has an outstanding jazz score by John Barry.

In fact, the ‘Iprecress File’ soundtrack is one of only two soundtrack albums I have ever bought, the other being by Alberto Iglesias for Almodovar’s ‘Habla Con Ella’ [Talk To Her]

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I was about to post about Powell & Pressburger, but I see others have got here before me! I could (and do!) watch their films again and again. ‘I Know Where I’m Going’ is one of my very favourite films, and I never tire of ‘A Canterbury Tale’ and ‘49th Parallel’.
Other favourites include ‘Night and the City’ (1950), ‘Odd Man Out’ (1947), ‘The Fallen Idol’ (1948) and ‘Hell is A City’ (1960) - all have excellent directors, great acting and impressive cinematography.

Yes though harder to watch.

As to your longer list - much I’d agree with although I’ve not seen some of them (particularly Peeping Tom), besides if I put every classic British film in my original post there would be nothing left for anyone else to contribute :slight_smile:

If we’re happy that Bond is sufficiently British I’d like to add “The Day of the Jackal”.

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But what, these days, makes a film British? Made exclusively in Britain, British director, producer, cast, funding ( ok maybe not that)

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Movie making has always been an international business so it’s rare to find a purely British film - but predominantly British cast, British production company and filmed in Britain would be the cornerstones I think. Bonus points for British Director as well.

Er excuse me I said everything by P&P upthread acksherly - but yes I didn’t mention the 3rd man, and it’s one of my alltime favourites.

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Life of Brian for me…love that film :grinning:

And lock stock and two smoking barrels…

And Trainspotting…

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